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How many quotations should students learn?

AQA’s examiners say a reference does not have to be a quotation, and they are wary of quotations learned with the analysis attached. Students still need a small set of short, exact quotations from across the whole text. Here is the evidence, and how many we ask for.

Long read · 11 minute read

AQA’s GCSE English Literature exams have been closed book since they were first sat in summer 2017. The specification puts it in one line: “All assessments are closed book: any stimulus materials required will be provided as part of the assessment.” The Macbeth and A Christmas Carol questions print an extract, and the anthology question prints one poem. Everything else a student quotes comes from memory, including every line of An Inspector Calls, which has no extract at all.

That is why quotation lists exist, and AQA’s examiners have written about them in report after report. Their reports from 2019 to 2025 say a good deal about which quotations to learn, and memory research helps with how to learn them.

A reference does not have to be a quotation

The first assessment objective asks students to “use textual references, including quotations, to support and illustrate interpretations”. A reference is the wider term. AQA’s report on Paper 2 in June 2022 said: “Many students understood that a reference does not mean a quotation and that, as long as they were using the text to respond to the task, they were addressing AO1.” The same summer, writing about the poetry paper (one of the options that year), the examiners reminded teachers that “the word ‘quotations’ is not in the mark scheme; rather it is ‘references’.”

In 2023 the Paper 1 report spelled out what else counts: a reference “could be identifying a character, an incident, an image or something else which is relevant to the point being made”. The Paper 2 report for the same year was blunter still: “there is no requirement to include direct quotations in any part of this qualification”.

So a student who writes that Scrooge turns down his nephew’s invitation to Christmas dinner in Stave 1 has used a reference. None of this means quotations are out of favour. The 2019 report on Paper 1 found that students “have successfully used references as opposed to direct quotations to illustrate their understanding of the text”, and in the same report praised “plenty of impressive use of direct quotations”.

Why exact words still matter

A paraphrase shows that a student knows the text. It gives them nothing to analyse. The AO2 marks go to the writer’s methods, and a method lives in the words. A student who remembers that Marley made his own chain can make a point about Marley. A student who remembers “I wear the chain I forged in life” can also zoom in on “forged”, the verb that makes Marley the maker of his own punishment. The 2023 report on Paper 1 asks for references “that enable students to demonstrate their appreciation of the writer’s methods”.

The examiners also want them short. The 2023 report on Paper 2 tells students: “A well-selected word or phrase from the text is often much more effective than a long direct quotation.” A short phrase is easier to remember exactly, and it fits inside a sentence of the student’s own. The 2022 report on the poetry paper noticed the difference that makes: “Increasingly, students are able to integrate references into their line of discussion which works so much better than ‘tacked on’ references.”

What goes wrong with long lists

The problem the reports keep describing is the quotation that arrives with its analysis already written. The 2022 report on Paper 2 drew the line: “There is a difference between the response that is peppered with extraneous, ‘remembered and revised’ direct quotations and the response that selects an appropriate moment, or word, or phrase, to exemplify a good point that they want to make”.

In 2025 the Paper 1 report found that “Some responses relied on pre-learned analysis of a quotation, often that did not fit with what the question was asking.” A phrase learned with one reading attached tends to get used for that reading, whether it fits the question or not. The same report warned against building a reading of a character on one word lifted out of context. Its example was Macbeth’s “bloody instructions”, which, the examiners pointed out, “is primarily about his fears and anxieties about killing Duncan, not his innate violence.”

The 2025 report on Paper 2 saw both ends of the problem. It was glad to see students use other references as well as “the usual ‘high-frequency’ quotations that we have come to know and expect over the years”, and it found that “In the lower levels students tended to drop in quotations without pausing to explain the precise inference or significance before moving into analysis.” And the 2023 report on Paper 2 told students directly: “We have written the mark scheme in the context of this exam being closed book and don’t expect you to memorise chunks of the text”. The examiners had also noticed where some of the lists come from: “We also know that some revision sites focus a lot of time on giving you ‘the ten quotes you need to know about Text X to pass this exam’.”

Getting a word wrong

The examiners are relaxed about small slips. The 2022 report on the poetry paper told students: “Don’t worry if you can’t remember exact quotations. It’s fine to pinpoint parts of a poem and it’s also understandable if you slightly misquote because the examiner will get the idea.” The 2023 report on Paper 2 suggests “paraphrasing the things characters say if you are not sure and can’t remember exactly”.

One distinction is worth teaching. A slip in the words around a point costs little. A slip in the word being analysed costs the analysis: a student who remembers Marley’s chain as made in life has nothing left to zoom in on. So the words to learn exactly are the short ones that carry a method, and the rest of the text can be held as moments.

What memory research adds

Learning a list is a memory problem. The Education Endowment Foundation’s 2021 review of cognitive science in the classroom found that “There is evidence to suggest that spacing teaching and learning of material over time and between intervals of unrelated content has the potential to improve pupil learning.” On quizzing, it concluded: “When compared to no recap activity at all, the evidence for using quizzes is moderate and generally positive.” It is careful about how much of this was tested in ordinary lessons. Of the studies that compared retrieval practice with restudy, it says: “Only one of the 21 studies was delivered by regular class teachers.” Our long read on retrieval practice and the Do Now goes into the detail.

For quotations the practical message is plain. Learn a few at a time, come back to them over weeks with other work in between, and test them by writing them out from memory. In our A Christmas Carol scheme, “decrease the surplus population” is met in Lesson 2 and comes back in the Do Nows of Lessons 4, 6, 12, 13, 15 and 22. Knowing the text well does some of the work. The 2022 report on the poetry paper found that “Many students remember references and quotations exceptionally well, seemingly born of familiarity with the poems, rather than learning by rote.” A student who knows the whole story also has somewhere to put each line, which is one of the arguments in our long read on reading the whole text.

One quotation, several questions

The 2023 report on Paper 1 picked out one use of references in particular: “One particularly fruitful use of references is where they are paired across the text.” Its Macbeth example set details from the Act 5 extract beside “dearest partner” from Macbeth’s letter in Act 1 Scene 5 and “chuck” from Act 3 Scene 2, which gave students “a way into Macbeth’s evolving relationship with his wife”.

A short quotation at one end of a pair can answer more questions than its length suggests. Take “decrease the surplus population”. AQA’s 2019 question on A Christmas Carol asked how Dickens “uses the ghosts to help Scrooge change his attitudes and behaviour”. The 2023 question asked about “the effects of greed”. The phrase works for both. In Stave 1 it is Scrooge’s answer to the gentlemen collecting for the poor, and a measure of what greed has done to him. In Stave 3 the Ghost of Christmas Present turns it on him, “If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population”, and Scrooge “hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.” In our model answer pack, the same four words appear in the grade 8 to 9 answers to all three A Christmas Carol questions: one on family, one on poverty and responsibility, and one on the supernatural.

Macbeth works the same way. The Captain’s report that Macbeth “unseam’d him from the nave to the chops” (Act 1 Scene 2) suits a question on violence, and AQA set one in 2019: how far Shakespeare presents Macbeth “as a violent character”. In 2023 the question asked about Macbeth “as a male character who changes during the play”, and the report found that “‘hacked’ and ‘unseamed’ worked well as examples of brutal graphic imagery”. Students paired the Act 1 image with Macbeth’s “I’ll fight till from my bones my flesh be hack’d” in Act 5 Scene 3. Some argued that he never changes. Others argued that the violence stays the same while its moral direction shifts.

An Inspector Calls needs this most, because there is no extract to lean on. Mr Birling’s “I can’t accept any responsibility” (Act 1) will serve a question on Birling, on responsibility or on the older generation. Set beside Sheila’s “I’ll never, never do it again to anybody”, it shows the two generations splitting before Act 1 is over.

How we chose our lists

The teacher handbook for each of our three set-text schemes has a knowledge bank listing the quotations students should be able to use from memory by the end of the unit: 15 for A Christmas Carol, 16 for Macbeth and 16 for An Inspector Calls. The revision workbooks have 20, 20 and 15, and most of the handbook lines are among them. The Power and Conflict workbook has 30, two for each of the fifteen poems, because the second poem in the comparison question can be any poem in the cluster.

Four things shape the lists:

  • They cover the whole text. The A Christmas Carol workbook list has seven quotations from Stave 1, which sets up everything Scrooge has to unlearn, and three or four from each later stave. The Macbeth list runs from the witches’ “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” to Malcolm’s “this dead butcher, and his fiend-like queen” in the play’s last scene.
  • They are short. More than half of the lines in the three set-text workbooks are eight words or fewer, and every Power and Conflict quotation is.
  • Each one does more than one job. The An Inspector Calls workbook keeps to 15 lines because the play is in copyright and the paper prints no extract, so each line has to work for more than one character or theme.
  • They include both ends of the echoes Dickens and Shakespeare build in: “solitary as an oyster” in Stave 1 and “A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still” in Stave 2; Lady Macbeth’s “A little water clears us of this deed” in Act 2 Scene 2 and “Out, damned spot! out, I say!” in Act 5 Scene 1.

The Feedback Loop kits give students the same advice. The tip on the first A Christmas Carol kit is to keep quotations to three to six words. The tip on the last is to prove that Scrooge has changed by setting a Stave 5 line beside its Stave 1 echo: “I have come to dinner” beside the “Good afternoon” he repeats to Fred.

For A Christmas Carol, our free quotation a day for December spreads 24 quotations from all five staves across 1 to 24 December, one a day, some with a question that links back to an earlier stave.

So how many?

None of the AQA reports we read gives a number, and the advice in them points to a short one. Our answer for each of the three set texts is 15 to 20 short quotations, spread across the whole text and learned exactly, plus a stock of moments students can describe in their own words. For the anthology, at least two short quotations for each poem. Each quotation needs practising in use as well as in recall, and a longer list leaves less time for that.

What we would do:

  • Start with the quotations that pair across the text, and teach both ends together.
  • Keep most of them under eight words, and make sure students know which word in each carries the method.
  • Add three or four a week, and bring each one back in Do Nows over the following weeks.
  • Practise each quotation against at least two past questions: one quotation, two questions, a sentence of analysis for each.
  • Teach the safety net. When the exact words go, describe the moment and say what it shows.
  • Check accuracy where it counts, on the word students will zoom in on.

For students, the hub has quotation pages for A Christmas Carol, Macbeth and An Inspector Calls, and a guide to learning quotations so they stay learned.

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