How do you prepare for an ELAT exam?

The ELAT examination is designed to test the kind of close reading skills which you will develop during the Oxford / Cambridge course; the best way to prepare is to become as comfortable as possible dealing with unseen materials of varying genres, styles, mediums. Each paper will contain six extracts, which are linked in some way by a common theme (for example, mine was about storms –– you can check what kind of themes that have come up before by going through online past papers), but will often differ in such ways as style, genre, form or medium, and may be examples either of drama, prose and/or poetry. The ability to effectively process this amount of material quickly, and then to use two or three extracts to formulate an argument, is a reflection of the kind of research and writing skills necessary when writing essays on a weekly basis in an Oxford / Cambridge degree, and so the best way to prepare is to use materials from past papers and practice analysing passages and developing your ideas into a cohesive structure. It is also very useful to read as widely as possible beforehand, and to practice analysing material as you read, so that you become familiar with a range of styles which may come up as a potential extract. For example, it may be useful to read a novel from a period you may not have come across before, by an author you may not be familiar with; or to read poetry from an earlier, less familiar era, in a more archaic use of English, such as poetry from the 16th-century by Sidney or Shakespeare, as well as more recent material from 19th-21st centuries. It is valuable to have an awareness of the literary canon which extends beyond that of your school curriculum, though that may be a useful place to set off from. With this in mind, it is important to emphasise that the purpose of the ELAT exam is to test close-reading and argument development skills, and not to test knowledge of literature and its historical contexts; you are not expected to know what the extracts are, but rather to analyse their literary qualities, and how their forms, styles and genres contribute to the creation of meaning in relation to the theme in question.