Beth Kemp | Tuesday June 07, 2011
Categories: Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
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…
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Christine Sweeney | Friday November 22, 2019
Categories: KS4, AQA GCSE, AQA GCSE Pre-2015 Resources, AQA GCSE Generic Skills, AQA GCSE Skills Resources, EDEXCEL GCSE, Edexcel GCSE Generic Skills, Edexcel GCSE Skills Resources, OCR GCSE, OCR GCSE Pre-2015 Resources, OCR GCSE Generic Skills, OCR GCSE Skills Resources, WJEC Eduqas GCSE, WJEC GCSE Pre-2015 Resources, WJEC GCSE Generic Skills, WJEC GCSE Skills Resources, Starters & Teaching Ideas, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development, Writing, Essays, Persuasive Writing
Associated Resources Discourse Markers Toolkit Discourse Markers PowerPoint DISPLAY Discourse Markers 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…
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Beth Kemp | Thursday June 13, 2019
Categories: Hot Entries, Starters & Teaching Ideas, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development, Writing, Productive, Creative or Original Writing, Transformative or Editorial Writing
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…
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Richard Gent | Tuesday February 17, 2015
Categories: KS5 Resources, KS5 Literature, Drama, King Lear, Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Plays, Shakespeare - Other Activities and Resources, Starters & Teaching Ideas, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development, KS5 English Starters, Improve Your Teaching
Indicative Content Question 1 pdf How do France and Cordelia present their arguments to Lear here and what do they tell us about their respective characters? New PDF Question 2 pdf How does Shakespeare develop the themes of eyesight and insight in the play? New PDF Question 3 pdf Exactly what are the accusations Kent makes of Oswald here and why does he denounce him so angrily? What does the exchange tell us about the state of status in Britain at this point in the play? New PDF Question 4 pdf…
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Richard Gent | Thursday February 12, 2015
Categories: KS5 Resources, KS5 Literature, Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Plays, Shakespeare - Other Activities and Resources, Starters & Teaching Ideas, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development, KS5 English Starters, Improve Your Teaching
Click on the pdfs below to access the guides Each guide is written by an expert and this expertise leads the construction of the guide. For example at Edusites we do not create a template our experts have to follow. If as a teacher you are teaching Hamlet it is unlikely that you would also be looking at our King Lear Guide so there does not have to be consistency about the structure of the guide. The only consistency we are interested in at Edusites English is the consistency of quality and…
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Richard Gent | Tuesday February 10, 2015
Categories: KS5 Resources, KS5 Literature, Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Plays, Shakespeare - Other Activities and Resources, Starters & Teaching Ideas, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development, KS5 English Starters
Indicative Content Question 1 pdf How do France and Cordelia present their arguments to Lear here and what do they tell us about their respective characters? New PDF Question 2 pdf How does Shakespeare develop the themes of eyesight and insight in the play? New PDF Question 3 pdf Exactly what are the accusations Kent makes of Oswald here and why does he denounce him so angrily? What does the exchange tell us about the state of status in Britain at this point in the play? New PDF Question 4 pdf…
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iyerm | Wednesday November 05, 2014
Categories: KS4, AQA GCSE, AQA GCSE English Language 2015, AQA Spoken Language, EDEXCEL GCSE, Edexcel GCSE English Language 2015, Edexcel Spoken Language, Cambridge iGCSE, OCR GCSE, OCR GCSE English Language 2015, OCR Spoken Language, WJEC Eduqas GCSE, WJEC Eduqas GCSE English Language 2015, WJEC Eduqas Spoken Language, Starters & Teaching Ideas, KS4 English Starters, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
This activity is taken from the First Activity in Lesson Two of the AQA, WJEC Eduqas, OCR & Edexcel GCSE Spoken Language Scheme. ‘Things that irk’ On a piece of A4 paper, ask the students to write down something they really do not like – encourage these suggestions not to be too serious. Use the example of Marmite; things that irk rather than serious issues. Once this is done, collect their responses and distribute them amongst the class so that everyone has someone else’s…
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iyerm | Wednesday October 15, 2014
Categories: KS4, Poetry, Blake, The Sick Rose, Starters & Teaching Ideas, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
This activity is taken from the Plenary in Lesson One of the Edexcel GCSE Eng Lit Component 2: Unseen Poetry Scheme. Decide on your Poem Choose a poem you are studying that you want the students to analyse. This scheme is looking at ‘The Sick Rose’ by William Blake. Draw some jigsaw puzzle pieces on the board and ask students to do the same in their books. Pose the question “What pieces make up ‘The Sick Rose’ puzzle?? Ask students to insert some of the possible meanings of…
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Caroline Bagshaw | Monday July 21, 2014
Categories: Hot Entries, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
click on image to enlarge Associated Resources Edusites Exam Board Comparison Grid.docx Contents OCR H072: A/S level OCR H472: A2 Level AQA LIT A: A/S Level AQA LIT A: A2 Level AQA LIT B: A/S Level AQA LIT B: A2 Level CAMBRIDGE PRE-U ENGLISH LITERATURE 5765 CAMBRIDGE INTERNATIONAL A LEVEL 9695 PEARSON EDEXCEL: A/S Level PEARSON EDEXCEL: A2 Level WJEC / EDUQAS: A/S Level WJEC / EDUQAS: A2 Level APPENDIX : COMPARISON GRID 1. OCR H072: A/S level 2 componentsComponent 1: Shakespeare + Poetry…
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Beth Kemp | Thursday September 12, 2013
Categories: KS4, WJEC Eduqas GCSE, Hot Entries, Writing, Drama Analysis, Prose Analysis, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development, WJEC GCSE English Literature, Unit 2a Literary Heritage, Drama and Prose, Unit 2b Drama and Prose
click on image to enlarge This guide focuses on the ‘strengthened’ version of the current specification for assessment from 2015 in terms of implications for teaching, as far as these can be told from the information currently available. This presentation is largely in comparison to the existing specification, examined for the final time in June 2014. This closed book examination assesses students’ understanding of two specific set texts, one drama and one prose, one of which must be a…
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Richard Gent | Tuesday July 02, 2013
Categories: Hot Entries, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development, Improve Your Teaching
A new title in the NATE/Routledge Teaching English Series Teaching English Literature 16-19 An Essential Guide by Carol Atherton, Andrew Green and Gary Snapper A new piece of work by Andrew Green and Gary Snapper who are both part of the consultancy team here at EnglishEdu. “… a major step forward in the teaching of English Literature at 16-19 … principled, persuasive, and packed with great teaching ideas … an essential handbook for anyone teaching the subject in the sixth form…
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Steve Campsall | Wednesday May 15, 2013
Categories: KS4, AQA GCSE, EDEXCEL GCSE, Edexcel GCSE Generic Skills, Edexcel GCSE Skills Resources, OCR GCSE, WJEC Eduqas GCSE, Drama, Analysing Drama, Hot Entries, Poetry, Yeats, W.B. Yeats, Prose, Analysing Prose, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development, AQA GCSE Generic Skills, AQA GCSE Skills Resources, Edexcel English Literature, Unit 1 Understanding Prose, OCR GCSE Generic Skills, OCR GCSE Skills Resources, WJEC GCSE English Literature, WJEC GCSE Generic Skills, WJEC GCSE Skills Resources
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. The various elements within the guide can easily be adapted either for direct student use (i.e. as a stand-alone revision guide) or for classroom use,…
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Beth Kemp | Tuesday April 09, 2013
Categories: Hot Entries, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development, KS5 Archive, AQA A Level, AQA A Level Generic Skills, AQA A Level Skills Resources, EDEXCEL A Level, Edexcel A Level Generic Skills, Edexcel A Level Skills Resources, OCR A Level, OCR A Level Generic Skills, OCR A Level Skills Resources, WJEC A Level, WJEC A Level Generic Skills, WJEC A Level Skills Resources
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…
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Beth Kemp | Monday March 11, 2013
Categories: Hot Entries, Starters & Teaching Ideas, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development, KS5 English Starters, Improve Your Teaching, EDEXCEL A Level English Literature, 6ET01, AQA A Level English Literature A, LTA1, AQA A Level English Literature B, OCR A Level English Literature, F661, WJEC A Level English Literature, LT1, KS5 Archive, AQA A Level, EDEXCEL A Level, OCR A Level, WJEC A Level
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.…
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Beth Kemp | Monday March 11, 2013
Categories: Starters & Teaching Ideas, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development, KS5 English Starters, Writing, Linguistic Analysis, Speech Analysis, Child Language Acquisition, An Introduction to Child Language Acquisition, CLA Exam Revision, Gender, Gender Resources, Spoken English, AQA A Level English Language A, ENGA1, ENGA2, ENGA3, AQA A Level English Language & Literature A, ELLA2, AQA A Level English Language & Literature B, ELLB1, ELLB3, EDEXCEL A Level English Language & Literature, 6EL01, 6EL03, EDEXCEL A Level English Language, 6EN01, 6EN03, 6EN04, OCR A Level English Language & Literature, OCR A Level English Language, F651, F653, WJEC A Level English Language, LG2, LG3, LG4, KS5 Archive, AQA A Level, EDEXCEL A Level, OCR A Level, WJEC A Level
Guide Navigation A Level English Language Starters: Frameworks & Analysis A Level English Language Starters: Accent & Dialect A Level English Language Starters: Language & Gender A Level English Language Starters: Language Change A Level English Language Starters: Mode & Technology A Level English Language Starters: Child Language Acquisition A Level English Language Starters: Language & Power This collection of suggestions includes ice-breaker or ‘getting to know you’…
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Beth Kemp | Thursday August 04, 2011
Categories: Hot Entries, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
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…
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Beth Kemp | Thursday August 04, 2011
Categories: Hot Entries, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
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…
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Beth Kemp | Monday August 01, 2011
Categories: Hot Entries, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
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,…
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Beth Kemp | Saturday July 16, 2011
Categories: Hot Entries, Writing, Literary Analysis, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
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…
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Beth Kemp | Monday July 11, 2011
Categories: Hot Entries, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development, Linguistics Theory & Study, Using Theory
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…
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Beth Kemp | Sunday July 10, 2011
Categories: Hot Entries, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
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…
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Beth Kemp | Thursday July 07, 2011
Categories: Hot Entries, Writing, Linguistic Analysis, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development, Linguistics Theory & Study, Linguistic Theory, Using Theory
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…
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Beth Kemp | Monday June 20, 2011
Categories: Drama, Hot Entries, Prose, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
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…
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Beth Kemp | Friday June 17, 2011
Categories: Hot Entries, Trial, Writing, Comparative Analysis, Comparing & Contrasting, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
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…
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Beth Kemp | Wednesday June 15, 2011
Categories: Hot Entries, Poetry, Writing, Poetry Analysis, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
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…
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Beth Kemp | Monday June 13, 2011
Categories: Hot Entries, Writing, Analytical Writing, Essays, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
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…
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Beth Kemp | Tuesday June 07, 2011
Categories: Hot Entries, Writing, Lexical Analysis, Linguistic Analysis, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
Associated Resources
https://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;…
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Beth Kemp | Tuesday May 17, 2011
Categories: Hot Entries, Teaching Ideas & Skills Development
Associated Resources Suggested ways of using exemplar essays.doc
https://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…
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