English Language Paper 1: The Yellow Wallpaper MODEL ANSWERS

 

 

1)There are hedges and walls

There are gates that lock

There are lots of separate little houses

There is a delicious garden

 

2)The writer uses language to describe the room negatively and its effects on the narrator as being offensive.

Firstly the writer uses word choice to describe the effects of the room on the writer: the room “irritates”, “provokes” and “destroys”. All of these verbs suggest aggression, lasting damage and of having negative consequences thus showing the offense the room causes her and highlighting its portrayal as being negative. Secondly the writer uses metaphor to describe the pattern of the wallpaper as committing suicide. Just as committing suicide is destructive, negatively impacts those involved to the person and has permanent negative consequences so the wallpaper patterns seriously affects the narrator. The use of metaphor furthers the negative description of the room and its offense caused to the narrator.

English Language Paper 1 Question 2

Look in detail at this extract:

Doubled, I walk the street. Though we are no longer in the Commanders' compound, there are large houses here also. In front of one of them a Guardian is mowing the lawn. The lawns are tidy, the facades are gracious, in good repair; they're like the beautiful pictures they used to print in the magazines about homes and gardens and interior decoration. There is the same absence of people, the same air of being asleep. The street is almost like a museum, or a street in a model town constructed to show the way people used to live. As in those pictures, those museums, those model towns, there are no children.  

How does the writer use language here to describe the atmosphere of the town? 

You could include the writer’s choice of: 

• words and phrases

 • language features and techniques

• sentence forms

Level 1 Exemplar Answer: The town is sad. We know this because it says there is an “absence of people”. The word choice highlights the emptiness which makes it sad.

Level 2 Exemplar Answer: The writer uses the words “absence” and “asleep” to describe the town. These word choices emphasise the description of the town as being empty and quiet. This describes the town’s atmosphere as lonely and depressed.

Level 3 Exemplar Answer: The writer uses personification to create an eerie atmosphere. This is shown by the quote: “the same air of being asleep”. This could give the reader the impression that the town is lifeless and almost ghost like. To add to this eerie atmosphere, the writer concludes the description with the statement: “there are no children”. This powerful concluding statement creates a sense of drama as the lack of children in the town creates a dark, lifeless atmosphere. The dark, lifeless atmosphere is further highlighted use to the writer’s use of contrast as the earlier description of the town contains adjectives such as “beautiful” and “gracious”, which contrast with the barren eerie concluding statement.

Level 4 Exemplar Answer: Immediately the reader’s curiosity is piqued by the word “doubled” as the reader is initially uncertain as to whether the speaker is referring to walking with a partner or being hunched over. The speaker appears to be a stranger in this environment and presents this place as something strange, an anomaly in the present times they are experiencing due to the repetition of the past tense: “used to”. In this town there may be a war going on because the “Commander’s compound” implies those in power live apart from the people. This creates an atmosphere of sterility and oppression.  In addition a “Compound” is enclosed and those on the outside are closed off from it, furthermore the word choice of compound has suggestions of a pressurised situation which hints at the atmosphere being pressurised and the need for perfection to exist and be adhered to. This is further implied by the reference to the lawns and houses being “like the beautiful pictures …in magazines”. Finally the rule of three and repetition of the demonstrative pronoun “those” used in the last sentences: “those pictures, those museums, those model towns” reinforces the sterile, empty atmosphere and the separation between the speaker and the town in which she lives but clearly feels apart from.

Due: by Monday 9am delivered to English base.

Year 11 English
Task – Attempt at least 2 of the 4 questions below. Do remember that in the final English Language Paper 1 exam you will have to attempt Q1 and Q2 so perhaps you might want to use this opportunity to stretch yourself and get valuable feedback. 

a)   Read again the extract below.
For an instant, as he hurried into the showers, with one leg angled in running, with his dirty legs and huge rib cage moulding the skin of his white body, with his hollow cheek in profile, and the sabre of shadow emanating from the eye-hole, just for a moment he resembled an old photograph of a child hurrying towards the final solution.
   Write down four features of Billy’s physical appearance.        [4 marks] 

b) Look in detail at this extract from paragraphs 3-5.
The blunt arrow was pointing to HOT. Sugden swung it back over WARM to COLD. For a few seconds there was no visible change in the temperature, and the red slice held steady, still dominating that dial. Then it began to recede, slowly at first, then swiftly, its share of the face diminishing rapidly. The cold water made Billy gasp. He held out his hands as though testing for rain, then ran for the end. The three guards barred the exit. 
"Hey up, shift! Let me out, you rotten dogs!" 
They held him easily so he swished back to the other end, yelling all the way along. Sugden pushed him in the chest as he clung his way round the corner. 
Billy tried another rush. Sugden repelled it, so he tried the other end again. Every time he tried to escape the three boys bounced him back, stinging him with their snapping towels as he retreated. He tried manoeuvring the nozzles, but whichever way he twisted them the water still found him out. Until finally he gave up, and stood amongst them, tolerating the freezing spray in silence. 

How does the writer use language here to suggest Billy’s desperation?
   You could include the writer’s choice of:
* words and phrases
* language features and techniques
* sentence forms
[8 marks] 
 
c)  Read again the extract below.
The formal name of the Store was the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store. Customers could find food staples, a good variety of colored thread, mash for hogs, corn for chickens, coal oil for lamps, light bulbs for the wealthy, shoestrings, hair dressing, balloons, and flower seeds. Anything not visible had only to be ordered.
List four things from this part of the text that are sold in the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store.
           [4 marks] 
d) 
When I was three and Bailey four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed—“To Whom It May Concern”—that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson.
Our parents had decided to put an end to their calamitous marriage, and Father shipped us home to his mother. A porter1 had been charged with our welfare—he got off the train the next day in Arizona—and  our tickets were pinned to my brother’s inside coat pocket.
I don’t remember much of the trip, but after we reached the segregated southern part of the journey, things must have looked up. Negro passengers, who always traveled with loaded lunch boxes, felt sorry for “the poor little motherless darlings” and plied us with cold fried chicken and potato salad.
Years later I discovered that the United States had been crossed thousands of times by frightened Black children traveling alone to their newly affluent parents in Northern cities, or back to grandmothers in Southern towns when the urban North reneged on its economic promises. 
The town reacted to us as its inhabitants had reacted to all things new before our coming. It regarded us a while without curiosity but with caution, and after we were seen to be harmless (and children) it closed in around us, as a real mother embraces a stranger’s child. Warmly, but not too familiarly.

 How does the writer use language here to describe the helplessness of Maya 
 Angelou and her brother, Bailey?
    You could include the writer’s choice of:
* words and phrases
* language features and techniques
* sentence forms
[8 marks] 

Exemplar Q2 Question and A grade response

Q - Look in detail at this extract.
How does the writer use language here to describe the room? 
You could include the writer’s choice of: 
• words and phrases • language features and techniques • sentence forms

 Crooks’ bunk was a long box filled with straw, on which his blankets were flung. On the wall by the window there were pegs on which hung broken harness in process of being mended; strips of new leather; and under the window itself a little bench for leather-working tools, curved knives and needles and balls of linen thread, and a small hand riveter. On pegs were also pieces of harness, a split collar with the horsehair stuffing sticking out, a broken hame, and a trace chain with its leather covering split. Crooks had his apple box over his bunk, and in it a range of medicine bottles, both for himself and for the horses. There were cans of saddle soap and a drippy can of tar with its paint brush sticking over the edge. And scattered about the floor were a number of personal possessions; for, being alone, Crooks could leave his things about, and being a stable buck and a cripple, he was more permanent than the other men, and he had accumulated more possessions than he could carry on his back.

Answer:

The narrator demonstrates the lack of warmth and comfort in the room through the phrase “long box filled with straw”. Firstly the long box has connotations of a coffin and therefore death, thus suggesting that the room is devoid of humanity and life/warmth. Secondly by highlighting the noun “straw” this likens Crooks’ sleeping area to an animals sleeping quarter’s thus describing the room to be unfit for humans.

The narrator also uses repetition as references to animals are repeated throughout the extract, thus furthering the description of the room as unfit for humans and, furthermore inhumane (the ‘inhumane’ aspect of the room is also present in the bed being described in such a manner as to connote a coffin).

The narrator’s includes a long sentence which contains a list, and each item on the list contains an object that is broken or in need of repair, indeed the harness is specifically described as “broken”. This listing of problematic items furthers the description of the room as not being fit for purpose and appropriate or comfortable. The list being contained in a long sentence could suggest that the lack of warmth and comfort has been prolonged.

Homework: Due Thursday (please leave in English office for me). Homework to be completed in your jotter.

Those whose jotter is with me for marking, please collect from my desk in the English office on Tuesday.
Q2 Practice

Look in detail at this extract.
How does the writer use language here to describe Scrooge? 
You could include the writer’s choice of: 
• words and phrases • language features and techniques • sentence forms
(8 marks)

Oh!  But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.  A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.  He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

English Language Paper 1 Q2

Q2 The question will look like:

Look in detail at this extract from lines 8 to 18 of the source: 

How does the writer use language here to describe …? 

You could include the writer’s choice of: 

• words and phrases

• language features and techniques

• sentence forms

Your answer could look a little like like:

The word choice of “girl” has connotations of innocence, youth and vulnerability, this therefore suggests that Curley’s wife is inexperienced , a victim and at risk in her surroundings.

 You need to:

•      Show detailed and perceptive understanding of language

•      Analyse the effects of the writer’s choices of language

•      Select a judicious range of relevant quotes

•      Use sophisticated subject terminology accurately

Welcome to our class blog Y11, and the year in which you can make the biggest gains in your life. Remember: nothing worth having is easy.