This page lists what we actually have for OCR GCSE English Literature J352. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.
The question that is half unknowable
Most English Literature revision rests on a comfortable assumption: the student knows the text, so revision means knowing it better.
OCR breaks that assumption on purpose. Component 02 requires a comparison between a poem from the studied cluster and an unseen poem. The candidate has lived with one of them for a year and meets the other for the first time with a clock running.
This is a genuinely different demand, and it fails in a predictable way. A student who has revised by memorising what their teacher said about the studied poem arrives with a set of finished conclusions and nothing to do with them, because the conclusions were about a pairing that does not exist yet.
Two activities work on that specific join. Studied vs Unseen is about holding a studied poem loosely enough to compare it with anything: its methods, its attitude, its shape, rather than its agreed interpretation. Studied plus Unseen works the reading order for a poem met cold, so that the first two minutes produce something usable instead of panic.
Neither can supply the unseen poem. Both make the arrival of one less catastrophic.
Method, not text, in ten of the fourteen
The set texts a department teaches vary, and a resource built on particular novels is useless to everyone else.
Ten of these fourteen activities are about how to write rather than about what happened. Tracking a theme through a whole text. Building a quotation bank that is small enough to learn and flexible enough to use. Deciding between an extract question and a discursive one, which is a real choice in this specification and a frequently bad one. Writing about context so that it explains something rather than sitting in a paragraph of its own. Tracking a character's arc rather than listing their traits.
Two of them handle the extract question directly, one for the novel and one for Shakespeare, and the Shakespeare one is the better of the pair.
The consequence is that most of this page is usable whichever texts you teach, which is unusual for literature and is why the set is worth a look even if the poetry cluster is not yours.
The marks students give away
One activity is on technical accuracy in essays.
It is the least glamorous thing here and probably the highest return. OCR awards marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in this subject. Those marks do not require a single additional idea about the text, and they are reliably the ones a mid-range candidate leaves behind.
At twenty-four minutes it is one of the longest activities in the set, and it is the one to set for a class whose essays are full of thinking and short of sentences.
How it compares with AQA
Our AQA GCSE English Literature activities take a different shape, because AQA's specification names components rather than texts, and that page describes the worked-example problem it creates.
OCR's structure gives a revision resource more to hold on to: a defined poetry cluster, a defined comparison, and a clear division between the text-specific and the transferable.
Using them
The three activities embedded further down are playable here without an account.
The lists below group by classroom use, worked out from what each activity contains. For how each is meant to be run, see ready-to-run revision activities. To put several in front of one class in order, build a sprint and share one link. Everything else, by subject and board, is on the revision pages.
What this page does not do
It does not supply unseen poems. The method is here and the practice material is your department's or OCR's own papers, which are in our past paper archive, free and unaltered.
It does not teach your set texts. Four activities touch the studied poetry; the rest are method.
It does not mark essays. The written tasks run eighty to a hundred and forty words with a structure to follow, and a human still reads them.
It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.