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.
As Amy Forrester stated ‘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’.
Ensure that students are walking into an exam with the very best subject knowledge possible - without this, they cannot achieve their true potential
Over the past 2 exam cycles, I have observed that the students who worked the hardest, who committed a vast about of subject knowledge to memory, were able to achieve grades far higher than targeted.
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.
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.
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.
Presented at both The Team English Conference and the ResearchEd National conference this series of resources combine the latest research to improve creative writing. Directed towards improvements for the GCSE English Language Paper this resource can be used in conjunction with any qualification which includes a Creative Writing element.
Edusites English Macbeth Allusions booklet is not only useful for the teaching of Macbeth, but also in other texts where these biblical and classical allusions are made. We’re preparing our students for the language exam, where the text could be taken from anywhere. We are preparing our students for A Level, where good Bible knowledge is necessary for every text on the syllabus.
Power and Conflict Poetry Edusites English has teamed up with The Royal British Legion in partnership with Never Such Innocence would like to invite young people all over the world to share a message of Remembrance and hope, by saying “Thank You?" to the First World War generation.
Drawing room drama, murder mystery, critique of the classes, socialist sales pitch- there are a lot of different phrases you could use when describing ‘An Inspector Calls’. It’s a popular, short, and compelling little play that has been on the GCSE specification for decades now.
Teachers are nothing less than miracle workers. Language has the power to move us. Language has the power to make us see tired and old things anew. Language has the power to create hope.
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?
The language analysis in question two is a tricky little gem of a question. Most students feel pretty confident attacking this one, and usually even weaker students can pick up one or two marks. I’m going to split this into advice for those who are aiming for each separate ‘level’, because the advice I would give is quite different.
And now question three. You little tricky brute. It should be so simple! Teach structural devices, and how to analyse them, chuck in a couple of nice sounding technical terms to boost their confidence, and voila! Eight out of eight? NO.
What is the problem with question four? It should be as simple as teaching the difference between analysis and evaluation, point them in the right direction, and watch them go. But it isn’t.
