Group identity and peer pressure — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Group identity and peer pressure
Themes
What you need to know
How Kelly explores belonging and peer pressure, as the need to be part of the gang puts Adam in danger, keeps the others silent and leaves Leah, Phil and Adam isolated across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'trying to be part of', 'do anything to be part of the group', 'we did it together', 'Whatever we did, we did', 'We're screwed', 'Is he serious', 'you crying little piece of filth', 'We're going to have to tell them', 'Dentists don't get mixed up in stuff like this', 'you can change the world', 'She's gone', 'Come back to us'.
The gang's pecking order of leaders, followers, victims and outsiders, and the price of belonging: silence, lies and a part in murder.
Friendship and isolation: Jan and Mark's partnership, Leah's one-sided love for Phil, Adam alone in the wood, and a group cut off from parents, teachers and the world outside.
OCR's sample paper on the behaviour of gangs, with peer pressure and the need to belong as motives.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
