Approaching Exams: An Open Letter to Students
Dear Students, Rites of passage, including coming of age, often involve elaborate and sometimes painful rituals. From around the world, some of these transition to adulthood ceremonies involve wearing...
November 2022 Paper 1: Sample Response 1 (First Dog on the Moon)
This week, we’ve added an exemplar from the November 2022 Paper 1 examination. The response focuses on Text A, from the “First Dog on the Moon” cartoon series published in The Guardian Australia. This...
Paper 2: Sample Response 8 (Harvest and No Exit)
In this week’s post, you can find a new Paper 2 exemplar here. What’s interesting about this one is that the student still does quite well using an A, A, B, B structure. It goes to show there isn’t...
How to Help - Analyzing Medical Infographics (with a body of work)
What text types will appear on the May 2023 Paper 1 exam? We have no idea! But we do know what’s happened in the past. There was an infographic on the May 2021 (Timezone 2) and November 2021 exam. ...
Analyzing Apologies
Not everything we do in a Language and Literature class has to be tied to non-literary bodies of work. In fact, there are many times when explicitly not teaching a body of work should be the goal. One...
In Celebration of Podcasts
Once, in Lerwick on the Shetland Islands, there lived a man called Peerie Willie Johnson. ‘Peerie’, in Scots, means small or slight, but Peerie Willie was not insignificant. Peerie Willie became a celebrated...
Getting Started: Students
In this week’s update, we’ve added a new top-level heading titled “Getting Started: Students.” This is the one place on the site dedicated entirely to students. “The course” gives them a brief outline...
Paper 2 Resources - Quick Links to What's on the Site
May 2023 will be the first Paper 2 examination in the revamped Language and Literature course after the Covid-19 disruptions in the 2021 and 2022 exams. We want to take this opportunity in this blog...
Getting Started: Teachers
In this week’s update, you’ll notice that we’ve slightly redesigned the site. We’ve added a new top-level heading to align with the other InThinking websites. And in a few weeks, we’ll add another one...
2022 Paper 1: Sample Response 3 (Travel Blog)
Many of the students we teach love to describe the text in front of them. They might tell us everything that has happened. They might use phrases such as “engage the reader” or to “get their attention”...