How to analyse and evaluate an unseen fiction text
Develop GCSE English Language students' exam skills with this helpful teaching resource.
It carefully guides students through the difference between analysis and evaluation, in preparation for AQA GCSE English Language Paper 1 questions on an unseen fiction text.
It includes sentence starters, evaluative adverbs and an unseen fiction extract (from John Buchan's 1915 novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps) for students to practice their own written analysis and evaluation.
Useful for exam practice and preparation.
Here's an extract from the teaching resource:
When you’re thinking about a text, you could analyse:
- Language features, such as metaphors, similes, vocabulary, alliteration and onomatopoeia.
- Structural features, like what happens at the beginning, middle and end of a text, use of different sentence types, how the narrative is told etc.
To evaluate, you should look at the whole thing as a finished piece of work, and judge how successful you think it is. These sentence starters will help you:
- In the text, the writer’s use of dark imagery subtly introduces a theme of suffering…
- The author successfully develops tension in the extract through…
- Throughout the text, the writer conveys the seriousness of the characters’ situation…
