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How many times have you had a student, pen in hand, poised over a blank and unspoiled piece of paper, look up at you and plaintively say “I don’t know where to start!”? Me too.
It’s not
that they don’t have the words – they plainly do as otherwise you wouldn’t
spend half the lesson telling (commanding, imploring, encouraging – the verb is
interchangeable) half the class to be quiet.
Joking
aside, it isn’t about a lack of language or vocabulary (or writer’s block as
some of them insist!) – it’s about
structure. They are thinking too much
about content and not enough about organisation.
Jeremy Bentham
once said: “Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often
man forgets the flowers at his feet”. We must forgive the very gender-specific
language used by this pre-eminent eighteenth-century British philosopher and
social reformer – but he wasn’t wrong.
In the case of GCSE English, language is “the stars” and structure “the
flowers”.
Before you close the tab with a tut and move on, let me explain a little further. Language is – or at least seems to me – hugely over-represented in GCSE English. There’s a veritable tsunami of language for students to get to grips with – whether it’s in the twenty marks specifically targeted at the way that writers use language over the two papers – or the texts that must be read and understood to respond to Section A questions - not to mention the texts that students must themselves write for the final question of each paper.
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