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| A-Level English Literature and GCSE English Literature
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| WHY STUDY ENGLISH LITERATURE AT 'A' LEVEL?
There are two main reasons, one high-minded and the other more prosaic. From a purist’s perspective, the literary canon is a precious repository of “the best that has been thought and said” (Matthew Arnold), and the study of literature therefore brings one into contact with touchstones of intellectual and linguistic excellence whose effect is illuminating, edifying and life-enhancing. On a more utilitarian level, English Literature 'A' level fosters analytical and expressive skills which possess a widespread transferability, and, accordingly, it enjoys a considerable prestige among universities and employers alike. The older universities (Oxbridge, Durham, Bristol et al), in particular, harbouring as they do certain (probably ill-founded) reservations about new-fangled subjects like, say, Media Studies, will look kindly on a candidate who achieves a high grade in English Literature. |
| WHAT KIND OF EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND DO YOU NEED TO TAKE, AND MAKE A GO OF, ENGLISH LITERATURE 'A' LEVEL?
There are no hard-and-fast answers to this question. Ideally you should have scored a respectable grade (certainly a C and preferably a B or higher) at GCSE English Language and / or Literature. Since the gap between GCSE and 'A' level in almost all subjects is famously pronounced, however, even an A* grade at GCSE is no sure-fired guarantee of similar success at the higher level. More important than your track record on paper are a liking for reading literature of various kinds and a willingness to work hard to develop the interpretative and organisational skills on which 'A'-level examiners in English set a high premium.
If a student contemplating English Literature 'A' level has not previously taken the subject at GCSE and, in the absence of that preliminary experience, is in doubt as to his or her suitability, we will be more than happy to arrange for a consultation with the English tutor at Duff Miller in order to assess the extent of his or her aptitude.
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| WHAT DOES ENGLISH LITERATURE 'A' LEVEL TEST?
Above all, it tests the ability of the candidate to construct cogent, well-documented arguments about particular, designated aspects of literary texts, and to do so in language which (on an ascending scale of virtue) conforms to traditional standards of technical correctness, exhibits a felicitous turn of phrase, and makes sensible, unostentatious use of relevant critical terminology.
It is important to lay stress on this feature of the examiners’ preoccupations, because all too often students opt for English Literature at 'A' level under the misapprehension that the subject centrally involves the expression of personal opinion.
Whilst this belief is not entirely misguided, since the exam does allow, and sometimes invite, the candidate to voice his or her reactions to a text, the questions set never sanction an impressionistic subjectivism. All personal responses must be substantiated by close reference to the text in question, and even accurate observations will fail to score highly if they are presented without textual corroboration.
In addition to these general requirements common to all six modules, certain particular units also make extra demands broadly reflective of an incipient shift in emphasis from the New Critical (all that counts are the “words on the page”, and everything else should be bracketed out) to the historicist (literary texts emerge out of, and never wholly transcend, their social and cultural context of production). Thus, in the Shakespeare coursework module on Edexcel, students are called upon to be constantly alert to the significance of the 400-year divide separating them from the author’s first audiences, and to demonstrate that awareness not only by identifying ways in which the play of their choice has been shaped by social forces operative in Jacobean England but no longer extant in the modern world, but also by recognizing the equally powerful cultural conditioning which colours (and perhaps skews) their own seemingly natural responses to the play.
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| WHICH BOARD, AMONG THE SEVERAL OFERING ENGLISH LITERATURE AT 'A' LEVEL, DOES DUFF MILLER FAVOUR, AND WHY?
All the boards are much of a muchness to the extent that they offer a wide variety of texts from which to choose and insist on the study of works spanning several genres (poetry, prose and drama) and deriving from several periods (pre-1900 and post-1900). At Duff Miller we favour Edexcel because its questions tend to be very fair (they do not go out of their way to find odd angles from which to invite consideration of the given texts, so that the student who has worked hard and knows his or her text well can be more or less assured of being given the opportunity to write about an aspect of it with which he or she is entirely at ease) and their marking is equally so (our predicted grades invariably correspond to those achieved by our candidates).
By no means do we restrict ourselves to a single board, however. If a student applying to Duff Miller has previously begun English Literature 'A' level on another board, and is reluctant to sacrifice the work already undertaken by switching to Edexcel, we are sufficiently flexible to make special arrangements on his or her account. This may involve one-to-one tuition or a mixture of one-to-one lessons (where his or her texts do not overlap with those on the Edexcel syllabus) and group lessons (where there is a fortuitous imbrication).
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| WHO CHOOSES THE TEXTS TO BE STUDIED, AND ON WHAT BASIS?
In the case of students pursuing a two-year 'A'-level course, the texts will be chosen by the teacher. This is not so much authoritarian as sensible: inevitably, the teacher, familiar with all the books on the syllabus, is better placed than the students to pick texts which are accessible, varied and, in some cases, mutually illuminating. His choice will be governed, however, by his impression of the students in his class, taking into account both their inclinations and their capabilities.
With one-year students who have previously taken the exam elsewhere, the process of selection will be more consultative. The choice of texts will, where possible, take account of the students’ existing familiarity with, preference for, and aversion to, certain texts on the syllabus.
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| WHAT DISTINGUISHES DUFF MILLER’S APPROACH TO ENGLISH LITERATURE 'A' LEVEL FROM THAT OF OTHER SCHOOLS?
The Duff Miller method, which has delivered impressive results over a long period, is, in one sense, very obvious and straightforward: we teach the set texts very thoroughly and systematically, demand a high level of commitment from our students, and, using a mixture of carrot and stick, refuse to allow recalcitrant pupils to fall by the wayside. There are, however, several specific features of our programme which distinguish us from most, and perhaps all, other schools:
a) For every set text we provide a compendious set of notes, identifying all the aspects of the work which are likely to be foregrounded in exam questions and assembling all the relevant citations under suitable headings.
b) When preparing students for open-book exams, we help them to inscribe their text in a manner which enables them to access material as it is needed with maximal efficiency.
c) For the unseen prose and poetry questions, which at many other schools are often criminally neglected on the spurious grounds that they cannot be prepared for, we conduct carefully thought-out courses in poetic technique (metre, rhyme, stanza form), rhetoric (the figures and tropes by means of which a writer renders his or her views the more persuasive), and a whole host of other relevant topics. In this way we ensure that our candidates do not commit the cardinal sin, in their treatment of unseen texts, of merely paraphrasing the set passage or poem rather than submitting it to systematic stylistic analysis.
d) We make use of a wide variety of unseen gobbets for the purposes of practice, covering the whole gamut of English literature from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, and in this way contrive to offset the syllabus’s built-in (and, to some students, stultifying) emphasis on a narrow range of set texts.
e) We run remedial classes in English grammar for students whose mark is in danger of being dragged down by a high incidence, in their essays, of basic grammatical errors of the kind which ought, in theory, to have been eradicated at an earlier stage in the educational process.
f) We make extensive use of past papers, familiarising our students with the style of questions set by the relevant board and developing their ability to construe the demands of the questions accurately and to re-orient the material at their disposal to meet those demands. To this extent, our business is not so much to create an expert on Othello or Emma as to create an expert at answering Edexcel-or AQA-style questions on those texts.
g) We devote a considerable amount of time to the mechanics of essay-writing, inculcating in our students the ability to construct a relevant and cogent argument in relation to a given question, impressing on them the need to begin every paragraph with a pertinent point which the remainder of the paragraph proceeds to elucidate and substantiate, and equipping them with a varied repertoire of devices for negotiating transitions in an argument.
h) We occasionally introduce our students to literary criticism written by professionals in the field. This has two advantageous effects: it exposes them to salutary models to be borne in mind when writing their own essays and, more specifically, it helps them to extend their literary critical range of expression. Typically, we would ask a pupil to go through a couple paragraphs from an essay by, say, Leavis or Empson, and to highlight any turns of phrase with which he is unfamiliar or which he could not imagine himself using but which seem to possess a wide application.
i) We conduct regular tests, both written and oral. This has the doubly beneficial effect of overcoming any fear of exams which the student may harbour (the real exam becomes just the latest in a long sequence), and of enabling the teacher to keep fully abreast of the student’s progress.
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| WHAT KIND OF RESULT CAN I EXPECT TO ACHIEVE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AT DUFF MILLER?
It would be nice to say that we can guarantee an A grade but, alas, that would be a wildly extravagant claim. For any child there is a non-negotiable ceiling to his or her achievement at 'A' level. The commitment and expertise of the English teachers at Duff Miller, and the methodical nature of the programme outlined above, are such as to ensure, however, that we enable all cooperative students (an important caveat!) to realise their full potential. |
| Examination Board
Edexcel
OCR
AQA
WJEC |
| Tutors
Bill Symes
Margaret Lipinska
Anna Mielniczek |
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