To think about narrative structure is to walk the alleyways of story. To follow paths that can, in some cases, be pre-determined by the signposts of genre, routes that wind their ways through half-familiar, because unvisited, landscapes. However, even a straight line through the city of convention might turn into a darkened corner that, for… Continue reading “But first I must feel.”
It’s not all bad… After reading the Ofsted report on English, I feel the need to put a few things down on ‘paper’. Writing is catharsis, after all. It’s not all negative: I like the focus the report places on teaching the components of writing and the need to place more emphasis on non-fiction texts.… Continue reading Telling their story: the Ofsted English report
In my last two blog posts, I wrote about the ladder of abstraction and (a) its application to disciplinary literacy and (b) responding to literature. In this short blog, I want a look a little closer at how we can use the ladder to improve the depth of a student’s writing. The ideas here derive… Continue reading Teaching writing using the ladder of abstraction.
In the last post, I wrote about how we used the ladder of abstraction in a ‘disciplinary thinking’ session. In this short post, I will explain how the ladder can be used to help students develop more detailed responses to literature (or their reading in general). Remember that the ladder of abstraction is a way… Continue reading The Ladder of Abstraction Part Two: Responding to Literature
The Ladder of Abstraction I’ve been reading about S.I. Hayakawa’s ladder of abstraction which formed the central core to his 1939 book, Language in Thought and Action. It is a weighty tome and not without its critics, but the diagrammatic representation of the movement from the concrete to the abstract seems to suit the way… Continue reading The Ladder of Abstraction: Part One – Disciplinary Thinking
I’ve been working with my Year 11s on their AQA GCSE English Language paper 2 writing question. Before I talk about what we’ve been doing, let me share what I’ve told students not to do: they don’t need to worry about sub-headings, columns, by-lines, standfirsts, or even headlines. And don’t draw any pictures! These are… Continue reading AQA GCSE English Language: paper 2 question 5. Coherence and cohesion 1: importance of planning
You can skip the boring bits if you want and use the slides here: https://1drv.ms/p/s!AnpvBTL12aDNijdfIacMS01HHAfB Here’s a series of slides that might be of some use if you’re teaching writing skills for Language paper 2. I delivered this remotely to a whole cohort of Year 11s. The question is based on experiences of lockdown and… Continue reading Writing Skills: English Language Paper 2 Question 5
I am a child of the edgelands. The Black Country where I grew up, and where I still live, occupies a space between the city-sprawl of Birmingham and the woodlands that border the Severn and the Stour rivers which wind their way through its scarred landscape. The districts of Netherton and the Wrens Nest formed my… Continue reading An In-Betweener: Edgelands Memories
Originally posted on Mr Hanson's English :
The following session was inspired by some work I’ve been doing with an Erasmus project on dialectical talk – you can read more about this here. Never was a professional studies session more topical than the one we held last week on inclusion and curriculum. Coming in the…
Originally posted on Mr Hanson's English :
We know that students find the structure question on AQA’s GCSE English Language Paper 1 a difficult nut to crack. Here’s an example from June 2019: You now need to think about the whole of the source. This text is from the beginning of a short story. How…
Mr Hanson's English 