How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Use of quotations
How to teach students to analyse texts effectively

Using quotations is a requirement in all GCSE English exams and rightly so. A quotation is a thing of beauty and is so versatile. There’s so much teachers can do with them in a lesson: we can analyse in great detail, or we can link to the broader text. Closed-book exams have placed a greater emphasis on knowing texts and memorising large swathes of quotations. But memory is finite and subjects are vying for available brain space, so I tend to place a lot of emphasis on learning single-word quotations. After studying lots of exam papers, you notice that the best students use lots of single-word quotations rather than longer ones.

Take the following words used to describe Romeo:

✵ pilgrim

✵ villain

✵ young

✵ madman

✵ rose

✵ waverer

✵ lamb

✵ effeminate

✵ sweet

I get students to memorise these because they serve so many functions, for example:

1 Analyse specific language.

Lamb — the noun reflects his inexperience and the fact that he hasn’t yet reached adulthood. It also reflects his lack of strength and experience.

2 Link ideas across the text and spot patterns.

Rose — links to the use of garden imagery with the friar’s garden and Capulet’s reference to Juliet as a ’bud’.

3 Highlight a character’s attitude to a subject.

Effeminate — highlights Romeo’s realisation that love has changed him and his arguably sexist attitude.

The great thing is that each word is loaded and has so many uses. I find, as Mark Roberts has in his blog post on one-word retrieval practice,⁴ that looking at words changes how you teach because you begin to collect word banks and expand the students’ repertoire of quotes. You can also track the development of character through the use of three words.

Take Scrooge in A Christmas Carol:

oyster — ogre — friend

The words used here quite obviously show us how the character develops and changes. However, some of the words selected might allow a more subtle interpretation. Students can easily explain how Scrooge is an oyster at the start. Then they can continue the imagery when they say that by the end of the story Scrooge opens up and shares his pearl (wealth) and, as a result, becomes a friend to Bob Cratchit. Simply put, from single words students can make connections across the whole text. So much meaning can be squeezed out of a word. Give it a go. How much can you say about the word ’serpent’ when used to describe Romeo?