English
Subject Leader: Ms Jenny Kerrera
jenny.kerrera@queenkatherine.org
English at QKS
The guiding principles for English teaching at QKS are:
- to develop our voices as writers
- with the text at the heart of every lesson
Students of English are students of both Language and Literature throughout their time at QKS. We foster a culture of reading as a writer and writing as a reader: we develop an acute awareness of our audience, the purpose of our writing, the form our writing takes and we do this with a critical and analytical awareness of what writers before us have achieved.
By exploring texts from across the globe and through time, by looking at the spoken and the written word, by considering the chosen form of the publication, through exploration of the text’s context, we become more informed citizens, better able to navigate and negotiate our way through an increasingly literate and articulate world.
Through exposing students to a wide range of literature and by exploring the many powerful facets of language, we will gift our students a life-long love of reading and a rich and rewarding rhetoric with which to express themselves in whatever walk of life they chose to travel.
Key Stage 3
By the end of Key Stage 3, QKS students will have explored their literary heritage through poetry studies, delved into the world of fake news and advertising through modern media units, journeyed into text worlds of novels and plays, modern and historic.
With exciting text choices to analyse, explore and reflect they will develop their comprehension and inference skills. Every textual study is also an opportunity to develop written and verbal communication skills. By the end of Year 9 students will have written in a variety of forms and covered a range of genres and will be proficient users of a wide range of punctuation, confidently deploying Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary and be able to express themselves using a range of sentence types and constructions.
Key Stage 4
Following a wide and varied diet of text types at KS3, QKS students will fine tune their reading and writing skills and become highly adept writers of narrative fiction; expressive and persuasive writers of transactional pieces and consummate readers with developed and intuitive analytical skills.
They will study in depth literary greats from the English canon including a Shakespeare play, a nineteenth-century novel, a modern drama and an anthology of poetry.
Edexcel English Language:
GCSE English Language Specification
Edexcel English Literature:
GCSE English Literature Specification
Enrichment
- Youth Speaks Competition
- Mock Trial Competition
- Book Club
- Theatre Visits
- Dove Cottage visit
