Understanding Gothic, Sci-Fi and Dystopian Fiction Through Extracts and Creative Writing

This short scheme of up to six lessons aims to enable students to understand what genre is as well as how it forms an integral part of any text. Students are invited to discuss their existing understanding of The Gothic/Sci-Fi/Dystopian fiction before reading extracts from seminal works from each genre and trying to identify how conventions are used. The scheme builds students’ creative writing skills by asking them to identify linguistic and narrative features of each genre before having a go at writing some of their own. The scheme builds up to students planning and writing a dystopian piece. All extracts were found easily online and include: The Woman in Black, War of the Worlds, 1984, The Road, and The Hunger Games.’ I printed sigle full page copies of the slides with extracts to give to students. The Youtube links at the end also prompted some interesting discussions.