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Along with the examiners Edusites English has put together a range of reading intended to assist with the leap from GCSE to A Level English.
Here you have access to the first sections of these readings. If you would like to see more please become a member of the full site which includes a vast range of English resources written by experts assisting teachers and students to develop their English skills.
Please click below to read the first section on Shakespeare from GCSE to A Level. This is detailed and includes information about Assessment Objectives. If you are a parent or NQT or a student we are all teachers here and you can contact us by email
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Why study 'A Raisin in the Sun'? For them the 'American Dream' has been a false grail. History suggests that for Walter and Beneatha's children and grandchildren, despite civil rights legislation, it still might not have been the full realisation of equality and the American Dream.
Obviously, we want Literature students to re-read the texts – but what we don’t want is for them to think that’s their job done.
Edusites and A Level English Language...Many of you will be looking to cover the topic of Child Language Acquisition (CLA) with Year 13 now, perhaps with an eye to providing it as a possible Investigation topic. On the Edusites English, we have 24 page printable booklet which contains a comprehensive guide to the topic, covering key concepts in a range of frameworks and the central theories in some detail.
NEA Investigation Basics Thinking about getting your year 13s started on Investigations? If so, don’t worry – we’ve got you covered. There’s a great guide here on Edusites, written with the AQA specification’s NEA in mind, but it should help you out too if you’re an Eduqas or OCR English Language teacher. The guide fits the requirements of the current specification, and has an example of a nice approachable music-themed project that you could easily show to a class and work through with them, to help them get their heads around what an investigation is.
Autumn – and our minds turn to tackling the grittier of ‘language methods’ (or approaches, frameworks, or whatever they’re known as in your department). It’s grammar time! Having built up some confidence with ideas like lexis and semantics, it’s about this point in the term when things start to get a lot more technical and we want to really nail that terminology.
As an idea, Language and Power is so closely allied to Language and Gender, that it would make sense to teach this unit second as a grounding in ‘Power’ will provide a solid grounding in ‘Gender’. Equally, language-mediated via any form of technology, too, is frequently a site where power (and gender) relations are important and so dealing with Language and Technology last of all can work well.
Allusions in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Picture the scene: last July I see my 2018/19 timetable in my pigeonhole. It has all my new classes, including AS Level Literature. I’m nervous – we split classes, 1 teacher teaches Othello and love poetry, the other Tess of the D’Urbervilles and unseen prose. Othello and poetry? That’s my jam. I’d feel happy there. Hardy and his endless ramblings about pastoral Wessex? Not so much… So, obviously, I end up teaching Tess.
Edusites English (GCSE or IGCSE) 9-1 (Language or Literature) is the place for teachers looking for ideas and information to work with students identifying and interpreting writers' effects. Edusites English continuing professional development supports whole departments to form a critical difference in vocabulary, grammatical features and structural texts.
Join Edusites English for AQA English Literature and English Language constantly evolving in collaboration with trusted teachers, specialists and academics, always with your classroom in mind. Edusites is renowned for subject expertise and targeted resources – including support for post-16 and resit teachers.
As part of our new blogs series from teachers who are using Edusites in their classrooms we are delighted that Helen has shared her experience of sitting timed questions with students. There is something wonderful about sitting papers along with students, not least because it causes the classroom to be filled with a group dynamic of concentrated hush...
This layout allows for the connections to be made between words and leaves space for students to write down modeled examples of sentences that had the flexibility to be inserted into their writing regardless of the question. We looked at the patterns, links and the etymology of the words. We spent the lesson thinking about how to use each word effectively and the way that some words had nuanced meaning.
The ability to compare and contrast is one of the most important and challenging skills to master for the GCSE and IGCSE 9 to 1 English Language and English Literature. Previously compare and contrast techniques were tested only by Controlled Assessment in one of the four units of English Literature: now it reaches across both specifications as detailed below. It takes on much greater significance because some reading passages in GCSE and IGCSE English Language and English Literature are unseen.
AQA make clear their ‘take’ on context which starts life in the DfE curriculum order of 2013: under the heading ‘reading comprehension and reading critically’ there are the following bullet points:literal and inferential comprehension: understand a word, phrase or sentence in context critical reading: identify the theme and distinguish between themes; support a point of view by referring to evidence in the text; using understanding of writers’ social, historical and cultural contexts to inform evaluation…of the text.
In English Language the section dedicated to critical reading and comprehension states that students should ‘draw inferences and justify these with evidence; support a point of view by referring to evidence within the text…’.In Assessment Objective AO2 there is the clear injunction: ‘use relevant subject terminology to support their views’. Assessment Objective AO4 asks them to ‘evaluate texts critically’: the questions for this will lead them towards such evaluation.
A sample section of Edusites English AQA Unseen Poetry Anthology. Includes an introduction around meaning, discussion points for the classroom and teaching tips for two poems. Top Examiner Tips look at what is required in answering unseen poems in terms of the assessment objectives, structuring a response, how to reference effectively and how to compare and contrast. Includes practice exam questions, using the poems, written as per AQA body structure and style.
