The English Literature Admissions Test (or ELAT) is a formal English assessment now sat exclusively by students applying for single and joint-honours English courses at Oxford University. This is a ninety-minute online exam for anybody looking to study English Language and Literature, Classics and English, English and Modern Languages, or History and English.
These are popular and rigorous courses but sitting the ELAT need not be a terrifying experience. In fact, it simply tests skills that you’ve been cultivating since at least your GCSEs: the skill of reading slowly, closely, and creatively, and the skill of writing with clarity, purpose, and insight.
The ELAT is designed so that you can do well in it regardless of prior knowledge. This isn’t an exam where you’ll show off how much you already know. Rather, it should be seen as an opportunity to showcase your ability to interpret and reflect on unseen literary texts in a thoughtful, responsive, and convincing manner.
The ELAT test format
The ELAT requires you to write an essay on two unseen texts, comparing and contrasting them in terms of language, form, and style – but also in terms of the ideas they present.
You’ll be given a selection of six short texts relating to the same theme. The texts might be about storms, birds, fathers, or the passing of time. The passages could be from lots of different genres of literature: there will be poems, sections of novels, and scenes from plays. But there might also be extracts from works that are less obviously ‘literary’, such as history books, government reports, sermons, letters, diaries, and essays.
The texts could also span a wide historical range, from the late sixteenth century up to the present day, and you can expect to see texts from familiar and well-known authors (such as Woolf, Dickens or Shakespeare) and from less famous authors. You must pick two of these texts to discuss. It doesn’t matter which two you pick, so long as you find them interesting and have something to say.
How difficult is ELAT?
The ELAT is not designed to be “difficult”; in fact, it is designed so that you can do well regardless of prior knowledge. It is an opportunity to showcase your ability to interpret and reflect on unseen literary texts in a thoughtful, sensitive, and convincing manner.
The ELAT is an old-fashioned test of skill and what used to be called ‘practical criticism’. It’s designed to test:
- the skill of reading slowly, closely, and creatively
- the skill of writing with clarity, purpose, and insight
- and skill of comparing and contrasting literary texts.
There are no “bonus points” for writing about the most challenging text on the exam paper. Rather, you should just pick whichever texts you find most compelling.
Examiners want to see sensitive, nuanced, thoughtful, elegantly written, clearly argued, and well-evidenced essays that shed light on the chosen texts and help us to see them in a new way.
How is ELAT scored?
The ELAT is marked by two separate examiners, each giving a score out of 30. These two scores are then combined to give a total score out of 60. A score of at least 50 is generally needed in order to get an invitation to interview. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule and some successful applicants have scored as low as 45.
Students will be well used to working with what are known as ‘AOs’ and it’s well worth checking out the ELAT marking criteria.
How important is the ELAT?
The ELAT is only one part of an admissions “portfolio” that also includes your academic record, predicted grades, personal statement, submission of written work, school reference - and your interview performance.
That said, the ELAT is an important part of the application because it show cases (a) your independent work and (b) your facility with the key skills of literary study.
How much should you write for the ELAT?
Students with typical handwriting should aim to write between 2.5 to 3 sides of A4. That works out to between 800 and 1200 words. It is important to aim for quality, not quantity, and also to ensure that the essay is well-structured, with a proper conclusion.
Is the ELAT an online test?
Yes. The Oxford admissions test is now computer-based, lasting 90 minutes and sat under timed exam conditions.. You will need to take this at an authorised test centre which in most cases, will be your school or college.
All applicants taking the ELAT will be invited to practise taking the 2022 past paper (or equivalent) online in advance of their test day.
Where can I find past papers for ELAT?
These are available at the ELAT website or via the University of Oxford Faculty of English.
Unfortunately, copyright prevents the examiners from publishing extracts from more recent literary texts, so these are blanked out on the past papers, except for the first and last lines. It is a good idea to look up these extracts in the original texts when you practice so that you have sufficient experience working with contemporary literature.
Tips for the ELAT
A few tips for how to write an excellent ELAT response
Do:
- Choose the texts that you like best.
The ELAT will feature a mix of famous ‘canonical’ writers and other authors that are less well-known. Don’t feel obliged to choose the ‘big names’; don’t feel obliged to choose older texts. Play to your strengths: if you are particularly good at writing about, say, drama, then choose play extracts if possible.
- Take time to read and plan carefully.
It is always better to plan long and start writing later than everyone else than to find yourself running out of ideas halfway through the writing process. By planning correctly you will give yourself the chance to notice subtler aspects of the texts – and not forget anything that occurred to you on the first or subsequent read-throughs. Some students employ up to 20 percent of their time planning comparative answers.
- Make an argument.
Advance an argument in your ELAT essay, rather than just making directionless commentary. Establish a thesis, something that connects the texts - a big idea, philosophy, mood, theme or notion, or a mix of the above – and set this out in your introduction. An ‘ideas’ thesis can and should be linked to any technical – literary - features you observe, such as narrative viewpoint, lexis, types of speech and imagery.
“Both authors suggest the power discrepancy between men and women and both use symbolism to do this.”
- Will you choose to make your comparison in ‘blocks’ – i.e. treat one text first, then another? Or take an integrated approach, where you juggle the features and ideas of both texts within the same paragraph, or in alternating paragraphs.
- To have two or three main points for comparison is a good guide, exploring aspects of a theme or idea – but relentlessly exploring technical aspects at the same time.
- Write with style and elegance – but clearly.
It is one thing to write something bold and beautiful (‘The poem reveals the tragedy of life’s transience while also celebrating its manifold beauties, no matter how fleeting’) but you need to earn this through solid use of evidence -and ‘say it how it is’ when you need. Say what you see – this is often the complex bit as these texts will be complex and require you to utilise a wide ranging critical vocabulary – and don’t show off.
- Tune into what is unusual.
It is always fruitful to examine what is unusual, distinctive, striking, and perhaps even downright odd about a text. If there is something strange about the passage or poem, don’t be afraid to talk about it. You’ll likely get much more interesting insights from this than you would from something that is fairly commonplace.
- Trust your intuitions, but check everything.
The ELAT mark scheme does not have a list of points that you are supposed to ‘get’. Instead, the examiners are prepared to be surprised and enlightened by your ideas. You might even show them something that completely changes their mind! This means that you need to trust your intuitions. You might, for instance, have a hunch that the text is being subtly sarcastic or that another text is being a bit coy or reticent about its subject matter. You might feel that the speaker is being disingenuous or untruthful. In another text, you might feel that there is a subtle sense of admiration and awe being created. You shouldn’t disregard these hunches! Instead, you should check them. See if you can trace your feelings back to the text. Patiently re-read until you can pinpoint the precise thing that created this feeling in you. Perhaps it was an unusual word choice or the syntax or the sounds of the words involved. Working like this will help you avoid any worry about ‘making a stretch.’ If you have traced your feelings back to their source in the text, then you can be confident about discussing this in your essay. Of course, it might also be the case that you try to trace the feeling back but then realise that you misread something or you can’t quite find what caused it. No problem! You can just re-read and find something else to talk about. In other cases, it may be that your initial intuition needs refining: perhaps you realise that the text is expressing grief, but that there is also a bittersweetness to it that makes the grief bearable, even delightful.
Don’t:
- Don’t leave your sense of humour behind.
While it might be a tall order to expect you to laugh in an exam, it’s important to recognise when an author is using irony or satire or hyperbole to comic effect. You can drastically misread a text if you miss the fact that it isn’t being entirely serious.
- Mine ambiguity
If the text is genuinely ambiguous, there’s nothing wrong with expressing some uncertainty about its meaning: it might be that the writer wants to confuse or disorientate the reader. This might be the case, for example, in a poem about grief or loss or mental illness, so you should be prepared to investigate this.
- Don’t rely on clichés
Every written text – from prize-winning novels to instruction manuals for microwaves – need to ‘engage the reader’ in some way. The observation that a writer uses a certain technique in order to ‘engage the reader’ is too bland, too obvious, and too general to have any use or explanatory power in your essays. The same goes for comments about a text being ‘accessible’ or ‘relatable’ to the reader: these aren’t nearly specific or interesting enough to warrant inclusion.
- Don’t rely on jargon.
A good knowledge of literary terms is useful, but don’t think that they are substitute for perceptive critical analysis. The examiners will not be impressed by a checklist of technical observations that have no relation to your overall argument or the point of each paragraph. Yes, it might be true that the novelist uses synecdoche or that the poem is an example of the Petrarchan sonnet, but so what? What is the relevance of that observation to what you are trying to say about these texts?
- Don’t reduce texts to generalities of genre or time period.
Don’t be too quick to lump a text in with a historical trend or generic commonplace. It doesn’t necessarily tell us much to say that ‘the passage is an example of Renaissance humanist thinking’ or ‘this trope is a staple of science fiction’. Better to look at what is distinctive about the passage. Tell us about this text. Be as specific as you can.
- Don’t forget to notice contrasts.
While the ELAT is a comparative exercise, this doesn’t mean you’re supposed to only point out similarities. Instead, think of comparison as a methodology: when we put two texts side by side, we begin to notice things about each that wouldn’t be apparent if we hadn’t done the comparison. The contrasts between the texts are often especially fruitful to discuss because, once again, they enable you to tune into nuances and idiosyncrasies of the texts you’re discussing.
Preparation for the ELAT
Aside from doing practice papers there are a few things that you can do to prepare:
- Read widely, actively, and slowly. The best thing you can do in order to prepare is to read a wide variety of literary texts in an active manner. That means reading with a pencil in hand, scribbling in the margins, underlining words and phrases that strike you, and keeping notes in a reading journal of your ideas. It might also mean branching out from the usual novels, poems, and plays to look at essays, religious texts, memoirs, philosophical texts, political tracts, and song lyrics. You might also investigate texts from time periods or countries that you haven’t explored before. There is no ‘set syllabus’ here: you just want to make sure that you’re able to respond to the wide variety of material that comes up.
- Read critical works and learn from their style. Reading the work of other literary critics can help you develop your own prose style. Notice how the writers you read construct arguments, use quotations, and conduct analysis. Chances are you’ll find a few stylistic elements that you can emulate in your own work. You might also notice things that don’t work so well, and which you can then avoid. Here are a few general texts that might be of interest, but really you can just follow your interests:
- Literary Theory: An Introduction, by Terry Eagleton
- Criticism by Catherine Belsey
- Finders Keepers, by Seamus Heaney
- Seven Types of Ambiguity and Argufying by William Empson
- The Force of Poetry and Essays in Appreciation by Christopher Ricks
- Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Literature and Philosophy by Martha Nussbaum
- Understand the rudiments of poetic analysis. John Lennard’s Poetry Handbook and Philip Robert’s How Poetry Works are two really helpful guides. I also recommend The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland. But remember: while knowing the jargon can be helpful, it is definitely not a substitute for creativity and sensitivity.
Tutors for the ELAT
Keystone has a range of specialist tutors who can assist students approaching university aptitude tests for Oxford and Cambridge University including the ELAT. Our English Literature Admissions Test tutors have extensive experience with the ELAT, both through having successfully sat the test and then gone on to tutor it. Contact us to find out more.