Time for a breather..

Chillax with a book

It’s the summer holidays for most English A Level students – time to relax after final or mock exam stress, stretch your legs and wiggle your toes.

If you’ve got a reading list for the next academic year, now is a fab opportunity to submerge yourself in those texts, to experience them as readers perhaps for the first time ... before you have to start analysing and writing about them!

Pausing for a while

At Crossref-it, we too are taking a breather. In just the past year we have added:

• Four full-length text-guides on
• The selected poems of John Keats
• Othello, by William Shakespeare
• The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
• The Taming of the Shrew, by William Shakespeare
• Themed lesson sequences on each of these texts
• Thirty-four new Big Ideas from the Bible
• Revision worksheets on eight texts featured on site
• Eight new articles exploring poetic form.

Not surprisingly, we are now taking a break from adding further material for the present, so don’t be alarmed at the absence of blogs.

Meanwhile, having been built up to contain over 20,000 web entries, we trust that the current information more than meets your A Level English needs, so please enjoy exploring all that www.crossref-it.info continues to offer by scanning the green menu headings. And of course pass on details of the site to your mates and teachers.

Love literature, love life!

Exploring the Big Ideas which run through literature

Cultural foundations

There are some themes and concepts which writers play with again and again through the canon of literature. They assume that their audience are familiar with the original concepts and so can recognise where each author has alluded to the idea or tweaked it for their own dramatic purposes.

Roald Dahl does the same thing when he takes the reader’s familiarity with well-known fairy tales, then suddenly challenges expectations by changing the narrative. His Red Riding Hood doesn’t get eaten (after whipping out a pistol!).

Reading enriched

Alluding to culturally embedded images and themes adds a whole new layer of meaning to our experience of literature, as readers bring their awareness of the source material to bear on the texts they encounter.

However, this all falls down once we lose our connection with what was once ‘common knowledge’.

• For example, when Nelly accuses the elderly servant Joseph of being ‘the wearisomest self-righteous Pharisee’ in Wuthering Heights (ch 5), it means very little unless the reader recognises not only what a Pharisee is, but also the connotations of the term.

Often there’s not just one source for a concept, but it has built up through repeated usage. To explain the bigger picture, Crossref-it.info has a range of Big Ideas from the Classics and Big Ideas from the Bible. Crossref-it.info has just added to the latter as we encounter texts that refer to these concepts.

• So in Rabbi, Pharisee, teacher of the law students can discover just why Nelly used the word Pharisee as term of abuse.
• By exploring Poverty and wealth, readers will have a better understanding of Cornelia’s motivation in The White Devil, or the Old Woman’s homily in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, as they gain insight into ideas that run counter to our modern culture.

These are just a couple of examples. Crossref-it.info now features one hundred Big Ideas from the Bible. Exploring them over the summer holidays will really help you get to grips with your A Level Lit. texts come September.

Exploring The Taming of the Shrew: Lesson worksheets for A Level Eng. Lit. teachers

Last week Crossref-it.info launched a comprehensive new guide for A Level Eng. Lit. students examining Shakespeare’s problematic comedy, The Taming of the Shrew.

Now there is help for teachers.

New updates mean that the text-guide is now accompanied by two sets of freely downloadable worksheets:

• Investigate The Taming of the Shrew handouts pose exploratory questions on each scene in the play, helping students build up a valuable bank of notes. Collated from the text-guide and covering:
  • Induction and Act 1
  • Acts 2 and 3
  • Act 4
  • Act 5

these are great timesavers for teachers, and can be used to help students revise, catch up missed work or simply to set for homework.

• Exploring aspects of the play and its world in greater depth and breadth, there are six new collections of lesson ideas exploring:
  • The play’s unusual double opening of the Induction and Act 1
  • How Shakespeare employs – and deviates from – the comic conventions of his era
  • Whether Bianca really is a ‘perfect woman’
  • The ways in which Petruchio and Katherina are paired and opposed
  • How the theme of marriage is developed through the play
  • How issues of social order and disorder permeate the plot.

Complementing most of these explorations are easily photocopiable student handouts.

Text-guide links

Each worksheet suggests where students can find handy information to help them deepen their knowledge by linking back to relevant pages within the new text-guide on The Taming of the Shrew. From there they can follow other links or simply roam through the wealth of material provided.

Created by UK educationalists, you can trust Crossref-it.info resources!