Disabled by Wilfred Owen

This resource was created to develop students’ analytical and interpretative skills for the Edexcel IGCSE English Language A qualification (4EA1), with a particular focus on preparing students for the Paper 2 exam. However, the activities work equally well as a coursework support resource for exploring ideas, building interpretation, and developing analytical writing skills.

If you are teaching Disabled by Wilfred Owen for coursework purposes, I also have another dedicated Disabled resource available which is specifically designed to support students in exploring the presentation of identity and producing coursework-style responses.

This resource will be bundled at a discount with lessons for all other texts in the unit once resources have been created.

Lesson Sequence:

• Starter: Students respond to questions exploring the life of a disabled WWI soldier before considering what war may have taken from him beyond his physical injuries. Ideas are categorised into physical, emotional, social, and romantic identity.
• Context: Very briefly introduces Wilfred Owen and his experiences of WWI, connecting his perspective to the themes of the poem.
• First Reading: Students read Disabled and discuss first impressions, emotional responses, and the contrast between past and present identity.
• Contextual Comparison: Students explore Jessie Pope’s Who’s for the Game? and compare its presentation of war with Owen’s more realistic portrayal.
• Structure Analysis: Using the provided table, students track the poem’s structure and examine how identity is presented across different sections of the soldier’s life.
• Poetic Structure Task: Students identify structural and poetic features including flashback, uneven rhyme, repetition, caesura, and rhetorical questions.
• Analysis Writing: Sentence starters and scaffolding support students in explaining how structure contributes to meaning.
• Exploding Quotations: Students move beyond surface-level quotation analysis using analytical lenses focused on identity, masculinity, isolation, and physical/emotional presentation.
• Extended Response: Students plan and write a response on how the unknown soldier’s identity is presented, using a structured paragraph framework.
• Plenary: Students select the most powerful word from the poem and justify their choice.

Includes:
✔ Fully editable PowerPoint
✔ Student-facing tasks and discussion prompts
✔ Differentiation support through scaffolded analysis
✔ Structured exam-style writing support