A resource to help teachers promote the competition organised by the English Speaking Union.

A handout with a skills focus: Skills: • Rhetorical skills • Outlining and Transitions • Introducing quotations/citation and paraphrasing • Conclusions Grammar: • Agreement

Play script

Student Knowledge Booklet

Unit of Inquiry - Student Knowledge Booklet - Year 8

First week’s lessons.

First week’s teaching Curriculum scope and sequence Copy of the play

A short unit of inquiry about poetry with a focus on dramatic readings, literary festivals and creative writing. The unit follows the MYP curriculum.

Year 8 Winter term 2 Adventure Fiction & Satire Holes by Louis Sachar Knowledge Booklet with tasks.

A resource for running an after school club to promote mindfulness. The activity focuses on a Sanskrit chant.

A lesson study of short story writing displayed in the English classroom.

Literacy week and World Book Week resources focus on: Extreme Reading Extreme Writing Genre Triptych Display Boards

Is all the world a stage? I’ve put this Year 7 MYP English Language and Literature Knowledge Booklet together using the play, Sparkleshark by Philip Ridley Feel free to adapt the assessments

Powerpoints to support the student knowledge booklet. Lesson 6-10 The summaries are wordy but the assessments are meaningful!

PowerPoints on the first five chapters. These lessons support the Knowledge Booklet and can be adapted. The lessons are structured around the IB DP Language and Literature English course - Intertextuality.

Why are we learning this? You will learn about the Area of Exploration – Intertextuality. This is not a literary or rhetorical device, but rather a fact about literary texts – the fact that they are all intimately interconnected. This applies to all texts: novels, works of philosophy, newspaper articles, films, songs, paintings, etc. To meet the IB’s assessment criteria, you will practice evaluating and interpreting the connections between texts. Significantly, The English Patient (1992) is considered as a postmodern novel since the text is manipulated to pass on spread identities of different characters through narrative shifts, intertextuality and mini narratives. In other words, The English Patient is a model of intertextuality. For example, Kipling’s Kim, Herodotus’ Gyges and Candaules Scene, The Last of the Mohicans, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Daphne de Maurer’s Rebecca, and Caravaggio’s painting of David and more.

Six lessons to accompany the student knowledge booklet.

I think the most important idea to grasp is the human condition, particularly, from the perspective of Nora who asks: “Has a woman really not the right to spare her dying father pain, or save her husband’s life?” At a turning-point in her life, Nora receives no solace from books, religion, the sanctity of family, nor her own conscience – she is unstoppable in seeking freedom and truth. “I believe that I am first and foremost a human being, like you (Torvald) –or anyway, that I must try to become one… I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer” (p.98). In studying A Doll’s House, you will analyse and interpret this preoccupation with the institution of marriage and its portrayal through Ibsen’s naturalism.

Why are we learning this? As the French say, the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing. In studying the letter you will reflect on the extent to which people permanently change their views about political and social issues, especially in the face of literally earth-shaking world events. Immediately after the terror murders in Paris in January 2015 at the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the kosher market Hypercacher, the historian Jeffrey Herf, wrote this in his blog: “I remember well that in the few months following the 9/11 American intellectual world, especially that if liberals and left-leaning people, was in a state of welcome confusion. The familiar denunciations of American “imperialism” and the habits of sympathy for “national liberation movements” that had emerged in the protest against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s did not fit the realities of September 11, 2002…Sadly, the new thinking did not last long, or rather, it was supplanted by experts who told stories about a ”moderate” Muslim Brotherhood and about the need to avoid inflaming Muslims with public discussions of Islamism. Many decades of investment in the cultural capital of conventional habits of left and right were proving too powerful to overcome.” The idea that when we read a work of literature we are seeking to find a meaning which lies inside the work seems completely common-sense. Literary texts possess meaning; readers extract that meaning from them. We call the process of extracting meaning from texts reading or interpretation. Despite their apparent obviousness, such ideas have been radically challenged in contemporary literary and cultural theory. Works of literature, after all, are built from systems, codes and traditions established by previous works of literature. The systems, codes and traditions of other art forms and of culture in general are also crucial to the meaning of a work of literature. Texts, whether they be literary or non-literary, are viewed by modern theorists as lacking in any kind of independent meaning. They are what theorists now call intertextual. The act of reading, theorists claim, plunges us into a network of textual relations. To interpret a text, to discover its meaning, or meanings, is to trace those relations. Reading thus becomes a process of reading between texts. Meaning becomes something which exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations. The text becomes the intertext.

Narrative structures can be used to show moral and ethical dilemmas, with people’s responses to these revealing aspects of their character and identity. What do our moral and ethical choices reveal about us? Many of us have learned to become sensitive to the physical environment but fewer of us are sensitive to the moral and ethical environment. This is the surrounding climate about how to live. You will find out about morals and ethics by reading texts that explore environmental anxieties. You will learn how writers create a moral imperative. Your skills will be focused on analysis and evaluation. You will be expected to identify and apply subject terms correctly. You will have two Summative Assessment Tasks and one Formative Assessment Task in the unit which are written below. Your teacher will use the ‘AREs/End Points’ to assess your learning throughout the unit.