It’s all ‘bout that quote, ‘bout that quote, no ideas!

Quotation learning is a poor proxy for literature revision. There, I’ve said it. The problem I have with it is that a quotation can only get you so far with exploration of a text. In fact, it stops the flow of thought and ideas. Students mould the thinking to the quotation rather than the quotation to the thinking. 

Over the years, I have seen quotations, plot (I take no prisoners on this one) and context become the juggernauts of revision. Students feel confident if they know some quotations, they know the plot and they can throw in some contextual facts into an essay. In fact, they have become the markers for revision. But, this is where the rub comes, they generate a level of false confidence. They give the appearance of knowing the text well, when that isn’t the case. 

Revision in English has become very knowledge led. But, the knowledge is limited to quite a narrow field. The knowledge of quotations. The knowledge of plot. The knowledge of context. If we are honest, these are the easiest bits of knowledge related to our subject. They are the things we can easily teach, text, and repeat in lessons. This ‘easy’ knowledge spills into how students revise. They revise these ‘easy’ knowledge elements and because they are more concrete than other types of knowledge there’s a sense of accomplishment. Students feel a sense of achievement in a largely abstract subject because they have learnt something concrete. Teachers feel a sense of accomplishment because they have taught something tangible and concrete - and easily measurable. 

There is some value in learning quotations, plot and context, but in the English classroom these should not be the drivers. Sadly, they are, which in turn converts to the idea that in English, all you need to revise is quotations, plot details and contextual facts. They are foundational things rather than exploratory and cumulative things. If you don’t believe me, then check out the examiner’s reports. I have yet to see one that says that students need to learn quotations. 

The knowledge of ideas. The knowledge of concepts. The knowledge of the writers’ feelings and thoughts. These are generally left behind with this concrete knowledge revision focus. We don’t see revision built around these. The complexity of the subject is the main reason. The plurality of ideas means that you cannot easily mark these sorts of things. You cannot easily tick or cross them. You cannot boil them down to a quick true or false task. You cannot summarise them easily. We don’t factor this complexity into revision and so revision doesn’t focus on the complex. Yet, what we expect students to do is get these complex ideas naturally armed with quotations, plot details and contextual knowledge. 

For this reason, I’ve been playing around with revision with our Year 11s. They are preparing for their first mock in November and I thought I’d explore different ways to build and develop a level of complexity in the revision. So, each Friday, we set the first ten minutes on answering these questions about a character studied. Not a quotation really in sight. 

I wanted them to think big and exploratory but also think like they would under exam conditions. They aren’t writing in full sentences, but bullet points. Then, I reveal what I would reward on an online version of the document.  The idea is to score as many points as you can.

Interestingly, students throw out ideas. I’ve used fatherly, is that ‘parent-like’? If they have an idea that I haven’t included, then I add it and add a score to it. This week I gave one idea 5 marks, because it was so good. The idea that the Friar links to the theme of rebellion. Cue more students trying to outdo that 5 marks. 

What I noticed was a real engagement with ideas and characters. Exploration and ideas were at the heart of the revision. It wasn’t just knowledge recalling, but idea forming… and exploring. It is quite easy to do but the key thing is showing a hierarchy of ideas. That’s where we can help make something abstract seem concrete. The categorising of some words or ideas being better is often something we say but don’t actively work on in lessons. Yes, some words are better to describe a character than others. Some words are precise and some words are general when describing things. 

The texts are massive banks of quotations. Seeing texts as disjointed entities is the problem here. Our obsession on quotations is warping how students interpret texts. They are thinking around the quotations and not thinking around the text. We need to reassert that distinction in lessons. A student that can think around a text writes the best essays.   

Ideas are the interesting things in English and we have a duty to make sure that our subject isn’t all quotations and extracts. If we are not careful, students are interpreting the subject as being all about the quotes and not the ideas. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

Crying over words. They are more than tiers.

In English teaching, we tend to neglect the fact that students arrive in our classroom with a suitcase of words in their brain already. We can easily neglect it by obsessing over fancy words. A student can spell ‘hamartia’ correctly but cannot articulate a character’s journey to that point. They know what the character’s flaw is. They know what ‘hamartia’ means. They know ‘hamartia’ is important so ‘that’ becomes the impetus for their writing. Just like I have written ‘hamartia’ four times, because supposedly it makes me sound clever. 

Words can be fooling and deceptive. Words don’t necessarily equate to meaning. I have taught students who have thrown words at me with the hope that one or two stick and make them sound clever. I still to this day get students throwing in ‘discombobulated’ into their writing, thinking I’d be suitably impressed. Secretly, I think, when reading it, how no writer uses that word in a normal conversation or their writing. Ok, maybe, Jane Austen. Even then, she’d use it in an ironic way. 

‘Word soup’ is often the phrase I use to describe these pieces of writing. The writing usually goes something like this: 

The juxtaposition of hamartia and catharsis connotes the Elizabethan Chain of Being. 

Like a massive juggernaut, these tier three (fancy words that ‘supposedly only academics and rich people use’) drive the writing. The student has said goodbye to the text they are studying and joined the jargon bus. Now, there might be a glimmer of meaning there, but the reader has to do a lot of the work. The reader has to unpick the meaning. The student isn’t doing the work. The reader is. That ‘word soup’ sentence doesn’t show precise meaning. In fact it shows very general meaning and every ‘show boat’ meaning. The words, therefore, give the illusion of understanding. They are the English teacher’s equivalent of the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’. The writer thinks they are dressing their writing as something fancy, when in reality the writing doesn’t cover the ‘crack’ or ‘cracks’. 

The problem I have around vocabulary is that when you put words into tiers you forget the connectability and contextuality of words. To talk about ‘juxtaposition’, you need tier 2 words (the fallen down the crack of the sofa words) and some tier 1 words (the words you use every day). That one word doesn’t work on its own, which is what some weaker students think. You cannot write the word ‘catharsis’ in a sentence, roll your sleeves and say, ‘job done!’. Nor can you proceed with an explanation of what the word ‘catharsis’ means. Sometimes, you get to a point in the subject of English where it isn’t so easy to itemise and compartmentalise things. 

Precision around word use is what we see in the best responses in English. They don’t throw words at the reader, but they carefully select the right word for the context. Their meaning is measured, clear and precise. It is hard to get students to mirror that. The root of the problem is nouns. Lots of us spend ages getting hung up about adjectives, verbs and adverbs when getting students to write analysis. They are usually window dressing. I have seen the verbs around a writer’s intent, which can give the sense of meaning, but without the understanding they fall flat. 

Lots of the time, when we are working on analysing texts, we focus on the addition of words. Adding words to a sentence. Adding words to a paragraph. We’ve often forgotten about nouns. Look at any weak student and you see the variety of their nouns is limited. Romeo this. Romeo that. Students might have some adjectives, but without some decent nouns to attach the adjectives to they generally falter. For that reason, that’s why we have been working on nouns and building a student’s knowledge of nouns. Unless they know alternatives or are directed to them, they rarely use them. That’s why I have started producing text sheets like this one for ‘Romeo and Juliet’. 

Nouns for characters	Nouns for events	Nouns for character aspects
husband	truth	arrogance
father	threat	bravado
villain	discovery	care
generation	kiss	carelessness
hero	plan	caution
admirer	actions	determination
priest	consequences	duty
wife	wedding	fairness
beloved	secret	haste
women	grudge	honesty
rebel	grief	humour
family	conversation	idealism
parent	suicide	ignorance
mother	understanding	kindness
gang	insult	knowledge
support	cause	loyalty
lover	deception	optimism
son	action	passion
servant	death	pessimism
child	fight	playfulness
leader	fallout	power
men	disagreement	pride
bystander	reconciliation	rashness
dreamer	feud	responsibility
guardian	infatuation	romanticism
authority	devotion	sensitivity
friend	miscommunication	strength
daughter	vow	warmth

If we think about child language acquisition, we learn nouns first when learning to speak. Students are often limited by their use of nouns. Yes, teach them some fancy words, but if they are not using precise nouns and synonyms then the foundations of their ideas are limited. If we look at the best writers, they tend to cycle through nouns but also make inferences through nouns. The ‘cause’ in one sentence connects to the ‘fight’ in another one. By providing students with nouns we can start formulating some sentences. 

The priest's caution over the wedding causes the child to want to do it even more. 

The child’s loyalty to her father is questioned. 

Once students have got these nouns they can add Shakespeare or any writer. They could add Shakespeare to that sentence or even write an additional sentence. 

Shakespeare uses the priest’s caution to reflect the gulf between the old and young generations. 

Shakespeare uses a child’s loyalty to highlight the problem that women faced in Elizabethan society: a duty to a husband outweighs a duty to a father. 

Of course, we now have another set of nouns for students. Nouns to describe the thing Shakespeare is tackling. Or any other writer for that reason. 

 

gulf	problem	fear	insecurity	divide	issue
divide	challenge	apprehension	uncertainty	separation	concern
gap	obstacle	anxiety	self-doubt	partition	matter
rift	dilemma	dread	vulnerability	schism	topic
chasm	difficulty	phobia	instability	discord	subject

  

danger	contrast	dilemma	consequence	conflict	distance
risk	difference	predicament	result	disagreement	separation
hazard	distinction	quandary	outcome	clash	remoteness
peril	divergence	enigma	repercussion	strife	gap
threat	disparity	conundrum	aftermath	confrontation	distance

You could go on and on with looking at nouns, because the next stage would be the themes. What nouns could we use to describe the themes in the text? This could carry on with the writer’s feelings and so on. 

Nouns are the bricks that form ideas. Without a good collection of nouns, your ideas tend to get nowhere. I do think there is some merit with teaching students to work on their verbs, adjectives and adverbs, but without the nouns to construct the framework of meaning we are generally chucking tinsel on the writing. 

Another way to look at it is how we use nouns to refer to characterisation. We can start constructing meaning by using these nouns. 

Motive	Fear	Confidence
intent	insecurity	security
mission	paranoia	bravery
purpose	cowardice	determination
desire	hesitation	audacity
hope	anxiety	heroism
wish	pessimism	fearlessness
aim	phobia	guts
objective	panic	boldness
target	dread	arrogance
agenda	unease	blindness
scheme	agitation	commitment
goal	repulsion	endurance
plan	disgust	strength
design	avoidance
intention	aversion
focus
dream
drive
rationale
impetus

Mercutio’s rationale is about looking for fun in all situations which might indicate his fear of growing up and taking responsibility. 

The Nurse's aim is to make Juliet happy, a substitute for her own daughter, which gives her confidence to challenge Capulet when he attacks her verbally. 

Of course, when you have nouns then you can  build around them. 

Shakespeare highlights the gulf … 

• ‘subtle gulf’ - add an adjective 

• ‘the subtle gulf that drives a wedge across society’ - add a verb 

• Controversially, Shakespeare - add an adverb

As you can see, there’s so much you can do with nouns. Recently, with a Year 9 class we spent a whole lesson looking at nouns we could use to describe characters and events in the play ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. It was much ado about nouns. Sorry - couldn’t resist! Then, we explored the adjectives we could attach to nouns. However, one student decided to offer ‘big’ and ‘small’ for every option. We explored how Leonato could be described as a ‘fickle father’ with his ‘conditional love’ for Hero. We discussed how Don John could be described as an ‘ineffective villain’ because of his ‘weak plots’. This led us to explore how we could use the adjective ‘effective’ and ‘ineffective’, exploring what context the words work best with. We were building links, but refining and correcting understanding at the same time.  To be honest, this is quite a simple activity or thing to do. Provide students with a grid and get them fill the grid with nouns and then look at adding adjectives to those nouns.

There’s so much potential for exploiting noun usage when studying a text. If we are serious about schemas and developing word knowledge, then we need to take a closer look at the language around texts. Especially the nouns. We are happy to throw in a high-brow concept  in a lesson, but what if a student hasn’t got the words or nouns related to explaining that concept in their own writing? I feel that maybe in our search for improving students we have been misguided like the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’. We need something. Nouns.  

Thank you for reading. Because you have made it through quite a long blog, I have included a link to one of my booklets around teaching aspects language precision in Year 9 here. 

Xris

P.S. I apologise if any nouns have been injured in this blog. Of course, some nouns can be adjectives. Word class often depends on context.