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Student Workshops

The Nuts and Bolts of Textual Analysis for English Language A Level

Getting used to the demands of textual analysis at A Level is often a major hurdle for students. With English Language A Level, there’s a new technical vocabulary that needs to be learnt, and there’s often a degree of rustiness over the basics of grammar.

Aim

• To introduce new students (and perhaps new teachers) of A Level English Language to key frameworks and linguistic methods, using a range of written and spoken texts as a starting point
• To equip...

This collection of tried and tested classroom ideas is intended to help add variety, particularly to the A Level classroom. 

There are things that need to be practised, in order for students to develop the requisite skills, but it’s still important to ring the changes, for our own sake at least as much as for the students’!

The idea is for this collection to provide ways of meeting those constantly repeating needs with as much variety as possible.  All ideas also indicate where and how differentiation can be planned in, or how the ideas...

by the Super Baby Project

Guides to poetry by Duffy, Armitage and Pre-1914 Poets

Task: You will work in pairs to produce a revision guide to one of the following poems (I will tell you which one). It must be suitable for use by other Year 11s. The aim of this is both to help you to revise the poems for your English Literature examination, and for you, as a class, to produce a pack of revision guides. This task must be complete by the end of today’s lesson.

Poems to cover:

Duffy
Anne Hathaway
Before You Were Mine
Havisham
Stealing

Armitage
Mother, any distance
...

This teaching guide for students of higher ability is designed as a self-contained unit which can be used to produce the AQA A GCSE Pre-1914 Prose coursework. It can also be used as a springboard for Original Writing.

A Modest Proposal is an excellent alternative for the more able students to the rather well-worn (though useful) Pre-1914 Prose path of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Great Expectations and Pride and Prejudice. Its blistering satire allows students to produce some quite subtle and impressive analyses.

• The AQA A Pre-1914 coursework...

Poetry from Different Cultures

This teaching guide for high-ability students is designed as a self-contained unit which can be used to prepare for the AQA A Paper 2 Section A question on the poetry from different cultures in the Anthology.

Let us remind ourselves of the assessment objectives addressed by this section. Candidates are required to demonstrate their ability to:

(i) read, with insight and engagement, making appropriate references to texts and developing and sustaining interpretations of them;

(iv) select material appropriate to...

Compare the ways an event is described in ‘Blessing’ with the ways an event is described in ‘Island Man’.

Imtiaz Dharker and Grace Nichols are both clearly concerned with issues of identity and clashing cultures when exploring the main events in their poems ‘Blessing’ and ‘Island Man’. Despite the fact that Dharker originates from Pakistan, and Nichols from Guyana, each seems able to use similar poetic techniques to get to grips with wider issues beyond the apparently mundane occurrences in their poetry.

The concept of identity is...

Titus Andronicus

This teaching guide for higher ability students is designed as a self-contained unit which can be used to produce the AQA A GCSE Shakespeare coursework.

• The unit uses one of the lesser-known and less critically-acclaimed Shakespeare plays in order to encourage a high-quality and truly original response.
• The AQA A Shakespeare coursework is what is termed as a ‘cross-over’ piece; therefore, if you are using it for assessment for both English and English Literature GCSEs (the most common approach), you need to be able to...

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Romeo & Juliet

This teaching guide for high-ability students is designed as a self-contained unit which can be used to produce the AQA A GCSE Shakespeare coursework.

The AQA A Shakespeare coursework is what is termed as a ‘cross-over’ piece; therefore, if you are using it for assessment for both English and English Literature GCSEs (the most common approach), you need to be able to address the assessment objectives for both.

Let us remind ourselves of these:

English

Candidates are required to demonstrate their ability to:

(i) read,...

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Tess of the d’Urbervilles in context

In an ideal world, we would study the whole text with all our students for AS and A2 English Literature. However, we realise that, given the pressures of A level study and teaching, this is not always possible. Therefore, it can be useful to teach using carefully selected extracts which are relevant to the module being studied. This can necessitate just as much preparation on the part of the teacher, who must read the whole text and locate suitable extracts. This guide aims to facilitate this process by...

Associated Resources

• Of Mice and Men Revision Guide on Loneliness.doc

This revision guide takes you through the central theme of loneliness in the novella “Of Mice and Men”.

Questions at GCSE often focus on this theme.

Consider the central theme of loneliness in the novel, Of Mice and Men.

Where and when is the novel set? Look on the first line of the first page. The action is set around Soledad. What does soledad mean in Spanish? Do you think it is a coincidence that this placename is chosen to set the tale?

Who are the two central...

A Pre C20th GCSE Assignment on Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Speaking & Listening and/or Written Response

I often get asked how to make Pre-Twentieth Century texts more accessible. This assignment has been used with a number of classes with children with statements of SEN and the students have enjoyed it. I hope you can make use of it too.

It can be used in conjunction with the full novel, the full chapters and/or the film version of the novel. The full chapters are available as a separate download and can be used on a whiteboard or...

Points to consider when assessing Chapter One of “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens.

Some ideas to get you started…

• What makes this opening chapter a good read? It might be useful to colour code your sheets with a highlighter pen!
• Narrative technique – first person narrative. What effect does this have on you, the reader? What does first person have that third person misses and vice versa?
• Setting (Where is the story set?)

The setting is very important in Great Expectations in a number of key scenes. The varied settings...

The narrative technique employed by Emily Bronte is both complex and beguiling.

There are two obvious narrators in Lockwood and Nelly Dean but several other elements are incorporated within the novel to channel the story.

Bronte ensured that the action as a whole is presented in the form of an intricate collection of written fragments or verbal eyewitness accounts by characters who have all had some part to play in the story they unfold.

The author employs a general Rahmenerzählung approach to the narrative with Lockwood’s tale...

Read the LAST paragraph of this article FIRST, then go back to the beginning.

• Highlight or put a ring around issues which relate to the characters Mickey and Edward.

OR

• Write ten bullet points which sum up this article.

OR

• Draft a short reply to Philip Webster outlining your ideas on this topic.

The Times
January 12, 2009

Children of poorer families face as big a hill as ever

Philip Webster, Political Editor

A child’s chances of success still depend largely on the background and earnings of his or her parents despite the billions...

Getting your teeth into a text!

Look closely at the newspaper article on Heather Mills.

Heather’s rants wrecking case

Got the wind up ... Mucca with papers at GMTV yesterday

By VICTORIA NEWTON Showbiz Editor
Published: 09 Nov 2007, The Sun

HEATHER Mills was last night looking for new divorce lawyers – after the top firm she hired “fired” her over her bizarre TV war against Sir Paul McCartney.

Lady Mucca, 39 – who went on GMTV AGAIN yesterday – was phoned by legal eagles Mishcon de Reya and told they could no longer represent...

An English Media Assignment

Film Review by ………………..

Blade Runner

Look at the advertisement for the film below. Who are the central characters and who are they played by?

Which other characters in the film caught your eye? Why?

What type or genre of film is Blade Runner? You can look at the information below which was taken from the DVD.

Who directed the film? This person has made some changes to the original film that was shown in the cinemas in 1982. What do you think the director has done to it?

The film was based on a...

A Scaffolded Essay Guide to Lord of the Flies

At the beginning of the novel, Ralph stands on his head and celebrates the fact that there are no adult survivors.

This is a dream come true. How does this dream turn into a nightmare?

It is true that at the beginning of the novel that in conversation with Piggy that Ralph celebrates the fact that there are no adults on the island. I think he…

Within hours of celebrating the lack of adult supervision. Ralph assumes the role of…

The dream really turns into a night mare when…

Another key...

Thinking of changing to Cambridge iGCSE for English Language?

Since this specification was approved for inclusion in league tables (provided that an English Literature qualification is also taken in KS4), more and more UK centres are opting for it. This guide will explore some of the reasons for this, and offer comparisons to the standard English Language GCSEs.

Please note that the specification has recently been revised, and this guide deals with the version to be assessed from 2015. A section at the end will explain the differences from...

1. Introduction to ELLA3 Revision Guide
2. ELLA3 Answering the Comparative Analysis Question
3. ELLA3 Comparative Analysis Question
4. ELLA3 Comparative Analysis Exemplar Response
5. ELLA3 Answering the Adaptation Question
6. ELLA3 Adaptation Exemplar Cupcakes Response
7. ELLA3 Adaptation Exemplar House Somewhere Response
8. ELLA3 Adaptation Checklist

This pack is to be used in conjunction with the ELLA3 paper set in Jan 2013 (the first with the new set sections in Section B), currently available on eAQA under ‘secure key materials’. It will...

click on image to enlarge

Specifications and Assessment Objectives

AQA English Literature A A2 Unit 3 Reading for Meaning: Love through the Ages Examination

Content

Candidates should read at least three texts in order to prepare for a paper which will contain unprepared passages for close study, comparison and critical commentary.

The topic for this unit is Love Through the Ages. ‘Love’ will include romantic love but will not be restricted to that...

Kate Chopin

Background

Kate Chopin, Katherine O’Flaherty (February 8, 1850 — August 22, 1904) was an American writer of short stories and novels. Most of her stories are set in Louisiana with prominent female characters in her writing.

She wrote for some very well-known magazines such as Vogue, Atlantic Monthly and The Century Magazine and the public enjoyed her short stories. Her two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899) were given different reactions by her audience; people barely commented on At Fault but The Awakening was...

Teacher’s Note

This guide has been tested successfully with students and gives them ways for them to develop a much deeper response to literature, with a particular, but not exclusive, focus on poetry. It also shows how to analyse at the levels of form, structure and language – the first two of which seem to cause near universal difficulties.

• Throughout this guide, a past exam-style question based on the play Macbeth has been used to illustrate ideas, but these have been written in a way that will allow you easily to transfer the idea to any other exam text, whether another ‘Gothic’ text or Pastoral.

• To achieve a high grade in your exam answer, one major precondition exists:
  • That you know your text well.

If that condition has been met, through classroom and personal study along with research via the Internet or other study guides, then this guide should help you achieve the...

1. Introduction to ENGA3 Revision Guide
2. ENGA3 Answering the Language Change Question
3. ENGA3 Language Change Question June 2012
4. ENGA3 Language Change Question June 2012 Exemplar Response
5. ENGA3 Answering the Language Variation Question
6. ENGA3 Language Variation Question June 2012
7. ENGA3 Language Variation Question June 2012 Exemplar Response
8. ENGA3 Answering the Discourses Question
9. ENGA3 Discourses Question June 2012
10. ENGA3 Discourses Question June 2012 Exemplar Response
11. ENGA3 Exam Practice Feedback

This pack is to be used in...

1. Introduction to ENGA1 Revision Guide
2. ENGA1 Answering the Mode Question
3. ENGA1 Mode Question June 2012
4. ENGA1 Mode Question June 2012 Exemplar Response
5. ENGA1 Mode Analysis Assessment Reminders
6. ENGA1 Answering the CLA Question
7. ENGA1 CLA Question June 2012
8. ENGA1 CLA Question June 2012 Exemplar Response

This pack is to be used in conjunction with the ENGA1 paper set in June 2012, currently available on e-aqa under ‘secure key materials’. It will support exam preparation and practice in a structured and scaffolded way.

Although...

June 2013

Lancaster University A Level English Language Teachers Day Conference, 21 June 2013

http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/event/4235

NATE Conference, Stratford-upon-Avon, Friday June 28, 2013 to Sunday June 30, 2013

http://www.nate.org.uk/index.php?page=86&event=87

July 2013

Reading University A/AS English Language Teachers INSET, Monday 8th, Tuesday 9th and Wednesday 10th and Thursday 11th July 2013

http://www.reading.ac.uk/epu/inset/

Background

H.G. (Herbert George) Wells was born on September 21st 1866 and died in 1946, a year after WW2 ended. He came from a working class background but thanks to a small inheritance, his parents ran a hardware shop in Kent but this became financially insolvent and a burden on the family.  His own background is what inspired him to write in the genres he did – entertaining stories that, through their absorbing often futuristic plots allowed him to comment, convincingly, on issues he felt needed addressing in his own society. He was a...

1. Studying For The Exam
2. Examples From Literature
3. About The Exam
4. Further Reading
5. The Examination

Studying For The Exam

The title of this AQA A2 Unit is Reading for Meaning – Love through the Ages. It is worth taking a moment to consider the significance of the title. What are your thoughts? What ‘meaning’ exactly is the exam asking you to elicit? Is your interpretation of what a text means necessarily the same as someone else’s?

“Meaning” is created when language works to signify a response in...

What follows is a small set of samples, exemplars and resources that is intended to suggest ways of providing meaningful feedback advice to students in a time and effort efficient way – as well as helping students to make good use of it.

It’s all too easy to assume that the only way we can help students with coursework drafts, or with mock exams, is to correct everything we can get away with (and in some cases, more than that) and therefore to show them the ‘right’ way. At the same time, we know really that getting the students to work on...

1. ‘Burt’s Chips’ Textual Analysis PowerPoint

• Burts Crisps.pptx

2. Notes to Accompany ‘Burt’s Chips’ PowerPoint

The PowerPoint and ideas contained in these notes have been used successfully to introduce students to the linguistic methods or “frameworks” needed as a part of the AQA English Language course; however, the ideas contained here and in the PowerPoint are easily adaptable and entirely applicable to other A Level language courses as well as the combined English Language and Literature courses.

Slide 1 and General Notes

The...

Overview

• Accent & Dialect starters for A Level English Language lessons
• Key Sociolinguistic Studies into Variation
• Key Linguistic Concepts

Starters for A Level English Language: Accent and Dialect

A simple UK Geography test can be a fun starter for a lesson featuring particular UK varieties. It’s worth laminating a half class set of A3 outlines of the British Isles for this. Students work in pairs and either are given place names on cards to place appropriately (possibly with Blu-tak as well, so work can be held up to show the class) or a...

Gender, Media Representation and Power

This fairly old ‘riddle’ is a brilliant starter for the topic of gender, especially if students are not aware that the lesson will be focused on gender, so that they are not thinking along those lines already.  It’s my favourite way to start a unit of work on gender!

Some students will probably know the answer.  I find they can be fairly easily encouraged to keep it to themselves so as not to spoil the fun.  It works best projected on the board, with students writing down their answers secretly onto mini...

Spoken Language

Note that some of the starters listed in the ‘Language and Power’ guide focus on spoken language, particularly referencing status differences and politeness.

It can be interesting to ask students to draft a set of rules for conversations before studying speech in any depth. These can easily be drawn up in pairs and then tested against recorded conversations or transcripts. In some ways, it’s good for students to see that they can use their existing, ‘commonsense’ knowledge of language and yet, at the same time, it...

OCR AS Unit F661: Poetry and Prose 1800-1945 (Closed Text)

The focus of this section is the study of a prose set text from the period 1800-1945. There is a choice of two questions on each set text and candidates answer one question on the text they have studied.

Candidates should be able to:

• respond to a proposition offered in the question demonstrating understanding of the text in relation to the view presented;
• explore how themes and issues are presented, taking into account the effects of language, form and structure.

Teaching Ideas

1. Introduction
2. The Withered Arm
3. The Son’s Veto
4. Tony Kytes, The Arch-Deceiver
5. Absent-mindedness in a Parish Choir
6. The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion
7. The Distracted Preacher

This guide has been written with a focus on AQA Unit 4, Section B (‘Approaching Shakespeare and the English Literary Heritage’); however, Hardy’s stories are popular and the guide will be useful for any exam board specification.

In the AQA unit specifically, candidates will need to read texts from the so-called...

How do we address people? is a useful starter at an early stage in considering power and spoken language. Students can be asked to think of as many different terms of address as possible in a minute, or can be encouraged to think of different contexts and relationships and the relevant terms of address for these, perhaps with a three or five minute time limit.

Who has the power? can be a very effective starter to encourage students to use their intuition to determine who is more powerful from their speech. This can be good for encouraging...

Associated Resources

• Improving Your Analyses.pptx

Some activities focused on specific frameworks, perhaps especially phonology and grammar, would also be appropriate starters for Child Language lessons, and in the ‘general starters’ section, some of the word game starters could be used to revise or refresh key terms for the topic.

Broad discussion questions can make great starters: simply display one on the board, or hand out a few on cards and let them think and explore. Possibilities for CLA lessons include:

• What do you need to learn in order to use language?
• Some say that language is...

What’s this? is a great starter in the early stages of studying new words.  Simply collect five very recent new words that are currently not widely used.  (Internet articles on new words are a great source of these words that are not yet in everyday usage). These can be displayed on a slide for students to note down (in a fixed time) what they think they mean.  This can easily be extended into the next phase of the lesson by selecting words all formed by a single process, e.g. all blends, to enable you to shift into teaching that process.

...

This collection of lesson starters for A Level English Literature complement the collection of ‘ice breakers’ and general English starters for broad recapping ideas, word games, creative writing starters, essay skills, general terms activities and skill builders. See A Level English Starters.

General discussion prompts are useful as broad starters once in a while. Try one of these quotations to get the class thinking:

• “Literature adds to reality. It does not simply describe it.” C. S. Lewis
• “Poetry is the best words in the best...

Many of these suggestions can work as interesting ways to introduce a concept, with the actual name or ‘label’ of the idea brought in afterwards as a follow-up; or they can be effective starters to recap and consolidate terms learnt in a previous session.

All-purpose terminology revision starter: students have a fixed amount of time, e.g. one minute, to note down as many terms as they can recall within a particular linguistic ‘framework’ category. A level of challenge can be added by having students mark their own or each others’...

This collection of suggestions includes ice-breaker or ‘getting to know you’ ideas which are especially suitable for a new class and some broadly ‘English’ lesson starters suitable for either English Language or Literature (or the combined English Language and Literature A Level) lessons, and some specific topic-related ideas. The focus here is on suitable starters for A Level classes, as starters for lower levels and younger ages are more readily available.

Ice Breakers

Human Bingo is an old favourite which can be quite easily given...

Dr David George has lectured both nationally and internationally on the education of gifted and talented children and is the author of Young Gifted and Bored, his most recent publication, The Challenge of the Able Child, Gifted Education and Enrichment Activities for Able Children. He claims to be a teacher first and foremost, having taught in three schools, including nine years in Liverpool. His devotion to teaching, enthusiasm and expertise is reflected in all his courses. David is a keen sportsman and ran for his country and the RAF.

Dr...

It is because we cannot see the reader that writing needs to be different from speech. A reader is distant and so we cannot notice any misunderstandings or loss of interest that occur as they read. This creates a need for clarity in writing that isn’t so important in speech. The style and structure we adopt for example needs to be more formal; and the need to create and maintain interest means that writing should be lively. In the case of school essays, the reader is the teacher or examiner who awards marks and a grade, something that can...

Teacher’s Note

Even a poor essay is the result of a substantial amount of time and effort; and the chances are that the student knew all along that their writing was ‘going wrong’ – but press on they must, on to what must at times seem like the bitter end. How frustrating and even belittling this process must be and how much it must reduce the student’s chances of enjoying this wonderful subject.

This guide results from many years of teaching essays in a way that seems to make writing them far more enjoyable and productive. The...

Source: RSC / Peter Cook

Below are some general notes aimed at students, intended to help them analyse any stage play.

Plot and Theme

When a writer creates a story, whether for page or stage, there are two linked aspects that you can analyse and discuss in your school essays: plot and theme.

Plot

When we read or watch anything, we give time over to it. For us to feel this time will be well spent and worthwhile, the writer needs, from the outset, to find ways to interest and absorb us into the world of the fictional story or play, the...