by the Super Baby Project

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...

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...

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...

AQA A Literature | Unit LITA4: ‘Literary Connections’

This novel can be chosen as a coursework text for this A2 unit.

Below is a summary of the AQA Assessment Objectives. The guide focuses on the techniques Fowles used when writing his novel, including what are called his ‘postmodern’ techniques. There are also two worked essay examples to show how you might achieve high marks in this unit.

The Assessment Objectives

It’s important thing to be aware of the assessment objectives for your piece of work or exam paper. If you know...

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

This is just a little taster of Jonathan Peel’s frankly suberb guide to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel ‘Never Let Me Go’. At over 40 pages, it should provide you with more than enough material to engage with in and out of class.

• NLMG Guide.pdf

We might start this document by considering the genre of the writing. Is it science-fiction? Or dystopian literature in which a parallel world is developed which focuses on negative stereotyping (the opposite of a Utopia - look them up, it’s part of learning!). Or is it something else again?

I argue that...

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...

OMAM Post-reading Revision.ppt

OMAM Post-reading Revision.pptx

Associated Resources

DARTs Literary Analysis and Wuthering Heights.doc

I teach some students with special needs and I found one particular technique really useful when tackling Pre-Twentieth Century Literature recently.

To put the lesson in context, I try to enter my autistic students for GCSE English examination as soon as possible.

This gets them used to the system and the particular demands of the syllabus, particularly in coursework and the examination itself.

Some students thus take the examination as early as Year 8 or Year 9 in the...

Click on the link below to download Jo Winwood’s PowerPoint on Lord of the Flies.

The Lord of the Flies by Jo Winwood.ppt

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Assessment Objectives

AO1

Respond to texts critically and imaginatively; select and evaluate relevant textual detail to illustrate and support interpretations.

AO2

Explain how language, structure and form contribute to writers’ presentation of ideas, themes and settings.

AO4

Relate texts to their social, cultural and historical contexts; explain how texts have been influential and significant to self and other readers in different contexts and at different times.

To fulfil these assessment objectives...

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Assessment Objectives

AO1

Respond to texts critically and imaginatively; select and evaluate relevant textual detail to illustrate and support interpretations.

AO2

Explain how language, structure and form contribute to writers’ presentation of ideas, themes and settings.

AO4

Relate texts to their social, cultural and historical contexts; explain how texts have been influential and significant to self and other readers in different contexts and at different times.

To fulfil these assessment objectives...

Coursework Essay Introductions

How does Jonathan Swift satirise contemporary attitudes towards the poor in Ireland in A Modest Proposal? Consider:

• The language and rhetorical devices Swift uses and their effects
• The structure of the piece
• How Swift’s writing may have been influenced by his social, cultural and historical context.

Here are 3 sample introductions to your coursework essay. They have some good points.

Task 1: See if you can identify these good points and explain why they are good.

However, as you can tell having studied the...

Contextual Research

Exam Criteria

Here’s an overview of the criteria I will use to assess your essay:

English GCSE

You are required to demonstrate their ability to:

• Read with insight and engagement
• Make appropriate references to texts
• Develop and sustain your interpretations of a text
• Understand and evaluate how writers use linguistic, structural and presentational devices to achieve their effects

English Literature GCSE

Candidates are required to demonstrate their ability to:

• Respond to texts critically, sensitively and in detail
...

By following this guide, students will be able to construct an argument based on Lockwood, the narrator of Wuthering Heights.

Lockwood, the narrator of Wuthering Heights is often dismissed as mere writing device. What do you think of him?

What do we know about Lockwood? His role as the ostensible narrator allows Bronte to include a Germanic “Rahmenerzahlung” approach to the piece. Simply stated, the novel Wuthering Heights is a “frame story”. One tale sits inside another like a picture sits in a frame. This type of narration was very...

To complete this Pre-Twentieth Century Prose Assignment, you can use Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1998) TV Version of the Hardy Classic starring Justine Waddell and Jason Flemyng and/or the full novel.

The Task

The task is to look closely at two journeys Tess takes with the men in her life. One is in Chapter 8 and the other is Chapter 30. Students are invited to comment on the action and dialogue in these two chapters and state what these encounters reveal about the relationships between Tess and her suitors.

This task has been designed to...

Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” was published in 1847 under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell. It is now considered a classic novel in English literature.

Originally, the book seemed to hold little promise, selling very poorly and receiving only a few mixed reviews. Even the author’s sister, Charlotte, stated in a preface to the book, which she wrote shortly after Emily Brontë’s death “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know. I scarcely think it is.” and other Victorian readers found the...

If you have read the last page of the novel Lord of the Flies, you will realise that William Golding had the novel Coral Island in mind when he wrote his tale.

The Task

The following playlet explores some of the issues involved. Once you’ve read the script, improvise a response then write it up.

• What exactly DOES he think?
• Does he sympathise with Golding or attack his views?

The following scene takes place in the common room of a public school. One teacher is sipping coffee and marking some school exercise books. The other, William...

The Task

The boys on the island busy themselves looking for a beast or demon. We are painfully aware of the irony here. There is indeed a devil on the island… or rather several and they are openly on view.

Looking closely at the action in Golding’s novel, who do you consider could be described as a demon?

Beelzebub (Hebrew בעל זבוב, with several variants) appears as the name of a god worshipped by the Philistines. In ancient contexts, there appears to have been little, if any, meaningful distinction between Beelzebub and Baal....

William Golding wrote his second novel entitled “The Inheritors” one year after “Lord of the Flies”. The action covers the extinction of the last remaining tribe of Neanderthal Men at the hands of the more sophisticated and malevolent Homo sapiens. What does “malevolent” mean?

The novel is written in such a way that the reader might assume the group to be modern humans as they gesture and speak simply among themselves and bury their dead with heartfelt, solemn rituals.

The plot follows the fate of one Neanderthal called Lok when...

The Monkey’s Paw - Version B

W.W. Jacobs

Two versions of the same story…

• One was written for children who find reading difficult.
• What has changed?
• Why?

The Monkey’s Paw

W.W. Jacobs (Version B)

The year was 1876. A fire burned brightly in the front room of Laburnum Villa. Outside, the weather was cold and wet. It was night time and Mr and Mrs White had drawn the curtains to try and keep out the draught.

“Just listen to that wind,” said Mr White to his son opposite. Father and son were enjoying a game of chess.

“I’m listening,”...