A fabulous read first thing this Sunday morning and thank the heavens we have someone in charge that sees the failings of GCSE English Language. I agree with this 100%.
I’ve been tutoring 11+-university and whatever the age I see the same problems persist: students do not know the fundamentals of grammar or rhetoric by the time they get to GSCE and studying lit analysis doesn’t help. I find it hard to explain why analysing an article is as essential as analysing an excerpt from a 19th century novel in a language paper. I have found GCSE to be too much testing and not enough value.
We have to work backwards from the goals: do we know what we are trying to achieve with GCSE English? There are much more dynamic ways of teaching that use real-world examples integrated with grammar and vocab building that would add far greater value than what we have today.
Fundamentally two things are most obviously missing in my view: students cannot write clean sentences in the knowledge that an active verb is a prerequisite for any sentence. They start sentences with conjunctions and end them as subordinate clauses without any main clause. This is throughout the GCSE era and into university.
They have no idea that communication, particularly but not only in writing, is an art. They perceive it to be some kind of ailment or punishment. The Liberal Arts program teaches the art of communication and I cannot understand why this is missing from our current syllabus. I use funny examples to show them why I’m ordering my sentences in the way I am and they are eager to discover the science of communication.
Some recommends: use technology. Students learn new vocab by gaming; it is natural and fun and makes them work out new vocab through context that is current and relevant.
Teaching syntax is essential: students don’t even think about what a sentence is or why they are ordered into paragraphs. It has never crossed their minds…why? They are very willing to learn the reasons for why they are learning things but nobody feels obliged to tell them. Patronising students is totally ineffective.
Use news. Students love to be challenged and discover their own viewpoints. They love hearing about the news from articles that are current and interesting even if demanding. GCSE tends to favour dated news content about boring topics. Why? Just make the content interesting and relevant and ask students to process their thoughts. The more experience they have of developing their own arguments, the more they will learn about the function of words in a sentence and the central importance of power verbs and conjunctions.
Include discussion in schools. The UK over-values the written word but articulation by speech helps clear and spontaneous thinking, essential for life, and a fundamental differentiating factor between state and private schools.
Rethink GCSE English, a great thing to read today.
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