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

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...

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...

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...

Associated Resources

• 1. Shelley - Frankenstein Walton’s Letters 1-4.pptx
• 2. Shelley - Frankenstein Allusions and Victor Ch 1-4.pptx
• 3. Shelley - Frankenstein The Birth of the Creature Ch 5-8.pptx
• 4. Shelley - Frankenstein Families Ch 15 Focus.pptx
• 5. Shelley - Frankenstein The Trial Ch 16-17.pptx
• 6. Shelley - Frankenstein Female Characters Ch18-20.pptx

1. Introduction
2. Section A: Shakespeare
3. Section B: Drama and Poetry
4. Exemplars
5. Conclusion

Introduction

I think it is important to acknowledge at the outset that this is not an especially easy examination for which to prepare students. In my experience, no matter how much work you do with them on your chosen texts, even the most diligent and able of your pupils are going to enter the exam room with somewhat of a sense of unease; indeed, I’ve found that the more hard-work the pupil puts in, the more ideas...

• Aspens.ppt

1. Introduction
2. Section A: Shakespeare
3. Section B: Drama and Poetry
4. Exemplars
5. Conclusion

Hopefully, this guide will have given you a starting point on how to prepare your students for this very difficult examination.

I cannot stress enough the importance of a focus upon the assessment objectives. If the pupils are aware constantly of how they are going to be assessed, they have the best chance of achieving a good mark.

With a few weeks to go before study leave, our lessons become exclusively about...

1. Introduction
2. Section A: Shakespeare
3. Section B: Drama and Poetry
4. Exemplars
5. Conclusion

OCR say that all of the six questions on this paper can be answered by any possible combination of the texts – and that they spend a long time ensuring this is so. I’m not sure I necessarily agree – there was a question on ‘women’ a few years ago that I would have been interested to see a response to it using Dr Faustus and Paradise Lost Book 1 – containing, as they do, no women . . .
Thus, I would suggest...

1. Introduction
2. Section A: Shakespeare
3. Section B: Drama and Poetry
4. Exemplars
5. Conclusion

There’s a plethora of information out there about the individual texts that you may choose to study, so I don’t intend to spend too long here on the content of what you can teach.

However, there are some teaching ideas and strategies below that you may find useful when ensuring that you are meeting the demands of the examination.

AO3 and AO4 Critics and Contexts

All four of the assessment objectives are,...

1. Introduction
2. Section A: Shakespeare
3. Section B: Drama and Poetry
4. Exemplars
5. Conclusion

The examination board believes you should be familiar with the technical terms below. Please make sure you do not find yourself in an examination not knowing how to use any of these . . .

A

ALLITERATION, ALLEGORY, ALLUSION, ANAPHORA, ANTITHESIS, APOSTROPHE, ASSONANCE

B

BALLAD, BATHOS, BLANK VERSE

C

CAESURA, CHIASMUS, COLLOQUIAL LANGUAGE, CONCEIT, CONNOTATION, COUPLET

D

DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE, DISSONANCE

E

ELEGY,...

1. Introduction
2. Section A: Shakespeare
3. Section B: Drama and Poetry
4. Exemplars
5. Conclusion

What does a good response to the Shakespeare question look like?

Here are two examples of introductions, with annotations, of work I have received from students this year. Obviously, these extracts are addressing Othello – but hopefully you can see how the particular approach I have outlined above works.

‘If the play were never to leave Venice, there would be no tragedy’. How far and to what extent do you find...

Context

This poem was written in 1938, just before Yeats’ death.

Structure

The poem is written as a conversation between the man and an echo. It is composed of rhyming couplets which is the simplest rhyme form.

Stanza 1

The word ‘Alt’ is a rocky fissure at Knocknarea, County Sligo. The phrase ‘broad noon has never lit’ suggests a dark, secluded place.  This is an alliterative phrase ‘shout a secret to the stone’ ; ‘shout’ suggests a public declaration but by shouting at ‘the stone’ the man keeps his secret while making...

Context

This poem was written in 1927. The people mentioned in the title are Eva Gore-Booth (1870-1926) and Constance Markiewicz (nee Gore-Booth) (1868-1927). They were childhood friends of Yeats.

Structure

The poem has 3 stanzas with 10 or 12 lines. There is no regular rhyme scheme in the poem which may reflect the fact that Yeats is writing about friends; this is a personal poem and not the place for the formal or structured.

Stanza 1

‘Lissadell’ is a late Georgian house, home of the Gore-Booths, in County Sligo. The description...

Context

This poem was written after a visit by Yeats in his capacity as a Senator to St Otteran’s School, Waterford in 1926. The school was run on Montessori principles.

Structure

The poem is 8 stanzas long with 8 lines per stanza. It is also written in ottava rima, a verse form Yeats used in Sailing to Byzantium. The subject matter is appropriate for this verse form – the changing face of man and mortality.

Stanza 1

Yeats walks through the school in the company of Mother Philomena who ran the school. He lists the children’s activities...

Context

This poem can be seen in reference to The Second Coming; it describes a moment that represented a change of era in Yeats’ model of gyres. But where Yeats’ poem The Second Coming represents the end of modern history, Leda and the Swan represents something like its beginning; the rape of Leda by Zeus resulted in the birth/hatching of Clytemnestra, Helen, Castro and Polydeuces (Castor and Polydeuces were war gods) and this brought about the Trojan War which in turn brought about the end of the ancient mythological era and the birth of...

Context

This poem was written in 1926 and first published in 1928. Yeats wrote in a draft script for a 1931 BBC broadcast:

I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of my thoughts about that subject I have put into a poem called Sailing to Byzantium. When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the jewelled ‘croziers’ in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolize the...

Context

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War. Richard Ellman and Harold Bloom suggest the text refers to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Bloom argues that Yeats takes the side of the counter-revolutionaries and the poem suggests that reaction to the revolution would come too late. Early drafts also included such lines as: “And there’s no Burke to cry aloud no Pitt,” and “The good are wavering, while the worst prevail.” (Wikipedia)

Yeats intended The Second Coming to describe the current historical moment –...

Context

This poem was written as a reaction to the Easter Rising of 23-29 April 1916.

It was written in September 1916 when Yeats was staying with Maud Gonne MacBride at Les Mouettes, Calvados. In it he records his reactions to the Easter Rising in Dublin, when the city centre was occupied by a force of around 700 members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, led by Patrick Pearse, and members of the Citizen Army, led by James Connolly. They held out for 6 days – 15 of their leaders were sentenced by courts martial and executed between 3rd...

Context

This poem was first published in 1916. The Fisherman is presented as the ‘ideal man’ with his country skills; he is also a symbol for Ireland – where Yeats believes the ideal man ‘exists’. It draws a contrast between Yeats’ ‘ideal Irishman’ and the real man of his contemporary Ireland. Yeats was a skilled fly fisherman and used this knowledge to develop the character of the fisherman.

Structure

The poem is written as a single stanza with a regular ABAB rhyme scheme, 3 stresses per line.

The word ‘him’ refers to...

Context

This poem was first published in 1919. It is widely believed to be a tribute to Major Robert Gregory, the only child of Lady Gregory; he joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1916 and was shot down in 1918 over Italy.

Structure

This is a 16 line poem written in iambic tetrameter (4 quatrains of alternating rhymes). The title reflects the reality of life for airmen in WWI. This may have happened to many people fighting during wars: they know their death is approaching but there is little they can do about it. There is no real sense of...

Context

This poem was first published in 1917 when Yeats was 52 in a collection of the same name. The setting is in Coole Park, Galway, the home of Lady Gregory. Lady Gregory was a patron and friend of Yeats and he first visited her home in 1897.

Structure

The poem has 5 stanzas each 6 lines long and is written roughly in iambic pentameter; 1st & 3rd lines = tetrameter, 2nd, 4th & 6th lines trimester, 5th line pentameter. Pattern of stresses 434353. This is very precise and links with the precision of the subject matter – events are...

Context

This poem was published in 1914 at the start of World War One. It is about remorse over failure in love and the fear that this remorse will continue after death as a purgatorial punishment. This could be said to have links with the ‘guilt’ which is felt particularly by Irish Catholics. Some commentators have said that the failed love was for Maud Gone, but it doesn’t really matter for the readers’ understanding of the poem.

Structure

This poem is 1 stanza long, a total of 12 lines. There is a regular rhyme scheme with all the...

Context

This poem was first published, unsurprisingly, in 1913 and was inspired by the dispute over the Lane art gallery in Dublin; Hugh Lane wished to present his collection of French paintings to Dublin but there was disagreement about whether the City should provide or pay for a gallery to house them.

Structure

4 stanzas, 8 lines in each. The last 2 lines of each stanza form the refrain. A regular rhyme scheme is used which shows the control that Yeats’ displays in much of his poetry.

Stanza 1

The use of ‘you’ means the Irish people...

Context

First published in 1886 when Yeats was 21. This poem is set in County Sligo where Yeats spent part of his childhood; some actual locations mentioned illustrate Yeats’ fond reminiscing about his childhood – Yeats has a tendency to romanticise childhood.

The poem also illustrates Yeats’ interest in Irish mythology – the story of a child abducted by ‘faeries’. This feeds into many cultures’ fears of loss of children; also the story of changeling children (a human child abducted and replaced with faery child).

There is a...

William Butler Yeats

Yeats was born into a strongly Protestant family in 1865 in the Irish and largely Roman Catholic city of Dublin; Yeats was the son of Susan Pollexfen and John Butler Yeats; his mother was a member of a wealthy milling and shipping family; his father was originally a barrister but later followed his other son into painting.

He was educated at Godolphin School, Hammersmith and High School, Dublin. He studied at School of Art, Dublin and developed an interest in mystic religion and the supernatural. Yeats identified himself...

Yeats’s poems are studied for:

OCR English Literature AS Unit F661

Section A: Poetry 1800–1945

The focus of this section is the study of selected poems of one poet. Your students will need to answer one question on one poem of the poet studied and...

1. Specifications & Assessment Objectives

2. An Introduction

3. The Stolen Child

4. September 1913

5. The Cold Heaven

6. The Wild Swans at Coole

7. An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

8. The Fisherman

9. Easter 1916

10. The Second Coming

11. Sailing to Byzantium

12. Leda and the Swan

13. Among School Children

14. In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz

15. The Man and the Echo

Edward Thomas and His Poetry

Edward Thomas is one of our most highly regarded war poets and yet in the popular imagination is perhaps less well-known; his work has attracted the highest critical acclaim.

Here are some comments:

Because all of his poetry was written after the outbreak of war, it is all, in an important sense, war poetry. Behind every line, whether mentioned or not, lies imminent danger and disruption. Andrew Motion

And from the foreword to the Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (1920)

His face was fair, long and rather...

Jane Eyre & AO2

Form, structure and language - is often considered to be the hardest Assessment Objective to cover in A level essays. In fact, all three of these in Jane Eyre contribute to the development of themes, characters and plot, so they should be form an integral part of any discussion of these. Integrating points about form, structure and language into other discussions is a better way of including them than constructing a paragraph specifically to address AO2. Here are some ideas about ways it can be tied in:

A paragraph about Jane...

Brontë uses extended passages of direct speech to tell Jane’s story. In some ways this acts as protection against Jane’s later knowledge intruding on her younger self. As a device it enables characters to speak for themselves; it enables the reader to see, for example, Rochester’s feelings about Jane when she herself cannot. Apart from her initial introduction of the Reeds, we do not usually rely on Jane’s assessment of anyone, instead being given the opportunity to judge for ourselves from their actions.

Many passages in the book...

Jane Eyre is set firmly in northern England, in five separate locations. The Reed house at Gateshead, Lowood School, Thornfield Hall, Moor House (the Rivers’ house) and Ferndean Manor, which is Rochester’s smaller, more rural home. Mary, Rochester’s housekeeper at Ferndean, gives Brontë the chance to demonstrate that her control of the Yorkshire dialect is as strong as Emily’s, who used it in so extensively in Wuthering Heights: ‘she’s noan faâl, and varry good-natured.’ The dialect emphasises the more rural and remote...

The plot has been constructed by Brontë in order to allow her to create not only an absorbing and suspenseful narrative, but also, of course, to allow her to explore several themes in interesting and often persuasive ways.

Love

Love is a strong theme throughout the novel, which is essentially a romance; it is also the aspect of the novel which is quintessentially Romantic, with a capital ‘R’, in that the love which Rochester and Jane share is an extreme emotion. Both of them confess to overpowering feelings which cloud their judgement,...

Jane Eyre

Brontë constructs the character of Jane as having been left as an orphan after her parents’ death through typhoid; Jane is initially brought up by her mother’s (dead) brother’s wife, along with their children. Her paternal family are apparently ‘poor’, and she does not know anything of them, until her aunt – on her deathbed – reveals a letter from her father’s elder brother, who has made his fortune, but who has no children to whom to leave it. Later she discovers the Rivers family – the children of her father’s...

Brontë’s choice of creating a novel narrated by a ‘first person autobiography’ narrator of Jane Eyre and ostensibly edited by ‘Currer Bell’ is a conceit that serves to heighten the identification between author and protagonist – and which adds effectively to the authenticity and authority of the narrator.

The character of Jane narrates her life with the knowledge that she herself would possess at the time, if she were a real woman, rather than foreshadowing the dramatic narrative or giving any hint of future events. The form is...

Jane Eyre was published in 1847 and was the first of Charlotte Brontë’s novels; it was written in the same year as her sister, Emily Brontë’s, only novel, Wuthering Heights.

Charlotte (born 1816), together with Emily and Anne, lived at Haworth Parsonage, in North Yorkshire, where between them, they created complicated make-believe worlds as children before growing up to write.

Their mother died when Charlotte was just five, and when she was only 9, she found herself the eldest child, looking after the family, including her brother and...

Jane Eyre Overview of Specifications & Assessment Objectives.pdf

1. ­Overview of Specifications & Assessment Objectives

2. Context

3. Form

4. Characters

5. Themes

6. Setting

7. Language

8. Writing about Jane Eyre

• March.ppt
• Old Man.ppt
• Tears.ppt
• The Glory.ppt
• Words.ppt
• As The Teams Head Brass.ppt
• But These Things Also.ppt
• Gone, Gone Again.ppt
• Lights Out.ppt
• Melancholy.ppt
• The Sun Used To Shine.ppt

Hamlet: tragic hero?

Hamlet is usually regarded as the finest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and one of the greatest tragedies ever written; however, it is frequently defined as ‘tragedy’ with little or no reference to tragic tropes, either Greek, Renaissance or later theories of tragedy, or with insufficient consideration of other useful theoretical approaches.

The aim of this teaching guide is to trace Shakespeare’s development of his eponymous hero through the play looking at aspects of language, form and structure as well as genre,...

Hamlet: tragic hero?

Hamlet is usually regarded as the finest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and one of the greatest tragedies ever written; however, it is frequently defined as ‘tragedy’ with little or no reference to tragic tropes, either Greek, Renaissance or later theories of tragedy, or with insufficient consideration of other useful theoretical approaches.

The aim of this teaching guide is to trace Shakespeare’s development of his eponymous hero through the play looking at aspects of language, form and structure as well as genre,...