2. LL1 Poetry Teaching Resources
Introduction
This document has been compiled from material previously distributed at
INSET.
Contents:
Approaching LL1 - Practical Suggestions
Grammar through poetry – nouns and adjectives
Grammar through poetry – conjunctions
Poetry presentations – context
Framework for analysing single texts
Framework for comparing and contrasting texts
LL1 making connections
LL1 section A – non-fiction texts
LL1 The Kraken – PowerPoint
LL1 New Prince New Pomp - PowerPoint
LL1 Poetry grammar quiz
1
3. Approaching LL1
Practical Suggestions
1. Develop a framework for studying the poems e.g. The Cone
2. Begin discussion/analysis of each poem with an overview of the poem’s key ideas
and the relevant contextual factors which may have influenced or shaped the poem
in some way.
3. Take a structured approach to the teaching of each poem by using the cone and the
bullet points given in the examination questions for LL1:
• overview (Content/Context)
• structure and form
• narrative stance
• grammar/ sentence structure
• lexis and imagery
• Phonology and sound patterning
• Orthography and punctuation
4. Get the students to work in groups by dividing up the bullet points and allocating one
focus per group. The students should record their analysis in the form of an S
(statement) E (evidence) A (analysis) grid.
5. The individual groups should feedback their findings to the rest of the class and every
student should be able to complete a Framework for analysing single texts based on
a set poem.
6. When the students are comfortable with analysing the poetry using the single text
framework, then they should be able to apply the technique to an unseen text that is
not from the poetry anthology.
7. Present the students with a variety of texts which have thematic links with the poems
in the anthology. These texts can come from a wide variety of sources. Do not
attempt any comparisons at this stage. Still focus on single text analysis.
8. Eventually introduce candidates to the framework for comparing texts by using texts
they have already analysed in isolation.
9. Follow up task: Working individually, in pairs or groups, set the students a poem from
the anthology and the task of finding a text which is linked thematically to the poem.
The students should produce a comparative analysis of their set poem and the
unseen text they selected. These pairs of texts could then be exchanged with other
individuals/groups in order for the students to attempt an exam style question set by
their own classmates. A peer assessment task using the marking guidelines and
assessment criteria from the grid would be an interesting way to conclude the
activity.
2
4. Introduction to Language: Nouns and adjectives
• The easiest types of nouns to identify are common or concrete nouns which name
objects, e.g. table, book, chair.
• Nouns also name emotions, ideas or concepts, e.g. happiness, valour, courage, war.
These are called abstract nouns.
• Collective nouns are word which group things together e.g. herd, swarm, class.
(Don’t confuse these with plural concrete nouns such as books, the collective noun
for books would be a library or a collection)
• Proper nouns name specific people or places, e.g. Emma, Gorseinon, Wales,
Microsoft.
• Adjectives describe nouns, they give us extra information about the colour, shape or
feel of the noun e.g. the green chair, a funny film
A good test for a noun is to try and put ‘the’ in front of it, or to try and fit it into the
structure: ‘the ____ of it’, i.e. ‘the strength of it’.
A good test for an adjective is to try and place it between ‘the’ and a noun e.g. the
green chair, or by placing very before it: ‘the very green chair’
Identify the nouns in this passage (even though it is nonsense):
It was a groggy day in Igglestrub and the gubbles were wuggling. ‘There’s too much
wugglification here,’ grumbled Gugglehunk. ‘You can’t see the raggles for all those
ugglewumps.’ The gubbles and even some of the soggles, had been wuggling since
Uggsday. They threatened an uggsung. That scared everyone. At the first sign of an iggle,
people reached for their zuggs.
Identify the adjectives in this passage:
Friendly, Affectionate Man, 35, seeks similarly Warm, Affectionate, Sensual Woman for
these plus warm but unpossessive friendship, loving sex and mutual support. London. Letter
with telephone no. – and photo?
Love That Doth Reign and Live Within My Thought
1. Identify all the nouns in the poem.
2. Put them into three lists: Abstract, Concrete, Proper.
3. Which heading contains the most nouns?
What does this suggest about the poem and its imagery?
4. Identify 5 adjectives in the poem.
5. Do the adjectives appear before or after the noun they are describing? If an
adjective appears before a noun we say it is a pre-modifier. If it comes after the noun
we call it a post modifier.
3
5. Introduction to Language: Conjunctions
• Co-ordinating conjunctions link units of equal value e.g. and, but, or, neither...nor,
either...or
• Subordinating conjunctions join a subordinate clause to a main clause they often give
information on when, where, why, how or if an action takes place e.g. while, as,
where, so that, if, although, like.
Identify the type of conjunctions used in these sentences:
1. The girl and the boy.
2. I love the theatre because it makes drama come alive.
3. Neither friend nor foe.
4. The woman looked as if she was going to shout.
5. Would you like tea or coffee?
6. I go to restaurants where I can get good service.
7. While she loved her new home, she still missed the old cottage.
8. I want to study so that I can go to university.
9. The dog was excited but friendly.
10. If they go quickly, they should be here by evening.
The Author To Her Book
Identify the conjunctions in these lines from the poem:
1. ‘Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,’ (line 3)
2. ‘Where errors were not lessoned (all may judge)’ (line 6)
3. ‘I cast thee by as one unfit for light’ (line 9)
4. ‘Yet being mine own, at length affection would’ (line 11)
5. ‘Thy blemishes amend, if so I could’ (line 12)
6. ‘I washed thy face, but more defects I saw’ (line 13)
7. ‘And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw’ (line 14)
8. ‘Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet’ (line 16)
9. ‘And take thy way where yet though art not known’ (line 21)
10. Which caused her thus to send thee out of door’ (line 24)
4
6. Poetry Presentations – Context
Aim: In pairs or small groups, to produce a five minute presentation on the life and work of
one of the poets from the Anthology.
You have three weeks to complete your assignment. The first presentations will be
delivered on………….
In your presentation you must:
Read aloud the poem from the Anthology written by your chosen poet
Present the information on your poet under three headings:
1. BIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT
2. SOCIO-HISTORICAL CONTEXT
3. LITERARY / ARTISTIC CONTEXT
Produce a summary of your key points, to be distributed to your classmates, on a single
side of A4
You will be formally assessed on the content and presentation of your information.
Presentation Tools:
• ICT (PowerPoint)
• Interactive Whiteboard
• OHP
• Handouts
• Mind Maps / Flow Charts
• Timelines
• Bullets / Headers
You may wish to ask yourself the following questions when conducting you research
1. What links can I find between the poet’s personal life and their poetry?
2. Have the poet’s religious beliefs, occupation, relationships, hobbies, philosophy,
friends, parents, hopes or fears affected their poetry in any way?
3. What sort of world was the poet living and working in?
4. Which country does your poet come from? Had the poet travelled out of that country
and how may this have affected their poetry?
5. Who was the reigning monarch at the time the poet was writing their poetry, how did
this affect their work?
6. In what religious context was the poet working?
7. What impact did attitudes to women, or people from different cultural or class
backgrounds have on the poet’s work?
8. Was the country at war or was it a peaceful time when you poet was writing? How
may this have affected their work?
9. Was the poet one of a group or movement of poets who shared similar aims or
poetic style?
10. Was the poet influenced by the work of other poets who preceded them?
11. Were the concerns of the poet’s writing shared by artists or musicians of the period?
5
7. Framework for Analysing Single Texts
Overview ( Content/Context):
Statement Evidence Analysis
Structure
and Form
Narrative
Stance
Grammar
and
Sentence
Structure
Lexis and
Imagery
Phonology
and Sound
Patterning
Orthography
and
punctuation
6
8. Framework for Comparing and Contrasting Texts
Overview ( Content/Context):
Text 1 Text 2
Statement Evidence Analysis Statement Evidence Analysis
Structure and
Form
Narrative
Stance
Grammar and
Sentence
Structure
Lexis and
Imagery
Phonology and
Sound
Patterning
Orthography
and
punctuation
7
9. Making the connections
Aim: To identify a text for comparison with one of the poems in the anthology and to
produce an analytical comparison of both texts.
You have two weeks to complete your assignment. The unseen text and your
analysis of the pair of texts must be handed in on _________________
In your analytical comparison you should include:
• an overview of both texts, comparing the content and the context in which
they were produced
• comparison of the structure and form of each text
• comparison of the narrative stance of each text
• comparison of the grammar/sentence structure of each text
• comparison of the lexis and imagery of each text
• comparison of the phonology and sound patterning of each text
• comparison of the orthography and punctuation of each text
Once you have completed your own assignment, you will be exchanging your pair of
texts for a different pair selected by someone else in the class. In effect, you get to
be the examiner and set your friends an exam style question – don’t be too mean
though, remember they are going to be setting one for you too!
8
10. TASK 1 LL1 SECTION A
• Look quickly through the texts below.
• Now find poems from the WJEC Anthology that would link well to them.
TEXT A Extract from War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres
I remembered how the Marine commanders in Kuwait had boasted that the
Marines were an “all-weather fighting force,” unstoppable by anything that Iraq’s
annual spring storm season could hurl at them. But the wind and the mud made me
feel like a character in one of the Wilfred Owen poems I had studied in high school
(Owen, unluckily, was killed by German gunfire one week before the Great War
ended; his mother received the telegram on Armistice Day). At the time, those
poems had seemed so old, so irrelevant. Modern war, after all, was clean, quick, and
efficient. The Americans could move across entire countries in the time it took the
Germans to advance three feet during the Battle of the Somme. To me, the five-day
Gulf War I had seemed like a thrilling video game, fought with laser guidance and
aircraft that looked as though they had been designed and built on Mars.
This, however, was no video game. I imagined what my face must have
looked like, caked, like everything else, with orange-brown slime. Just to make
matters worse—quite a feat in the circumstances, I thought—a thunderstorm arrived
from the north, making us flinch with every rumble.
TEXT B An article by Roland White for The Sunday Times
Can a computer help you write a novel?
Roland White puts a new software package to the test (with a
little help from Tolstoy)
'Love-tryst mum in death plunge'
The questions most frequently asked of great novelists must surely be: where do you get your ideas from,
and how exactly do you work? Well, from my very brief experience of writing great novels, this is what the
routine seems to be. You sit at your desk in the morning. On this desk are a computer, a cup of tea, a lucky
gonk and some spare opium. You stare out of the window for a couple of minutes, and then you begin to
write. Oh, it's great stuff. God, this is good. You can forget the Booker, Salman, this year's is pretty much in
the bag. After what seems an age, you stare at your screen and the words "Chapter One" stare back at you.
You admire these words for about five minutes, but then doubts set in. You get up from your seat and pace
up and down. You decide to make more tea, but in the kitchen you spot a pile of ironing. You do the ironing.
Then you make another cup of tea, which you drink in the kitchen, feeling miserable. You return to your
screen, and begin to type once more. By lunch, the words "Chapter One" now read "Part the First". It's
certainly got style, but is it really an improvement? You are not sure. By the end of the day, it's been
changed back to "Chapter One".
I am pleased to report, however, that this is very much yesterday's way of writing the great novel. It was all
right for Dickens, Tolstoy and that crowd, but from now on, the modern author will be doing it all by
computer. A businessman called Richard Lee has invented some software called newnovelist, which - for
£29.99 - claims to take the pain out of creativity.
9
11. TEXT C From The Times
October 16, 2007
Hazardous drinking, the middle-class vice
David Brown
Post your comments at the bottom of this article
Drinkers in middle-class areas are more likely routinely to consume “hazardous” amounts of alcohol
than those in poorer areas, research published today shows.
Social drinkers who regularly down more than one large glass of wine a day will be told they risk
damaging their health in the same way as young binge drinkers.
The figures will be used by the Government to target middle-class wine drinkers and to make
drunkenness as socially unacceptable as smoking.
Dawn Primarolo, the Public Health Minister, said: “Most of these are not young people, they are
‘everyday’ drinkers who have drunk too much for too long. This has to change.”
The research, commissioned by the Department of Health, is the first nationwide analysis of the
impact of “social drinking”. It found that people living in relatively affluent areas are more likely to be
drinking at above sensible levels than those living in deprived areas.
The percentage of adults drinking “hazardous” levels of alcohol ranges from 14.1 per cent to 26.4 per
cent. “Hazardous” levels for women are between five and twelve large glasses of wine a week and for
men between seven and seventeen glasses.
One large glass of wine — 250ml at 12 per cent alcohol — represents three units. A pint of normal
strength beer is two units.
The research, by the North West Public Health Observatory, concludes that just 22 units per week will
push a man into the “hazardous” category, while women need to drink just 15 units. Some of the
country’s most wealthy areas were found to have the biggest number of “hazardous drinkers”, with
Runnymede in Surrey and Harrogate in North Yorkshire topping the league tables.
10
12. TEXT D an extract from The Royal College of Psychiatrists website
Introduction
We all feel fed up, miserable or sad at times. These feelings don't usually last longer
than a week or two, and they don't interfere too much with our lives. Sometimes
there's a reason, sometimes they just come out of the blue. We usually cope with
them ourselves. We may have a chat with a friend but don't otherwise need any help.
Someone is said to be significantly depressed, or suffering from depression, when:
their feelings of depression don't go away quickly and
they are so bad that they interfere with their everyday life.
What does it feel like to be depressed?
The feeling of depression is much more powerful and unpleasant than the short
episodes of unhappiness that we all experience from time to time. It goes on for
much longer. It can last for months rather than days or weeks. Most people with
depression will not have all the symptoms listed here, but most will have at least five
or six.
You:
feel unhappy most of the time (but may feel a little better in the evenings)
lose interest in life and can't enjoy anything
find it harder to make decisions
can't cope with things that you used to
feel utterly tired
feel restless and agitated
lose appetite and weight (some people find they do the reverse and put on
weight)
take 1-2 hours to get off to sleep, and then wake up earlier than usual
lose interest in sex
lose your self-confidence
feel useless, inadequate and hopeless
avoid other people
feel irritable
feel worse at a particular time each day, usually in the morning
think of suicide.
11
14. The Kraken
Alfred Lord Tennyson
(1809 – 1892)
Follow these instructions to view the above slide show:
• left click the mouse on the box above (this will open/close
the attachment window)
• choose the file ‘LL1 Poetry Powerpoint The Kraken.pps’
• click ‘Open’
13
15. New Prince, New PompNew Prince, New Pomp
Robert SouthwellRobert Southwell
Follow these instructions to view the above slide show:
• left click the mouse on the box above (this will open/close
the attachment window)
• choose the file ‘New Prince New Pomp.pps’
• click ‘Open’
14
16. Poetry/Grammar Quiz
1. Which sonnet has the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg? (English/Shakespearean Sonnet)
2. What is the turning point in a sonnet called? (volta)
3. What is a stanza made of four lines called? (quatrain)
4. What type of rhyme follows an abab pattern? (alternate rhyme)
5. How many syllables are there in a line of tetrameter? (8)
6. What type of foot has an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable? (iambic)
7. Is a ‘Caesura’ a run-on line or a mid-line pause? (mid-line pause)
8. What type of sentence is ‘The students passed the exam’? (simple sentence or imc)
9. What name is given to a list without conjunctions? (asyndetic listing)
10. What name is given to the repetition of phrases? (parallelism)
11. Which sentence mood expresses a command? (imperative)
12. What is foregrounding? (Re-arrangement of syntax to focus on opening element)
13. What mode of address is this sentence written in? ‘I love to rise on a Summer morn’
(First person address)
14. Name four categories of noun. (proper, abstract, concrete, collective)
15. What is the first person singular possessive pronoun? (mine)
16. What is the third person plural possessive determiner? (their)
17. What is the second person singular subject pronoun? (you)
18. What does an adjective do? (modifies a noun or pronoun)
19. Which word class is used to convey the tense of an action (verbs)
20. What type of verbs are ‘should’, ‘could’ and ‘would’? (modal verbs)
21. Which word class does the word ‘quickly’ belong to? (adverb)
22. Are the words ‘too’ and ‘so’ intensifiers or de-intensifiers? (intensifiers)
23. Which word class do the words ‘on’, ‘beneath’ and ‘along’ belong to? (prepositions)
24. What is the definite article? (‘the’)
25. ‘And’, ‘But’, ‘Or’ all belong to which word class (conjunction, co-ordinate)
26. What is a simile? (comparison using word ‘like’ or ‘as’)
27. What is the opposite of personification? (reification)
28. What techniques does a writer use when the environment mirrors emotions? (pathetic fallacy)
29. What does the word ‘connotations’ mean? (the ideas provoked by a certain word/words)
30. ‘Proud PM punches pitbull’ is an example of what sound effect? (plosive alliteration)
31. What is sibilance? (the repetition of ‘s’ or ‘z’ sounds)
32. What is assonance? (the repetition of vowel sounds)
33. Spell the word ‘onomatopoeia’ correctly. (o-n-o-m-a-t-o-p-o-e-i-a)
34. What name do we give to spoken words enclosed in inverted commas? (direct speech)
35. What is the difference between ‘monologue’ and ‘dialogue’? (the number of speakers)
36. What is the technique called when common nouns are given proper noun status?
(non-standard capitalisation)
37. What is elision? (the shortening of words be removing letters e.g. can’t)
38. What is the name given to the removal of whole words or phrases? (ellipsis)
39. What does orthography mean? (spelling)
40. What does typography mean? (layout)
15