Tag: Revision

Teaching

GCSE Language paper 1- student revision booklet

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Reading Time: < 1 minute With loads of reading from @fkritson and Mr Hanson, I put together a student revision book for GCSE Language 1, It’s got some top tips, space for notes, peer assessment (inspired by C.Spalding!). The sharing of #teamenglish on Twitter is amazing. I think the best way through this paper now is individual practice. I’m giving this booklet to students as a quick-reference guide in lessons. It’s also got a list of terminology suitable for each question. We’ll be doing regular questions at the beginning of lessons with a combination of self, peer and teacher assessment, and there’s a tracker at the …

A-level study, Analytical

Appropriation of Language in dystopian fiction

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Reading Time: 8 minutes As an English teacher – and student, still, I think! – I love novels that engage with the idea of language itself. For me, literature’s how we enter and understand the world, and dystopian novels often bring that to the forefront. They explore communication, memory, story-telling, and the way that language works to soothe, manipulate, warn, and memorialise. In particular, I’ve been studying The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984 with A-Level students, and both novels have some interesting discussions about language’s role in our society. World-building Setting a novel in the future, as many speculative fictions do, language is a good …

Analytical

Revision tips: ten ways to revise a poetry collection

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Reading Time: 6 minutes At AS-level, comparison often needs you to think about the whole collection, which can feel a bit overwhelming when you’ve got fifteen poems and a closed-book exam facing you!

1. Read sample answers
The reality is: you’ll be taking an exam. That exam has a mark-scheme, and you need to know what the balance of the question is focused on. Is it the themes and ideas of the poems? Is it analysis of form, language and structure? Is it comparison across the whole collection? Is it exploring literary and social context? Reading sample answers will show you what that feels like. As you read, think about how the balance works. Does it use a lot of literary terminology? How much does it explore each point? How many other poems or ideas does it refer to? The answer can’t be boiled down to “refer to three other poems”, but you can get a sense of proportion across an answer.

2. Mind-map ideas across the poems
Throw everything you know down on paper! A great one if you’ve got access to an empty classroom and a board pen, or get some cheap wall lining paper from B&Q for a fiver!