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...

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.

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...

Click on the link below to download Alan Thomas’s AQA A ENGA3 / ENGA4 Language Change within Language Explorations Guide.

Language Change within Language Explorations Guide.docx

This 110-page editable guide, written by a very experienced A Level English Language teacher, should prove helpful. It’s in Word (.docx) format, if you can only open Word (.doc) format files use the link below to convert it.

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats

We’ve also included a PDF version to help with printing.

Revision is something which is increasingly begun in the classroom, or is requested by students, often in the form of “can we go over x again?”.  Revision is, of course, a largely personal activity but students frequently lack the skills or confidence to just get on with it, particularly since they tend to see English as a subject that you ‘can’t really revise for’.

Revising in the classroom is therefore useful to both actively revisit the necessary knowledge and skills for the exams, and also to demonstrate revision activities that...

Group working can be a highly useful tool, but it can also be an amorphous beast that eats lesson time with little clear benefit.  In this guide, there are some tips for avoiding some of the classic pitfalls and some ideas for ringing the changes, without increasing preparation time exponentially.  Often, organising groups in a different way can create enough of a difference for students to carry out a very similar task to last lesson but have a quite different experience.

Group Work Woes

• The top problem with group work: It is unclear exactly...

Click on the link below to download the resource.

Assessment of Presentations in Lang A2.doc

We are constantly hearing that students need to be more active in their learning; that they need to do more thinking; that more of the work needs to be done by them.  While this is clearly desirable, it’s one of the many things in teaching that is easier to say than to do: even pausing long enough after asking a question rarely comes naturally.

So this guide focuses on ways to build in thinking time and how to develop students’ ability to think and learn for themselves in lessons, rather than simply showing up and expecting knowledge to...

Close analysis of extracts – whether of known or previously unseen texts – is a key part of the assessment of English Literature (and the combined Language and Literature courses).  It is also a difficult skill to master and therefore needs considerable classroom practice.  Sometimes the task is to engage in ‘practical criticism’, selecting a range of interesting features of the text to arrive at an interpretation, while at other times, textual analysis needs to be focused more specifically: on the text’s relation to context; or on...

Contextual knowledge is needed in certain types of task in studying both Literature and Language.  In Literature, for example, contextual knowledge might arise in terms of social, historical or political background, or an overview of a particular writer, movement or genre, while in Language, this might be similarly socio-historical, but could also focus on the history of print and/or literacy.

Both kinds of English study also require students to apply theoretical knowledge to texts in some exam and coursework questions.  In Literature, this...

Anyone who’s taught a Language or combined Language and Literature course will be familiar with the catalogue of complaints about terminology, including “How am I supposed to know all this?” and, much more alarmingly, “I don’t really get frameworks, so I just do the other stuff.”

Understanding what terms mean, being able to apply them to texts and being able to use them in sustained analytical writing are interdependent skills which do need careful practice and development – both separately and together. 

There is overlap for...

For teachers coming into Language as Literature specialists, teaching linguistic theory is perhaps the most alien aspect of the course.  It is often seen as the most factual aspect within English teaching at A Level, and is sometimes (frustratingly) viewed by students as the only thing they can revise, as they see it as more explicitly ‘content’ than other elements of the course.

This is a collection of suggestions for different ways of introducing theoretical and research-based content to students, as well as ways of developing...

All Literature and combined Language and Literature specifications require students to work with full-length texts for exam units – both open- and closed-book – and/or for coursework.  Students may be required to undertake extract analysis demonstrating knowledge of a whole work; they may need to produce ‘overview’ essays on a theme, concept or character, or they may need to seek connections between the known text and an unseen piece.

The challenges of working with longer texts in class start with the issue of reading.  Clearly, it is...

Several specifications require comparison: of known texts, of known with unseen texts, or of all unseen texts.  These may be literary or linguistic comparisons, or there may be a requirement to combine both techniques.  The activities here include ways of developing comparative skills that will benefit all of these kinds of exam and coursework tasks.  Each activity has a short introduction in italics to indicate the kind of task that it is most suited as preparation and practice for.  The majority of these activities are about allowing...

Many specifications require students to work with poetry, whether that’s developing familiarity with particular works of poetry, responding effectively to unseen poems, or (often) both.  Simply ‘going through’ a poem in class is not possible for every text students will need to work with during the course.  Sometimes a particular approach is the obvious one to take because of the demands of the specification, but often a poem simply needs to be read and its meaning discussed.  This collection includes ways of introducing a poem that...

This is arguably the key skill in English A Level specifications, and it’s often one that is difficult to develop.  Students, after having been successful enough in their GCSEs to progress to AS Level, often feel they know how to write essays and are offended when bad habits are pointed out or corrected, especially when these are bad habits which derive from ‘frames’ used at GCSE level.

It can be helpful to approach essay development with an insistence on the academic nature of A Level writing, to emphasise how advanced it is in...

The skills of producing original writing are required in many specifications, particularly for Language and combined Language and Literature courses, and it can be a challenge to vary the presentation and practice of this very skill-focused aspect of English. Some specifications require students to write in different styles, or for different audiences and purposes under exam conditions, in which case students need preparing for a range of different types of writing, while others use productive skills only in coursework. Even with the latter,...

Associated Resources

• http://english.edusites.co.uk/index.php/category/c/teaching-ideas/

Carrying out linguistic analysis of texts and extracts in class

This is, of course, something that needs considerable practice in AS and A2 Language classrooms, and it can be a constant battle to engage in meaningful linguistic analysis while still ringing the changes.

This selection of ideas can be used for different kinds of analysis: general AS level analysis to embed and apply linguistic techniques; analysis of particular kinds of text (e.g....

Associated Resources

• Compare the ways in which Duffy and Larkin use language to create a sense of isolation.doc
• Teacher version with comments - Larkin and Duffy - Isolation.doc
• Using exemplar essays to improve students’ work

Both Duffy and Larkin use language in their poetry to express how it feels to be isolated, or to be on the outside of society.  The poems I have chosen here present this theme in different ways, providing examples of different ways in which the poets work.  Larkin often offers us the persona of an outsider, but is not...

Associated Resources

• Compare the ways in which Plath and Duffy use language to convey the theme of anger.doc
• Teacher Notes on D grade essay.doc
• Using exemplar essays to improve students’ work

Both Plath and Duffy express attitudes towards the theme of anger, through the use of language.  Both poets’ ideas though are conveyed in different ways.  Plath expresses her emotions through reference from her own experiences which have given her inspiration, but with Duffy, she uses the persona of other people to explore deeper meaning and...

Associated Resources

• Compare the ways in which Larkin and Duffy use language to explore relationships.doc
• Teacher Notes on C grade essay.doc
• Using exemplar essays to improve students’ work

Both poets Philip Larkin and Carol Ann Duffy write about relationships. Using different language techniques, they can show how they portray their feelings towards them.  The poems I have chosen to show this are “Valentine” and “Disgrace” by Duffy and “Self’s the Man” and “Talking in Bed” by Larkin.

Duffy’s poem titled “Valentine”...

Associated Resources

• Compare the ways in which Plath and Duffy use language to convey a sense of childhood.doc
• Teacher version with comments - Plath and Duffy - Childhood.doc
• Using exemplar essays to improve students’ work

Plath and Duffy both explore the theme of childhood in their poetry from different angles.  In the poems selected here, Duffy presents childhood as a memory: vague and tantalising in Beachcomber and specific and threatening in Welltread, while Plath presents childhood by exploring the development of an unborn child and...

Associated Resources

• Suggested ways of using exemplar essays.doc
• http://english.edusites.co.uk/index.php/category/c/teaching-ideas/
• Compare the ways in which Plath and Larkin use language to convey ideas of violence.doc
• Teacher version with comments - Plath and Larkin - Violence.doc
• Compare the ways in which Plath and Duffy use language to convey a sense of childhood.doc
• Teacher version with comments - Plath and Duffy - Childhood.doc
• Compare the ways in which Larkin and Duffy use language to explore relationships.doc
• Teacher Notes on C grade...

Associated Resources

• Compare the ways in which Plath and Larkin use language to convey ideas of violence.doc
• Teacher version with comments - Plath and Larkin - Violence.doc
• Using exemplar essays to improve students’ work

Violence is an aspect which is clearly present in some of Plath and Larkin’s poetry, but each conveys this theme in different ways and forms.  Larkin tends to express his ideas about society by means of a persona different to himself, which he does in the two poems selected here, using violent imagery and connotations to...

Associated Resources

• Discourse Markers Toolkit.doc
• Discourse Markers PowerPoint.pptx
• DISPLAY Discourse Markers.doc

A ‘discourse marker’ is a word or phrase that helps to link written ideas. These words are generally more formal lexical items that find little use in speech – which is perhaps why they do not always come naturally to students.

Discourse markers can be used, for example, to link ideas that are similar (e.g. the adverbs, also and similarly); and they can be used to link ideas that are dissimilar (e.g. however, alternately)....[ read full article ] »