How to succeed in your ‘Of Mice and Men’ examination

Assessment Objectives  AO2 Explain how language, structure and form contribute to writers’ presentation of ideas, themes and settings.  AO4 Relate texts to their social, cultural and historical contexts; explain how texts have been influential and significant to self and other readers in different contexts and at different times.

AO4  Because the text you are studying is a text from a ‘different culture’ you have to relate to the context in your response.  You must therefore write about the context of the text making sure that what you write is relevant to text and task.  It is not enough to show that you know about the setting of the novel – you must relate what you know to the task.

What is ‘context’?  Context = the SETTING of the text i.e. where and when the action is set.  How is the setting significant in the narrative of the text?  How does the setting relate to the ‘real world’?  How do these things influence the way we respond to the text?

Setting and the narrative  How is the setting significant to the narrative of the text? or or In the text, to what extent do things happen as they do because of when/ where the story takes place? In the text, to what extent are the characters like they are because of when/where the story takes place?

Setting and the ‘real world’  Setting becomes ‘context’ when you link the setting in the text and the setting of the ‘real world’.  Setting becomes ‘context’ when you start to explore the relationship between them.

Exploring context  Exploring context helps us to understand/ think more carefully about/ alter our view of characters and their relationships.  It also helps us to understand more about what happens in the novella.

The context of the reader You may also like to consider:  How or why responses to a text may change over time  How or why a text may provoke different reactions in different readers

Linking text and context  Select from your contextual knowledge what is relevant  Explain how the contextual material helps to shape the text itself  Explore how the contextual material helps to shape the way we respond to the text  Integrate all this into a response to the task set  Bolt-on background’ will not get you any marks