General information

Hi,

It has just occurred to me that I haven't yet provided you with an overview of the course, so here it is!

The exam board we use is Eduqas, which is the English branch of the Welsh Board, otherwise known as WJEC. The exam consists of two papers and there is no controlled assessment.

Paper 1: ·         40% ·         2 hours ·         Section A: Shakespeare. One extract question and one essay question ·         Section B: poetry from 1789 to the present day. Two questions, one of which involves comparison

Paper 2: ·         60% ·         2 hours, 30 minutes ·         Section A: Post 1914 prose/drama. One source-based question ·         Section B: 19th Century prose. One source-based question

Reading List

(please be aware that the list of prose and plays might change as we progress through the course)

For the Shakespeare section of the first paper, we will study:

·         Romeo and Juliet

·         Macbeth

For the poetry section of the first paper, the exam board’s anthology consists of the following titles:

·         A Wife in London by Thomas Hardy

·         Afternoons by Philip Larkin

·         As Imperceptibly as Grief by Emily Dickinson

·         Cozy Apologia by Rita Dove

·         Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney

·         Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

·         Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes

·         Living Space by Imtiaz Dharker

·         London by William Blake

·         Mametz Wood by Owen Sheers

·         Manhunt by Simon Armitage

·         Ozymandias by Percival Shelley

·         She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron

·         Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

·         The Prelude by William Wordsworth

·         The Soldier by Rupert Brooke

·         To Autumn by John Keats

·         Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy

Questions about any of these poems could come up in the exam.

For the Post 1914 prose/drama section of the second paper we will study:

·         Lord of the Flies by William Golding

·         The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time play script by Simon Stephens (adapted from the novel by Mark Haddon)

For the 19^th Century Prose section of the second paper, we will study:

·         War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

·         The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

 For the 20^th and 21^st Century poetry section of the second paper, there is no prescribed list as the poems will be unseen, but the exam board recommends using works by the following poets as stimuli:

·         Fleur Adcock

·         John Agard,

·         Moniza Alvi,

·         Maya Angelou,

·         Simon Armitage,

·         James Berry

·         Eavan Boland

·         Wendy Cope

·         Tony Curtis

·         Carol Ann Duffy

·         Rita Dove

·         Jen Hadfield

·         Tony Harrison

·         Ted Hughes

·         Jackie Kay

·         Philip Larkin

·         Liz Lochhead

·         Roger McGough

·         Robert Minhinnick

·         Andrew Motion

·         Grace Nichols

·         Sean O’Brien

·         Seamus Heaney

·         Adrienne Rich

·         Jo Shapcott

·         Owen Sheers

·         Derek Walcott

·         William Carlos Williams

·         Benjamin Zephaniah 

Please note that all of the above texts, with the exception of the poems for the poetry section of the first paper, are subject to change based on how well the pupils respond to them and the availability of resources.

Homework, 27th September, 2016

Hi,

In order to write a good essay on Romeo and Juliet in the exam, you are going to need to have a pretty in-depth knowledge of the play as a whole – this means you will need to be able to quote key lines from memory and be able to refer to specific acts and scenes.

We will focus on important quotes later on in the course, but, for now, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to memorise what happens in each act and scene in preparation for a test on Friday. You can use the ‘Act Summaries’ booklet to help you; you don’t need to memorise it all word-for-word, but you will need to be able to give a very brief overview of what happens in each scene in your own words. An online version of the booklet can be found here:

http://mrproulx.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/8/1/12816005/romeo_and_juliet_activities.pdf

Good luck!

Homework, 20th September, 2016

This homework is due tomorrow (Wednesday). 

Romeo and Juliet - Prologue

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Activities

1.      Demonstrate your understanding of the prologue by rewriting it in modern English so that it would make sense to someone who had never studied Shakespeare.

2.      Think of all the themes we discussed in class, e.g. love, death, conflict, etc. and choose one colour for each. Go through the original version of the prologue and, wherever you think one of those themes is referred to, underline it in the appropriate colour.

3.      Choose one of the themes and write a short explanation of how it is covered in the play as a whole, and how it is covered more specifically in the prologue. Try and relate it to the social and historical context of the storyline.

Example:

The theme of death is covered in the play as certain key characters (Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio and Tybalt) end up dead, and these are major turning points in the plot. The reason Shakespeare made death central to the play, as he did in many of his plays, is probably because it was so common in Elizabethan times that it was never far from people’s minds and was therefore fascinating to them. People may even have felt somehow reassured that death could affect nobility just as much as it affected the poor.

In the prologue we are told that two ‘star-cross’d lovers take their life’. Death, in this sense, is therefore inevitable, bound up in fate, so the question is not so much what will happen to them, but rather, how it will happen. Ultimately, their death is for the greater good because it helps to ‘bury their parents’ strife’, so it is being presented as something that is not as tragic as it might at first seem.