Reading through exam papers that also come with mark schemes and ‘indicative content’ which summarise the kind of ideas students should include in their answers. Looking through these will help you outline the kind of answers the exam boards are looking for to score top marks. All of these resources can be found on the exam boards’ websites.

You can use these documents to produce your own ‘model’ answers with the student, to indicate how to structure their ideas to achieve the best possible marks. This will also allow you to step into your students’ shoes and highlight the kind of problems they might face, which you can then help them to avoid.
To ensure the student understands the texts; compiling a list of key themes, such as the environment, holidays, conditions in prisons, education, sexism etc. Then, we will select one or two texts based on these issues and find interesting extracts that could be explored which are suitable for the kind of questions on the students’ exam papers. Consider the areas of the text you would want your students to analyse and think about how a discussion might pave the way for this before writing some relevant exam-style questions. Finally, produce a writing task linked to these extracts for students to complete in the tutorial or for homework, as necessary.
Discuss which overall issue the passage relates to. Then, help them break it down paragraph by paragraph. What is the key word/phrase of each paragraph? Could it be summarised in a sentence? Or emblemised in an image? Make sure to provide lots of positive reinforcement, as this is a difficult task!