Note: This year’s Prelim – November 26th – will not only include Reading for Understanding Analysis and Evaluation (Paper 1), and Scottish Text (Paper 2). It will now incl ude the Critical Essay (Paper 2)aspect, which will feature in the final exam.
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Reading for Understanding Analysis and Evaluation
This is worth 30 marks and lasts 1 hour.
The National 5 Reading for Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation Exam
The exam tests your ability to understand the writer‟s ideas, and to analyse and evaluate the language he/she uses to put those ideas across. You will earn marks for everything you get right.
1. You will be tested on this by sitting an exam in May of your National 5 year.
2. Try to read regularly a quality newspaper such as the Guardian, Scotsman, Herald, Independent or The Times.
3. Do not just read the news stories near the front, but also the feature articles and opinion pieces in the later pages.
4. Expand your knowledge of language, and of how people debate and argue about their ideas, by watching television programmes such as Question Time.
5. Listen to radio programmes such as Radio Scotland‟s morning news programme.
6. If you encounter unfamiliar words, see if you can work them out from the context, or look them up.
7. You will not be able to take a dictionary into the exam, so it is important to work on building up your vocabulary, and your command of ideas.
8. You will be given a non-fiction passage, perhaps a piece of journalism or an extract from a book.
9. You will have 1 hour to read the passage and answer 30 marks‟ worth of questions about it.
10. Each question will probably be worth 2, 3 or 4 marks.
Types of Questions
Using your own words
Many of the exam questions will ask you to use your own words. It is the most key and basic skill in all of close reading. If you can put something in your own words, you have understood it; if you do not understand something, you will not be able to express it in your own words.
Using your own words means you may have to:
Explain what a word or expression in the passage means
Explain the main point the writer is making
Give the reason for something that happens in the passage
Show that you understand a piece of information the passage gives
Context Questions
You may be asked to work out from the context what a word or expression means. In these cases, the examiners think that you may not know the given word, but that you should be able to work it out from what surrounds it in the passage.
Context questions might be worded like this:
Explain in your own words what is meant by „_____________‟ in this context.
How does the context of lines xx-xx help you to work out what is meant by „________________‟?
Context questions are usually worth 2 marks. You earn one mark showing what the word means, and the second for showing how you could work this out from the context.
Your answer should therefore be in 2 sentences, with the 2nd including short quotations from the context.
Use this pattern to structure your answers:
The word/expression “______________” as used here means “____________________‟. I can work this from the context because…
Imagery Questions
Writers use images to strengthen what they say by putting all sorts of pictures in the reader‟s mind. Imagery is not the same as description. A description tells us what something is like. An image shows that one thing is somehow like another. The comparison tells us more about the thing that is being compared. Similes, metaphors and personification are all different sorts of image, though most of the images you will be asked about will be metaphors.
There is a method for analysing images. You begin with what the image literally is like, or literally means.
Then you go on to the metaphorical meaning, showing how that image applies to and adds meaning to the subject under discussion.
Use this structure for your analysis:
Just as…(explain the literal meaning), so …(explain the metaphorical meaning).
Example: He has a mountain of work to do.
You could analyse the image like this:
Just as a mountain is large and is challenging to climb, so the amount of work he has to do is enormous and will be really difficult.
Link Questions
You may be asked a link question. These often ask you to say how a sentence creates an effective link between one paragraph and another. These questions are usually worth 2 marks and you usually need to answer them in 2 parts:
1. Show how one part of the sentence links back to the previous paragraph
2. Show how another part of it refers forward to the new paragraph.
Formula for link questions:
The word/expression „______________‟ links back to ________________________________________
Which was discussed in paragraph _________.
The word/expression ‟_________________‟ introduces the idea of ___________________________________________________, which is going to be discussed in paragraph _________.
Tone
It is easy to understand what we mean by tone if we think of a speaking voice. When you hear someone speaking, you can tell if
he/she is angry, confused, excited or afraid. Skilled writers can create a tone by word choice. Some of the most common tones that crop up in exam questions are humorous, matter –of-fact, critical, angry, conversational, formal, informal, etc.
Sentence structure questions: Sentence structure is how a sentence is made and built up. A number of smaller techniques contribute to sentence structure:
a. Length: Look at whether a sentence is noticeably long, or noticeably short, especially if its length contrasts with the length of other sentences nearby.
b. Listing: what is being listed and what does the list suggest?
c. Repetition: what is being repeated, and what does this repetition suggest?
d. Parenthesis: what is the extra information inside the parenthesis and what is the effect of this?
e. Word order: have any words been put in a position in the sentence that creates emphasis? What is the impact of this?
f. Colons or semicolons: what do these divide the sentence into? What do colons introduce?
g. Minor sentences: these ungrammatical (usually short) sentences are used to create some kind of impact, so what is the impact?
h. Questions: what is the effect of these on the reader?
Critical Reading – Scottish Set Text
This is worth 20 Marks and lasts 45 minutes.
You will be given an extract from the poetry, prose or drama you will have studied. Alongside this will a number of questions ranging from 1 – 8 marks each.
These questions will test your ability to analyse the extract. However, the last question (worth 8 marks) will ask you to discuss an area or aspect shared between the both extract and another text or another area of the novel or play.
Critical Reading – Essay
This worth 20 marks
