When it comes to scoring highly in the English literature GCSE, it’s important that students demonstrate perception. But with so much complex terminology to grapple with, it can be an area that they really struggle with.
Here, two English teachers share their advice on how they ensure students demonstrate insight in exam answers.
Ditch the terminology and start analysing language
Hetty Steele, head of drama at The Bishop’s Stortford High School and a part-time PhD student at King’s College London, says:
“Was Macbeth’s hubris his hamartia, or was his hamartia his hubris?”
This was a question given to Year 10s in a school I used to work in. I’m an experienced English teacher, currently studying for a PhD in English literature and I had to Google what on earth was going on.
Ultimately, this question is about perception, but this kind of hyper-focus on terminology is counter-productive and confusing. Students do need to use precise and relevant terminology to achieve top marks but, actually, when it comes to insight, I think it’s worth focusing on the small stuff first.
We need to ensure students are confident at identifying nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns - and then stop. At this stage, read a poem and focus on effect without even using terminology. Once you’ve done that, then revisit the word types. It’s incredible how many students skip to litotes and anaphoras without knowing the difference between an abstract and a concrete noun.
It’s important to take the time to do the basics well. Ask questions like why do active verbs make this section feel frantic? Why do abstract nouns here give the text a dreamy feel? Why does Armitage use the adverbs “probably” and then “possibly” here, when they mean such different things?
Once you’ve covered that, word sound is a great way to help students show perception, without having to use fancy terminology.
For example, you should spend time on things like plosive consonants, which communicate harsh friction, and elongated vowels, which communicate a smoother, rounder, softer feel. And once the fricative consonants are in the bag, alliteration will follow. They don’t necessarily need to know the terms “plosive consonant” or “elongated vowel”, as long as they can describe the effect the use has.
Again, there might be some assonance, but they don’t even need to know the word if they’re describing the letter choices: the repeated plosive “ts” in “tucks, darts, pleats” gives the line a harsh undertone, which may reflect the speaker’s feelings.
It sounds insightful but it’s accessible, and if they’re combining it with an effective use of word type analysis, they will impress the marker.
It isn’t rocket science but, perhaps, by focusing on the basics, not just the word types but the letters within, we might be able to give our students the tools to analyse effectively without needing to know what a hamartia is. It’s a fatal flaw, by the way. Hubris is excessive pride, but they don’t need to know that.
Vocabulary, sentence stems and structure really matter
Fay Brennan, teaching and learning coordinator for the English department at Charters School, says:
What’s the most important part of an essay? For me, it’s the thesis statement: it establishes an academic and critical tone, outlines the essay structure, hits assessment objectives one (response to text/task) and three (context), and takes away the fear of the blank page.
A thesis statement, however, is only really valuable when it is perceptive. When teaching this, then, success lies in vocabulary, sentence stems and structures and modelling.
The wider a student’s vocabulary, the more articulate they can be. This, in turn, leads to thoughtful, developed and perceptive writing. There is a wealth of brilliant vocabulary resources for GCSE texts already available, but I’ve stripped back my teaching of vocabulary to focus on two areas: a keyword for themes and characters in each text and interesting analytical verbs.
Each keyword must be multi-purpose; students should be able to use it across different characters and even texts. Students know that they must use these keywords in their thesis statement: examples include “privilege” for An Inspector Calls, “futility” for power and conflict poetry and “agency” for Romeo and Juliet.
I encourage students to use interesting analytical verbs to explore the writer’s intent, building on the work of Stuart Pryke. For example “to criticise”, “to teach”, “to warn”.
We then practise putting these keywords and verbs into sentences and have ‘“go-to” sentence stems for particular characters and themes. This is built on the work of Chris Curtis, and sentence stems include: “As a writer with a strong socialist voice, Priestley…” “The poet may have written the poem to…” and “Shakespeare reflects and challenges ideas about masculinity through…”.
We look at structure next. I let students explore and decide the best approach for them, and, often, I find that they use different structures for different texts and questions, but examples of best practice are:
- What? How? Why?
- Initially, … However, … Ultimately, …
- Both (poem and poet’s name) and (poem and poet’s name) (analytical verb) … However, (poem one) …; whereas, (poem two) ….
The final stage is a review: here, we look at their thesis statements and consider how they could make them more perceptive.
We look at vocabulary first and question the fluency of the thesis statement, as well as where different words can be used to make the analysis more specific. Improving the analysis of the writer’s intentions is next: we do this by combining two analytical verbs or extending our sentences using “because, but, so”. And finally, we think about how we can combine the context with the writer’s intentions through sentence stems.
So, what’s been the outcome of this approach? My Year 11s have made significant progress: their assessment objectives one and three marks have increased and the overall quality of their essays improved, too, because the thesis gave them a clear focus from the very start.
