Thinking AloudEnglish Blog

AO5 (critical engagement) has a reputation.  It arrives in lessons and mark schemes like a spectral presence: vague, unsettling, prone to terrifying otherwise confident students into silence.  ‘Different interpretations’, it whispers. ‘Critical debate’ . ‘Alternative readings’.

I remember when drama wasn’t something squeezed into an end-of-term production slot or a “practical enrichment” box on the timetable.  It was part of English, right there in the Key Stage 3 curriculum, alongside metaphors, Macbeth, and the Year 8 class jumping off the ends of their desks as Icarus tested his wings.  (Apologies to the Head whose office was below my classroom.)

TV's The (Celeb) Traitors - a masterclass in the need to plan an essay. With no spoilers! There’s something almost indecently satisfying about pulling off a plan.  The clean click of cause and effect.  The sly grin of inevitability.  It’s why The A-Team and every child of the 70s loved it when a plan came together.  And why The Traitors, especially last night’s celebrity edition, is the most exquisite piece of clockwork on television.

Free Masterclass: Tuesday 28 October, 6pm (UK): a free 30-minute masterclass to kick things off. If your teenager is muttering about daggers, witches, and the general futility of existence, it’s not just adolescence. Well, it could be. But it’s also Macbeth season.

I’ve just cracked open The Vegetarian. And then I stopped writing and carried on reading. That was my day yesterday.

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is uncomfortably relevant. An intelligent man - a scholar, no less - trades his soul for limitless knowledge and twenty-four years of supremacy. In our world, the Mephistophelean pact isn’t written in blood but coded in algorithms.

You know the feeling, you’ve paid for the flights.  You’ve wrestled with SPF, exchange rates, suitcase weight limits, and the mysterious disappearance of all chargers.  And somewhere between the airport WHSmith and the sun lounger, your teenager did something unexpected: they started reading a book.

Somewhere between the fourth bramble and the fifth step, my golden retriever puppy decided that she had experienced quite enough of coastal walks, thank you very much.  With the quiet dignity of a small Victorian child in a Dickens novel, she stopped dead in her tracks, sat down and gazed at me with the expression of one forced to walk barefoot to the workhouse. Reader, I carried her.

This isn’t a reading list disguised as revision. It’s a summer-friendly mix of films, podcasts, and context boosters designed to help students feel confident come September and give parents a way into the texts that will dominate the conversation by mock season.

Rejection: the gut-punch every writer faces.  History is full of books dismissed before becoming literary classics. 

Ah, January - the time of year we vow to eat kale, embrace exercise, and Marie Kondo our lives, only to end up binge-watching TV...

The game at iGCSE/GCSE level is all about how they handle the question, develop an argument, and structure their essay.

Because here’s the thing: good literature essays demand a belief in your argument.

Tuition. That golden ticket to better grades, fewer exam jitters, and the occasional boast at the school gates. 

Scrabble. The ultimate arena where vocabulary triumphs and three-letter words go to die.  And a great game to boost your vocabulary!

Is your child staring blankly at their English Lit essay, fear not - The LangLit Studio Literature tuition is here to help.

There he was, in all his intellectual glory, stretching like a cross between Socrates and Usain Bolt.