At Edusites English it is our mission to provide you with insightful and relevant English CPD to drive your team expertise and results strategy. Click below to read about GCSE English Language and Literature AQA, Edexcel, Eduqas and OCR, and IGCSE Language and Literature Edexcel and CIE.
Whether you were born before, on, or after September 11th 2001; whether you were in New York, Kabul or neither; and whether you are an atheist, agnostic or religious believer you cannot fail but be familiar with the images of the destruction of the World Trade Centre on that day.
This brilliant novel is not an account of that day and nor does it purport to be. Nonetheless it explains the fanaticism and murderous monomania that lay behind it better than any textbook or non fiction account could possibly do. That is because throughout the novel the writer, Khaled Hosseini makes us both see and feel the consequences of the decline and fall of civilisation in Afghanistan from 1963 to 2002.
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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.
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.
Become an Expert in A Level English Literature
Earlier this week, I decided I should put my 25-minute drive to work to more productive use. Instead of listening to Radio 3, Radio 4, 5 Live, or Capital, I downloaded the AQA’s podcast ‘De-icing with Death and Jane Eyre’s flamingos’ as it promised to explain ‘how effective back planning can help students untangle a text from its context’ and the ‘importance of cultural capital’ in this process. It proved a thought-provoking 15 minutes.
You know every single one of your students: you know that Johnny always forgets to write about context, and that Jane struggles to write about language devices, and you can only hope that this time, they remember what you’ve just spent 2 years drilling into their minds. You’re also bitterly aware that the examiner will never know their individual weak spots: it comes down to whether they met some assessment objectives.
Eduscribers We hope that today and last week were causes for celebrations and pain-free. We have had so many thank you messages from our members and we would love to hear from you.Email us hereWant advice? See below
My Principal queried two and a half years ago when I was internally interviewing for my current post: Head of English.Student voice had not always been kind to my department, and I felt if we could get key stage three students enjoying the subject, that enjoyment would be embedded and blossom by the time the stress of GCSE took hold.
Of all the challenges in the English Language exam, question one fades into the background when compared to the complexities of question four, or the mental gymnastics for the analysis in questions two and three. Question one sits there. Unobtrusive. Inoffensive. Nonchalant. A little dream of a question, really. “Find four things…”. Can’t go wrong, right?
