English Literature - Tara's IGCSE Study Hub

Your papers

How you are examined — every question is marked against four Assessment Objectives, each worth 25%: knowledge (AO1), meaning and ideas (AO2), how writers use language, structure and form (AO3), and your own informed personal response (AO4).

Paper 1 — Poetry & Prose	1h 30m · 50 marks · 50% · two essays: one poetry, one prose
Paper 4 — Unseen	1h 15m · 25 marks · 25% · one critical commentary on an unseen text

Set texts

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To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee

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Paper 1 Prose. Plot and structure, every major character, themes, Lee’s craft, context and the modern critical debate · 60 practice questions

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Songs of Ourselves, Volume 1 — 15 poems

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Paper 1 Poetry. Behn, Bhatt, Blake, Brewster, Boey, Clarke, Halligan, Heaney, Lochhead, Mungoshi, Philips, Pope, Rumens, Shakespeare, Wright · plus comparison and essay planning

Unit assessment — school exam by 18 Sep

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Unit Exam 1 — TKAM passage + The Cockroach

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90 minutes · 50 marks · a passage-based question on the end of Chapter 11 and a poetry essay on movement and self-scrutiny · band tables, weak/middling/strong exemplars and 25-criteria self-marking per section

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Unit Exam 2 — TKAM whole-novel essay + The Cockroach

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90 minutes · 50 marks · a no-passage essay demanding range across the novel, and a poetry essay on form, structure and the turn · all-new marking criteria and exemplars

Exam skills

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Essay Skills & the Four AOs

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What each Assessment Objective actually rewards, planning and structure, embedding quotations, writing about effect rather than spotting devices, and the 12 ways students lose marks

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Unseen Practice — Paper 4

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A repeatable method for any unseen text, poetry and prose toolkits, and four full practice unseens with model commentaries and mark schemes

A note on the books: these guides analyse your set texts — they don’t replace them. You still need your copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and the Songs of Ourselves Volume 1 anthology to read the actual poems and prose. Quotations here are short, as you would use them in an essay.

📚 English Literature