PGT English Literature

What the PGT English exam is

PGT stands for Post Graduate Teacher. A PGT teaches English at the senior secondary level — Classes XI and XII. Because the post carries a postgraduate qualification, the examination is set at a genuinely postgraduate depth, even where the prescribed texts come from the school syllabus.

The basic eligibility across most recruiting bodies is a master's degree in English with the required percentage, along with a B.Ed. The exact figures differ from board to board, so the notification is the only authority worth trusting.

Who conducts it

There is no single national PGT examination. Several bodies recruit separately, each with its own paper:

• KVS — Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan
• NVS — Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti
• DSSSB — Delhi Subordinate Services Selection Board
• UPSESSB — Uttar Pradesh Secondary Education Services Selection Board
• State Public Service Commissions and state school boards

The papers differ in length, marking and weightage. What they share is the subject matter, and that is what this page maps.

How the paper is usually built

Nearly every PGT English paper divides into the same broad parts, whatever the board:

Section	What it tests
Reading Comprehension	Unseen passages — prose, poetry, or factual writing. Inference, tone, vocabulary, and the ability to summarise.
Writing Skills	Letters, notices, reports, articles, speeches, debates — the formal writing a senior school teacher must model.
Applied Grammar	Tenses, voice, narration, transformation, prepositions, agreement, punctuation, idioms and phrases.
Literature	The largest and most decisive section. Details below.
General Section	Some boards add reasoning, general awareness, computer literacy and pedagogy as a separate paper or section.

The literature section in detail

This is where the paper is won or lost, and where a candidate from a strong literature background has a real advantage. Across boards, the coverage runs along these lines:

1. History of English literature

The full sweep from Old English to the present — Old English, the Age of Chaucer, the Renaissance, the Metaphysicals, the Neoclassical Age, the Romantic Movement, the Victorian Age, Modernism, and Postmodernism. Questions tend to test period boundaries, defining texts, and which writer belongs where.

2. Major British writers

Shakespeare carries the most weight — the major tragedies, comedies and the sonnets. Beyond him: Chaucer, Marlowe, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Hardy, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Auden, Golding, Orwell.

3. American literature

Twentieth-century American writing appears regularly — Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Toni Morrison.

4. Indian writing in English

A steadily growing area — Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu, Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, A. K. Ramanujan, R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy.

5. World and postcolonial literature

Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, South Asia and Latin America — Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez.

6. Literary forms, devices and terms

Poetry, prose, drama and fiction as forms; figures of speech; metre and prosody; the sonnet, ode, elegy, ballad, epic, lyric and dramatic monologue; tragedy, comedy, and the terms that describe them.

7. Criticism and movements

Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Aestheticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Feminism, Marxism, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Postcolonialism — with the critics attached to each.

A working method

Three things separate candidates who clear the paper from those who do not.

First, build the timeline before the texts. If you know which age a writer belongs to and what that age valued, a large number of questions answer themselves without recall of specific lines.

Second, treat the school syllabus seriously. Several boards draw directly from NCERT Classes XI and XII, then raise the level of the questions. The texts are familiar; the depth expected is not.

Third, do previous years' papers early rather than last. They show you the weightage no syllabus document will state openly — and the same terms and writers return with striking regularity.

Always download the official notification and syllabus for the specific board you are sitting. Marks, duration, negative marking and prescribed texts vary, and coaching material is not a substitute for the source document.

What you will find here

Notes across every literary age, explained in clear English and in Hinglish, along with practice questions and previous year papers. Start with the age you find weakest — the shelf on the home page is arranged chronologically for exactly that reason.