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WHY ENGLISH?
HOW THE COURSE IS STRUCTURED
The first paper is the drama paper, where you will have two essay questions to answer in 2 hours and 15 minutes on a Shakespearean text that you have studied as well as a more modern tragedy/comedy - 35 and 25 marks respectively. What is unique about this paper is that, for the Shakespeare essay question and this question only, you will have to incorporate critics into your works - in other words, quotations from academics that have studied a particular part of the text at great length. This is, arguably, the only main difference between GCSE and A-Level English Literature - as well as, of course, the level at which you are expected to write. This paper accounts for 30% of your overall grade.
The second paper is the prose paper, where you will have one comparative essay question to answer in 1 hour and 15 minutes on two texts that you have studied within the category that your school has chosen - be it 'Women and Society' or 'The Supernatural'. Again, there are no critics here and the AOs are distributed between the components that you would expect to see at GCSE - with perhaps a little more weighting on aspects such as, say, context. This paper accounts for 20% of your overall grade.
The third paper is the poetry paper, where you will have two essay questions to answer in 2 hours and 15 minutes again. The first essay question is one wherein you will have to compare two poems from a particular anthology that you have already studied - say, 20 poems from The Romantic period or 20 poems by Christina Rossetti. The second question is also comparative, but there is an unseen aspect. For this component, you will have studied a further 20 poems (yes, that's a 40 poem total - I wish I was joking) from the Modern Poetry anthology but you will have to compare one of the poems printed to an unseen poem. The marks for both questions are distributed equally, at 30 marks each - which then accounts for 30% of your overall grade.
That brings us to the coursework element, which accounts for the final 20% of your grade. This is yet another comparative essay between two or three texts of your choice - though most schools, like mine, choose specific coursework texts for you. Unlike the other essays that you will produce, this is an extended work with an advisory word count of 2500-3000 words - it seems like a lot, but not merely enough once you get into the swing of things! This essay is marked out of 60 and every assessment objective is weighted equally here - including critics. However, this element is done completely in the comfort of your own home or school - meaning you can take as long as you please to write said essay, and indeed write as many drafts as you feel is necessary, as it is not written under exam conditions.
Importantly, each and every one of the exams are open book - though your texts do, of course, have to be clean copies. There is a choice between two questions for every component of the exam, which usually means that there should always be at least one question you can feel comfortable writing. As was the case in the GCSE poetry component, the comparative questions are almost always rather vague and general to give you scope to make a variety of points.
MY EXPERIENCE
I must say, the transition between GCSE and A-Level for English Literature was the easiest out of all my subjects - and it was only truly in the middle of Year 12 that I began to notice a significant difference, when we began to look at the idea of critics.
This leads on nicely into the matter of workload - which, admittedly, is a tricky one to generalise because each individual school and teacher is going to have different expectations of you. Personally, I would not say that I was given very much in the way of homework - though that is not so much because there was no work to be done, but rather because my teachers encouraged us to be independent and take it upon ourselves to research context, made additional notes as we make our way through the texts, make revision resources etc. Naturally, some people deal with such scenario better than others and it was only until Year 13 that I truly learnt how to take charge of my own learning and when I subsequently saw my grades improve significantly.
Speaking of independent learning, another brilliant thing about A-Level English Literature is the sheer amount of resources that are available at your fingertip - something which I would have definitely benefited from in other subjects where this wasn't the case. While it can be overwhelming to see article upon article on the same topic matter, it's nice to know that the option is there to go through all of them should you choose to take it - though you certainly don't need to have read 50 critical articles for one text to do well in it, it's all about prioritising.
The above being said, I think that something which both I and many people rather ironically didn't expect was the amount of reading you would have to do for the qualification. As well as having to do your own independent reading and research, something you will notice is that there are a lot more books at A-Level than there were at GCSE and they're, unfortunately, a lot thicker - Dracula was 400 pages on its own! If you're out to achieve the top grades, you will have to constantly re-read your texts to keep your knowledge fresh as an open-book exam doesn't particularly do much when your texts are rather lengthy and things can be a bit difficult to navigate - so do bear this in mind.
In terms of the exam, I must admit that I feel rather foolish looking back to the days when I thought that the GCSE exams were very intense because the A-Level exams are a whole other kettle of fish. For me, the greatest difficulty came with time; the time you are given to answer a GCSE and A-Level answer respectively isn't too different, but there is a lot more expected of you at A-Level and you have to master the art of writing concisely so as to get all those AO's in (AKA, not waffling on). That being said, as with anything, you will get into the flow of things with practice and I've come out of exams amazed at how much I was able to write in such a short period of time - anything is possible if you put your mind to it!
SHOULD YOU TAKE IT?
To sum it up, A-Level English Literature is a great subject to take if you're willing to put the work in, if you want to keep your options open for university and if you like reading! So long as study smart (little but often), I can assure you that it is possible to know what it is you need to know about 4 texts and 40 poems - as daunting as it may sound!