Why Living Texts?
"The Living Texts course offers our Year 9 students so much. They can explore a range of genres, learn and practise a variety of skills, and enjoy meeting the challenge of an authentic examined qualification, without any pressure."
"It’s a terrific step between the traditional Key Stage 3 curriculum and GCSE for students with high aspirations."
Flexibility and choice
The flexibility of Living Texts means that teachers are able to choose the texts they want to teach and are most appropriate to their students. Students at Reading School study texts including prose, poetry, scripts and speeches by a range of authors from Bill Bryson to Edgar Allen Poe and Winston Churchill. This breadth of study gives students experience of a wide range of text types and styles of writing and builds their confidence in approaching new and unseen texts.
"Creating an exciting and varied programme of study for Year 9 is made easy by the Living Texts course. The structure of the units, with each one leading up to an assessed task and each one linked to different skills and text types, lends itself to building a programme of study which encourages clear progression throughout the academic year."
New skills that improve student's progress
The assessment tasks in Living Texts help to build students’ critical thinking and skills of analysis giving them experience of analysing, comparing and recreating texts. These enable students to build their writing skills whilst exploring texts and writing creatively. The presentation element of the Comparing Texts unit also gives students speaking and listening experience that prepares them for the speaking and listening element of the new specification GCSE.
The skills that students have developed whilst studying Living Texts have had the knock on effect at Reading School of improving results and student progress.
"Our first cohort of Year 9 Living Texts students went on, as Year 11s, to help our Department make an 8% improvement in English Language A* and A grades compared to the previous year’s results, and much of that was down to the excellent critical and analytical foundation provided by Living Texts. As a teacher, Year 9 has become a lot more fun again."