Teaching Literature in Year 10
Princes Risborough School
Your School Context:
Focus Group:
Activities Undertaken – Description:
- Upper (Secondary Modern) School
- 567 male pupils; 442 female pupils (including 6th form)
- 181 SEN pupils (including 6th form); 1% EAL (including 6th form); 12% Pupil Premium
- Special Features: ARP/Communications Base
- Particular Challenges: White working class boys
Focus Group:
- Year Group: Year 10 (top set; 26 pupils)
- Ability Range: High ability/G&T (average grades B-A*)
- Any Particular Issues: Group Dynamics (24 female pupils; 2 male pupils)
- Class chosen as focus group due to their lack of engagement with generic Language-based activities and their clear preference for Literature-based work. Although this is generally a high achieving group, with high target grades, their Literature assessment results have tended to be higher than their Language results and that has been the case since they started KS4.
Activities Undertaken – Description:
Activities Undertaken – Description:
Teaching Grammar Through Approaches to Literature
· Teaching of Susan Hill’s “I’m the King of the Castle” and a selection of poetry written by a variety of poets. Both units’ final pieces are tested for Literature objectives. However, all pupils completed a practice Language piece to judge improvement in that area and impact of case study.
· Analysing and evaluation of Susan Hill’s grammatical choices and the impact upon readers. This included pupils re-writing passages of Susan Hill’s work for comparative purposes to judge effect of author’s original choices.
· After examining and evaluating Susan Hill’s work pupils then started to write their own empathic pieces, with the key objective to create atmosphere.
· Analysing and evaluation of sentence structure and whole-text structural devices used within “I’m the King of the Castle”. Pupils then took what they had learnt and applied it to their own empathic pieces.
· The same process was completed through analysing poetry.
· Literature remained the core focus throughout, with Language addressed as appropriate, in a cohesive style as opposed to forming part of a separate unit.
Evaluation of Impact on Progress/Writing:
· 65% of the class have made at least half of a grade’s progress in their Language assessments between September and December, despite being taught a Literature module during that time period. Of those pupils, 59% have made at least one whole grade’s progress in Language, with 50% of those pupils improving by at least one a half grades.
· The pupils seemed proud when acknowledging their own improvement and, most interestingly, were genuinely shocked that they had made such an improvement in Language; an area which the class, as a whole, had tended to display a lack of engagement with. The class has always displayed a preference for Literature-based activities. When it was explained to them that they had been taught Language THROUGH Literature for the term, as opposed to treating the two as separate entities, the pupils quickly understood the reasoning behind it and how it had helped them to deepen their understanding of both how authors and themselves make specific language and grammatical choices. The usual ‘moans and groans’ were never present when the class was taught in this style, as they were previously when the pupils heard the phrase ‘grammar focus’.
· From a teaching perspective this style of examining grammatical and language features has been extremely interesting. The most rewarding aspect, alongside the improvement in pupils’ grades, has been to see the class genuinely engaged in the study of language and how texts are written. In closely examining some of Susan Hill’s word choices in “I’m the King of the Castle”, for example, the majority of the pupils were so engaged in the questioning process behind examining grammatical features and then evaluating the various outcomes that they seemed to forget about the fact that previously they had been, to a certain extent, disengaged with the study of the mechanics of language. When the pupils could later transfer their skills and put them to use in their own writing the outcome was encouraging – more caution was being taken in the pupils’ word choices, they took more time to make deliberate decisions with respect to structuring sentences and the overall quality of their work was of a far higher standard and, as a result, more effective.
· “I don’t usually like it when we’re told we’ll be focusing on sentence structure and grammatical features. It feels really mechanical and there doesn’t seem much point to it. With the way we studied ‘I’m the King of the Castle’, however, it was easy to understand why we were focusing on the language objectives when analysing the text and there was a clear, obvious point to it. It helped me to understand the many choices that authors like Susan Hill have to make and the effects that those choices can have upon readers. This then helped me to think about how I write my own work and because of that I’m much more careful when I structure my own writing” (Charlotte, Year 10).
· “I never really cared about things like pronouns, adverbs, semi-colons and subordinate clauses before we looked at how they were used specifically in ‘I’m the King of the Castle’. Now I guess I can appreciate why we study language and grammar features. They’re not just fancy names given to types of words or sentences. Understanding the intentions of their uses has helped me to figure out how writers construct their texts and the decisions I need to make when doing my own writing. I also found poetry far more enjoyable because of the way we looked at it. I think I even enjoyed it and I wouldn’t usually say that about poetry” (Amelia, Year 10).
Next Steps:
Teaching Grammar Through Approaches to Literature
· Teaching of Susan Hill’s “I’m the King of the Castle” and a selection of poetry written by a variety of poets. Both units’ final pieces are tested for Literature objectives. However, all pupils completed a practice Language piece to judge improvement in that area and impact of case study.
· Analysing and evaluation of Susan Hill’s grammatical choices and the impact upon readers. This included pupils re-writing passages of Susan Hill’s work for comparative purposes to judge effect of author’s original choices.
· After examining and evaluating Susan Hill’s work pupils then started to write their own empathic pieces, with the key objective to create atmosphere.
· Analysing and evaluation of sentence structure and whole-text structural devices used within “I’m the King of the Castle”. Pupils then took what they had learnt and applied it to their own empathic pieces.
· The same process was completed through analysing poetry.
· Literature remained the core focus throughout, with Language addressed as appropriate, in a cohesive style as opposed to forming part of a separate unit.
Evaluation of Impact on Progress/Writing:
· 65% of the class have made at least half of a grade’s progress in their Language assessments between September and December, despite being taught a Literature module during that time period. Of those pupils, 59% have made at least one whole grade’s progress in Language, with 50% of those pupils improving by at least one a half grades.
· The pupils seemed proud when acknowledging their own improvement and, most interestingly, were genuinely shocked that they had made such an improvement in Language; an area which the class, as a whole, had tended to display a lack of engagement with. The class has always displayed a preference for Literature-based activities. When it was explained to them that they had been taught Language THROUGH Literature for the term, as opposed to treating the two as separate entities, the pupils quickly understood the reasoning behind it and how it had helped them to deepen their understanding of both how authors and themselves make specific language and grammatical choices. The usual ‘moans and groans’ were never present when the class was taught in this style, as they were previously when the pupils heard the phrase ‘grammar focus’.
· From a teaching perspective this style of examining grammatical and language features has been extremely interesting. The most rewarding aspect, alongside the improvement in pupils’ grades, has been to see the class genuinely engaged in the study of language and how texts are written. In closely examining some of Susan Hill’s word choices in “I’m the King of the Castle”, for example, the majority of the pupils were so engaged in the questioning process behind examining grammatical features and then evaluating the various outcomes that they seemed to forget about the fact that previously they had been, to a certain extent, disengaged with the study of the mechanics of language. When the pupils could later transfer their skills and put them to use in their own writing the outcome was encouraging – more caution was being taken in the pupils’ word choices, they took more time to make deliberate decisions with respect to structuring sentences and the overall quality of their work was of a far higher standard and, as a result, more effective.
· “I don’t usually like it when we’re told we’ll be focusing on sentence structure and grammatical features. It feels really mechanical and there doesn’t seem much point to it. With the way we studied ‘I’m the King of the Castle’, however, it was easy to understand why we were focusing on the language objectives when analysing the text and there was a clear, obvious point to it. It helped me to understand the many choices that authors like Susan Hill have to make and the effects that those choices can have upon readers. This then helped me to think about how I write my own work and because of that I’m much more careful when I structure my own writing” (Charlotte, Year 10).
· “I never really cared about things like pronouns, adverbs, semi-colons and subordinate clauses before we looked at how they were used specifically in ‘I’m the King of the Castle’. Now I guess I can appreciate why we study language and grammar features. They’re not just fancy names given to types of words or sentences. Understanding the intentions of their uses has helped me to figure out how writers construct their texts and the decisions I need to make when doing my own writing. I also found poetry far more enjoyable because of the way we looked at it. I think I even enjoyed it and I wouldn’t usually say that about poetry” (Amelia, Year 10).
Next Steps:
- Work with Princes Risborough School English Department to find more ways to merge the teaching of Language Objectives and Literature Objectives (specific teaching activities/homework activities).
- Examine and evaluate current SOLs to find suitable opportunities to reinforce Language teaching through Literature.
- Expand out into other departments across the school – find ways to incorporate teaching of grammatical and language foci within SOLs/activities which feature heavy weighting of writing.