GCSE English 的閱讀理解部分，最難的可能是 Paper 1 關於 Structure 的那條題目。
“How has the writer structured the text to interest you as a reader?”
學生需要回答的不是文章說了甚麼，也不是作者用了甚麼修辭，
前幾天我跟一個學生做了一條來自2020年的 GCSE English past paper 的 structure-related 試題。學生只寫了一小段就放棄，我雖然完成我的答案，
下面是我對該題的 response。
移英的成年港人不容易，但其實移英的香港學生（
This extract is from the beginning of a novel by Judith Allnatt, published in 2015. It is set in a house that used to be part of a nineteenth-century silk factory. Rosie and her two children, Sam and Cara, now live in the house.
It was on their first day at the house that Rosie saw the stranger child. Standing at the sink, her hands deep in suds, Rosie was overwhelmed by the tasks that lay ahead of her. Tired after the long drive from London the evening before, she gazed vaguely at the sunlit, overgrown garden where Sam and Cara were playing.
The sash window had old glass that blunted the image, wavering the straightness of fence and washing line, pulling things out of shape. Sam was kneeling beside the patch of earth that Rosie had cleared for him, making hills and valleys for his matchbox cars and trucks by digging with an old tablespoon, and Cara was toddling from bush to bush with a yellow plastic watering can. Through the antique glass, Rosie watched them stretch and shrink as they moved, as if she were looking through ripples. She closed her eyes, glad of a moment of calm after the trauma of the last few days. Letting go of the plate she was holding, she spread her tense fingers, allowing the warmth of the water to soothe her. When she opened her eyes, another child was there.
Rosie had made a quick check of the unfamiliar garden before letting the children go out to play. The bottom half of the garden was an overgrown mess, a muddle of trees and shrubs. An ancient mulberry tree stood at the centre. Its massive twisted branches drooped to the ground in places, its knuckles in the earth like a gigantic malformed hand. The wintry sun hung low in the sky and the gnarled growth threw long twisted shadows across the undergrowth within its cage. The trunk of the tree was snarled with the tangled ivy that grew up through the broken bricks and chunks of cement, choking it. The path that led down towards the fence at the bottom, which marked the garden off from an orchard beyond, disappeared into a mass of nettles and brambles before it reached the padlocked door.
A little girl was sitting back on her heels beside a clump of daisies that grew against the fence. She had her back to Rosie and was holding tight to the handle of a large wicker basket that stood on the ground beside her. Cara seemed unfazed by the girl’s presence and continued to move, engrossed, along the row of plants. Rosie bent forward to look through the clearest of the panes and peered closer. The child was small, maybe around eight or nine, although something in the tense hunch of her shoulders made her seem older. Her hair hung down her back in a matted, dusty-looking plait and she was wearing dressing-up clothes: an ankle-length dress and pinafore in washed-out greys and tans, like a home-made Cinderella costume.
Where on earth had she come from? She must be a neighbour’s child but how had she got in? The wooden fences that separated the gardens between each of the houses in the terrace were high – surely too high for a child to climb.
The child glanced over her shoulder, back towards the houses, a quick, furtive movement as if she were scanning the upper windows of the row, afraid of being overlooked. Rosie caught a glimpse of her face, pale and drawn with anxiety, before the girl turned back and reached forward to quickly tuck a piece of trailing white cloth into the basket. Almost unconsciously, Rosie registered that the girl was left-handed like herself, and that there was something animal-like in her movements: quick, like the darting of a mouse or the flit of a sparrow, some small dun creature that moves fast to blend into the background.
Something wasn’t right here. She had seen distress in those eyes.
Rosie turned away, dried her hands hurriedly and slipped on her flip-flops. She would go gently, raise no challenge about her being in the garden but say hello and try to find out what was the matter. Maybe if she pointed out that her mother would be worrying where she was, she could persuade the girl to let her take her home.
But when she stepped outside, the child was gone.
Question:
You now need to think about the whole of the source.
This text is from the beginning of a novel.
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 of the source
• how and why the writer changes this focus as the source develops
• any other structural features that interest you.
My response
Right at the outset, Allnatt succeeds in creating in me the urge to read on. After beginning her story with “It was on their first day at the house that Rosie saw the stranger child,” instead of going straight to elaborating on that child, Allnatt serves up a scene from everyday life that couldn’t have been more ordinary: Rosie washing dishes in the kitchen. Then, just when Rosie allows herself to be “glad of a moment of calm after the trauma of the last few days,” she is shaken again, this time by her vision of the child in the garden. In disrupting Rosie’s mental equilibrium, Allnatt is also whetting my appetite for more unexpected twists and turns ahead.
Allnatt next makes me see the garden through Rosie’s probing eyes; its sinister features registers on her as well as on me. It is when Rosie’s focus darts back to the child, however, that Allnatt makes me doubt Rosie’s perception. The child is dressed in an old fashioned pinafore “like a home-made Cinderella costume,” has “distress” in her eyes, and moves in “animal-like” manner; Rosie’s daughter, also in the garden, acts as if the girl wasn’t there. Don’t these clues suggest the child may be a ghost? Yet Rosie manages to convince herself that the child is a normal child, and proceeds to walk to the garden to remind her to go back to her mum. I’m now in Allnatt’s grip: the only way to find out who’s right – Rosie or I? – is to read on.
In the next paragraph, Allnatt suddenly reveals by the time Rosie is out in the garden, the child has vanished. At this point, I recall a previous detail about the child: earlier on she was seen by Rosie to be tucking a piece of white cloth into her basket. The house Rosie just moved in was a silk factory in the 19th century. Maybe when the child was alive, she was connected to the factory in some ways? Allnatt gets me hooked by making me feel I’m smarter than Rosie, and by prompting me to play detective and look for clues Rosie herself has missed.
Michelle Ng
英國牛津大學畢業，前《蘋果日報》和《眾新聞》專欄作家，現在身在楓葉國，心繫中國大陸和香港。
聯絡方式： michelleng.coach@proton.me
個人網站： https://michellengwritings.com
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