AQA GCSE English Language: Paper 1 Q3: Structure Analysis

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Cora Welland, titled The Salt Road. A man returns at night to the lighthouse where he grew up.

From the cliff the whole coast lay spread below him in the moonlight, mile upon mile of pale cliff and black water, the lighthouse at the far point sweeping its long slow beam across the sea. Tomas stood and let his eyes travel the familiar shape of it all, the bay, the harbour, the single lit window of the inn. Then he began to walk down, and as he walked his gaze drew in. The wide coast shrank to the lane, the lane to the lighthouse gate, the gate to the green door he had slammed behind him twenty years before. He stopped. His hand went to the latch and remembered its weight before his mind did. Inside, the spiral stair climbed away into the dark exactly as it always had, and the smell — paraffin, cold stone, the sea — undid two decades in a single breath. He climbed. At the top, in the lamp room, a single chair faced the glass. And on the chair, folded as though it had been set down only a moment ago and was still warm, lay his father's old coat. Tomas had come to bury a stranger. He understood, now, that he had not.

You now need to think about the whole of this source. How has the writer structured the text to interest you as a reader? You could write about: what the writer focuses your attention on at the beginning; how and why the writer changes this focus as the source develops; any other structural features. (8 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Marcus Eaves, titled Low Cloud. A climber is caught out by the weather.

The summit, when she reached it, was everything she had imagined. Nadia turned slowly on the spot and the world opened beneath her: valley after valley falling away in blue folds, a silver thread of river, the toy roofs of the village she had left at dawn. She had earned this. She laughed aloud, and the sound carried for miles.

She did not, at first, notice the change. She was eating, her back to the north, when the light around her dimmed by a single degree. She looked up. The far peaks had gone. A grey wall, soundless and immense, was rolling across the range towards her, swallowing one ridge, then the next, then the next.

Now the focus narrowed and quickened. The wide blue world she had been admiring shrank to the few metres of wet rock at her feet. The cloud reached her, and the view, the valleys, the silver river — all of it vanished, wiped clean, as though it had never been. There was only the cold, the white, and the small hammer of her own heart.

She checked her watch. She checked the sky. And then, far below and out of sight, where the warm village still went about its afternoon, a single church bell began, very faintly, to ring.

You now need to think about the whole of this source. How has the writer structured the text to build tension? You could write about: what the writer focuses your attention on at the beginning; how and why the writer changes this focus as the source develops; any other structural features. (8 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Priya Nandakumar, titled The Lock-Keeper's Daughter. An old woman watches a house being cleared.

The skip outside number nine had been filling all morning. Margaret watched from her window across the road as the men carried out the bones of her neighbour's life: the green armchair, the rolled-up rugs, the kitchen table with the burn mark she remembered being made. Each thing landed in the metal skip with a clang, and each clang seemed to her like a small door closing.

She let her mind go back. She saw the table forty years younger, and around it a young couple newly moved in, and herself, younger too, knocking with a cake to welcome them. She saw the children that came after, their heights pencilled on the kitchen door frame, the parties, the quarrels heard faintly through the party wall, the ambulance, at last, in the blue small hours.

The present pulled her back. A man was lifting the door frame itself now, the very wood with the pencil marks, and carrying it to the skip. Margaret half rose from her chair, her hand lifting as if to stop him, and then she sat down again, because of course it was not hers to save.

The skip filled. The men drove away. And the house across the road stood open and empty, its front door swinging, waiting — as every house in the street would one day wait — for whoever came next.

You now need to think about the whole of this source. How has the writer structured the text to interest you as a reader? You could write about: what the writer focuses your attention on at the beginning; how and why the writer changes this focus as the source develops; any other structural features. (8 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Daniel Oduya, titled The Night Shift. A boy waits at a railway station for someone who may not come.

Three minutes to seven. The platform was nearly empty, and the long northern evening lay gold across the rails. Idris stood exactly where he had said he would stand, by the third lamp, and watched the dark mouth of the tunnel at the far end of the platform, from which the train would come.

He let himself imagine it. He pictured the train sliding in, the doors opening, and a particular figure stepping down — older now, surely, greyer, but unmistakable, scanning the platform and then finding him, and the long walk towards each other, and everything that had been wrong for ten years made, in a single moment, almost right.

Seven o'clock. Far off, a rail began to hum. A light grew in the tunnel's mouth. Idris's whole body turned towards it; his hand rose, ready. The train came in with a sigh of brakes, and the doors opened all down its length, and people stepped down — a woman with a suitcase, two laughing students, a man asleep on his feet — and Idris looked from face to face to face.

The doors closed. The train pulled away. And then the platform was empty again, and gold, and quiet, except for one boy standing by the third lamp, his hand only now beginning, slowly, to come down.

You now need to think about the whole of this source. How has the writer structured the text to build tension and interest you as a reader? You could write about: what the writer focuses your attention on at the beginning; how and why the writer changes this focus as the source develops; any other structural features. (8 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Helen Ashby, titled The Attic Year. A family arrives at a remote holiday cottage.

The car came over the last rise, and there it was: the whole valley at once, green and gold in the late sun, and the little white cottage at the bottom of it with smoke already rising, as the owner had promised, from its chimney. The children cheered. Even their father, who had driven for six hours and complained for five of them, fell silent and smiled.

They came down the winding track in a cloud of their own dust, and the valley closed in around them, hedgerow rising on either side until the wide view was gone and there was only the green tunnel of the lane and, ahead, the cottage growing larger.

Then the small things began to declare themselves. The smoke, seen close, did not rise from the chimney but drifted, thin and blue, from somewhere round the back. The promised garden was a square of nettles. And the front door, when the father tried it, with everyone gathered behind him and the engine ticking as it cooled, was already, very slightly, open.

Nobody said anything. A curtain in the upstairs window, where no window should have been open either, lifted once in the still air, and settled, as though something inside had just sat down to wait.

You now need to think about the whole of this source. How has the writer structured the text to build unease? You could write about: what the writer focuses your attention on at the beginning; how and why the writer changes this focus as the source develops; any other structural features. (8 marks)