/ Secondary
PGCE

SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE AUDIT 2017-18

ENGLISH

NAME / DATE

Purpose of the Audit

Your identification of subject knowledge strengths and weaknesses will be used as a basis for discussion during your individual interview and will inform target-setting afterwards. When the course begins, the audit will also be used to inform planning for the development of key areas of individual trainee subject knowledge.

Please complete the audit below, identifying both strengths and areas for development.

  1. English Literature (ie literature written in English, not necessarily in Britain).

Please identify the authors/texts with which you are most familiar, whether through formal study or personal reading. You also need to identify areas for further development

Poetry before 1900
Strengths / Areas for development
Poetry after 1900
Strengths / Areas for development
Drama before 1900
Strengths / Areas for development
Drama after 1900
Strengths / Areas for development
Prose before 1900
Strengths / Areas for development
Prose after 1900
Strengths / Areas for development
Please list any novels you have read which are aimed more specifically at the 11-16 age range – contemporary fiction for teens

2. English Language, Media and Grammar

English language: history, structure and usage
Strengths / Areas for development
English language: social contexts and language acquisition
Strengths / Areas for development
Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar
Strengths / Areas for development
  1. The English curriculum

Key Stage three – National Curriculum
Strengths / Areas for development
Key Stage four – GCSE specifications
Strengths / Areas for development
Key Stage five – AS and A level specifications
Strengths / Areas for development

Now read the following Simon Armitage poem and be prepared to discuss this poem during your subject interview. You may wish to draw comparisons between this poem and ‘To a daughter leaving home’ from the subject knowledge test.

Mother, any distance greater than a single span
requires a second pair of hands.
You come to help me measure windows, pelmets, doors,
the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors.

You at the zero-end, me with the spool of tape, recording
length, reporting metres, centimetres back to base, then leaving
up the stairs, the line still feeding out, unreeling
years between us. Anchor. Kite.

I space-walk through the empty bedrooms, climb
the ladder to the loft, to breaking point, where something
has to give;
two floors below your fingertips still pinch
the last one-hundredth of an inch...I reach
towards a hatch that opens on an endless sky
to fall or fly.

-- Simon Armitage