NCEA Exam Revision

ON Wednesday the 25th of November at 9.30 am, you will sit your Level 1 NCEA English exam. The exam has two papers in it:

1.1- Written Text Essay: for this paper, you will select ONE essay question from the statements provided and write an answer using our core text for the year, The Great Gatsby.

1.3- Unfamiliar Texts: for this paper, you will be given three short texts that you have not seen before to read and interpret. There will be a question that you need to respond to for each text.

2.1- The Great Gatsby Essay

In this paper, you will write your final Gatsby essay. One of the most important things you must to do to prepare for this is memorise quotations to use in the exam. Write them out over and over, make cue cards, stick them to your bathroom mirror or a place you spend time in, say them out loud to your pets, family, friends and whanau. Everyone’s memory works differently so just figure out the best strategy for you.

Below, I have added the past three years of exam papers, an excellence exemplar from NZQA and the marking rubric. You should look to use these during your own study time. If you are writing an essay, set yourself a 90 minute time limit and stick to it, as this is the time you will have in the exam. Try to hand write it so that you are mimicking the conditions of the exam. If you drop it in to me or send me pictures, I will mark it and give feedback.

90849-exm-2019-1

90849-exm-2018

90849-exm-2017

90849-exp-2018-excellence

90849-ass-2019-1

2.3- Unfamiliar Texts

In this paper, your reading skills are being put to the test. You will be given three different types of short texts to read, each with their own question. We have discussed a strategy in class for reading these texts:

Read the question
Read the text and consider it as a whole
Re-read the text and annotate (notice) moments which relate to the question.

Once you have read the text, you need to construct an answer to the question. Again, we have discussed some of the things that you need to include in this written answer:

Introduce your answer to set it up. Consider this your ‘one-sentence response’ to the question.
Discuss multiple techniques. Ideally, three is a good bet. For each technique, look to comment on the what, how and why.

– What is being presented in the text (the technique and the quotation)
– How does this technique work? What are the key features of it?
– Why is it operating in this way? What idea is being developed by it?
Conclude your answer by discussing the purpose of the text. For this, you can consider the genre (is it an article, speech script, short story, poem) and think about what those typical text types do. You should also comment on what the text does for the reader- does it teach the reader something, spark a memory, draw attention to a wider social issue?

Below, you will find exam papers and resource booklets from the past three years. There is also an exemplar answer and the marking rubric for you to look over.

90851-exm-2019-1

2019_English_90851-res-2019-1

90851-exp-2019-excellence-1

90851-ass-2019

90851-exm-2018-1

2018-1-1

90851-exm-2017-1

2017-1-1