English

Head of Department: Mrs. K. Wells

Examination: AQA, Specification A

Outline of course:

Content:

The GCSE English syllabus determines that the course of study must provide a range of experiences to develop pupils' skills and abilities in Speaking and Listening, Reading and Writing.

Homework activities / Revision Advice:

• Typically, students will be set one forty-five minute homework task per week up to a maximum of two forty five minute homeworks in any one week.
• Typical tasks will include researching a topic, learning spellings and/or the meaning of words, independent reading, teacher-directed reading, focused writing tasks, completion of class work, drafting and re-drafting coursework, proofreading and learning evaluations.
• Your help is very much appreciated and here are a few ideas about how you can support your child with English homework:
• Talk to your child about how to approach the task set
• Discuss reading
• Proofread work with them (please advise us of any help you have given)
• Encourage the meeting of deadlines

Revision will begin after Easter in year 11 (if not before). It will focus on the AQA Anthology's 'English' Poetry and preparation for the reading and writing tasks in the two final examination papers.

We advise students to attend ALL revision lessons. On top of this, we advise students to complete regular practice papers. English teachers will be only too happy to provide some.

Assessed Coursework:

• Speaking and Listening is continuously assessed and counts for 20% of marks in English.
• Reading and Writing are assessed by 4 units of work. (Shakespeare, Media, Prose Study, Original Writing) and count for a further 20%.

Examination entry requirements:

There are two terminal examination papers:

• Paper One focuses on non-fiction reading and writing to persuade, argue or advise.
• Paper two focuses on poetry, and writing to inform, explain or describe.

Each paper counts for 30% of marks in English.

Pupils will be entered for either the higher tier: A* - D or the foundation tier: C – G.

We aim to complete all coursework units by Christmas in Year 11.

Teacher expectations:

With so many marks available for coursework, clearly it is essential that coursework deadlines be adhered to. This means that students must organise their time carefully and spread the workload over a sensible period of time.

Parental expectations:

The pupil diary is a very useful tool for pupils to organise themselves. Please support your son/daughter by monitoring the use of this diary and discussing his/her progress with coursework assignments.

Useful resources and equipment:

All texts are provided for English study. However, some pupils like to have their own copies. We aim to give pupils good advance notice of selected texts.

A spelling dictionary is useful to have at home, when redrafting coursework.