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.
To help teach this specifications and for your students to make measurable progress Edusites has engaged some of the best writers and English experts to both write and moderate these materials ensuring that what we bring to you has a carefully constructed for your classroom practice.
Edusites resources for the Cambridge IGCSE 9-1 English Literature 0477 compliment resources available from the CIE website.
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The ability to compare and contrast is one of the most important and challenging skills to master for the 9 to 1 English Language and English Literature. Previously compare and contrast techniques was 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 English Language and English Literature are unseen.
There is frequent mention of a range of commands: see Edusites English Glossary of Frequently Used English GCSE Terms in Associated Resources but ‘evaluate’ needs clear definition here. The OED gives us ‘appraise’ ‘assess’. In turn we get to ‘estimate the worth of’ and ‘estimate the quality of’. So as far as we are concerned it means to make qualitative judgements about what has been read: with the constant proviso that these are supported by evidence from and reference to the text.
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.
Students having access to responses which exemplify a high grade 8 or 9 response gives a target for which they can aim. In the run up to exam season Edusites ‘Live Scripts’ can form the basis of a number of excellent lessons based on ‘what’ other students have achieved and most importantly how and why.
Edusites Slices show you how to enable students to consider how to ‘use’ quotations in their exam responses. However, the quotations need to be placed in long term memory to be available during the exam. What are some of the best ways of helping students to do this?
Back in 2015, when the first exams of the new spec rolled around, I knew the importance of quotations - it was a closed book exam after all. However, over time, I began to realise that the key wasn’t just in the retention of quotations, but in the knowledge of what to say about them.
So often students don’t speak up and let us know when they don’t understand a piece of vocabulary. Why? Embarrassment. Awkwardness. Indifference. But there are those other times, where there is a word in a sentence that they do not understand the meaning of, but they don’t speak up because they don’t realise themselves.
Videos and images used in the classroom can be huge distractions if used ineffectively. Chris Curtis has spoken about this very problem at the recent Team English National Conference and Rugby ResearchEd, and written about this very problem in his excellent blog here (http://learningfrommymistakesenglish.blogspot.com).
Catching up with your reading? Some expert subject based strategies for you to delve into.
