Redefining English for the More Able is a practical guide offering English teachers a range of strategies to stretch and challenge their students. Written by Ian Warwick, founder of London Gifted and Talented, and Ray Speakman, this book provides a fresh perspective on the purpose of English teaching and the benefits it can offer all students. Drawing on an array of ideas and examples from different genres of literature, the book discusses how ‘threshold concepts’ can be used to frame English teaching and push the boundaries of students’ learning. The chapters provide example lesson plans targeted at different age groups from Key Stages 2–5, and address different aspects of English, including short stories, poetry, film, drama and science fiction. Warwick and Speakman examine how the requirements for teaching more able students have received more recent focus under Ofsted, and offer specific examples of activities and reflective questions that can engage students more deeply in their appreciation of English. This well researched and accessible guide will be an invaluable tool for English teachers, teaching assistants and school leaders wishing to reflect on new ways of motivating and teaching the more able in order to develop the intellectual curiosity of all their students.

Redefining More Able Education is an essential, up to date and challenging introduction to the many factors involved in teaching more able students. Written by Ian Warwick, founder of London Gifted and Talented, and Ray Speakman, this book challenges our understanding of provision for the more able and explores ways in which we can ensure that students reach their full potential. Providing a thorough overview of topical research, the book offers a range of practical solutions for engaging students and encouraging them to become more independent in their learning. Warwick and Speakman explore key ideas including differentiation, resilience and motivation, and unpick issues including the history of more able education, the relationship between intelligence and achievement, working with marginalised groups and how students can overcome barriers when applying to top universities. A dedicated chapter summarises 21 easy-to-implement strategies that can make a real difference to teaching practice. This definitive guide to more able education will be essential reading for teachers, school leaders and any education professionals reflecting on different approaches to motivating and teaching the more able in order to better provide for all their students.

What is English as a school subject for? What does knowledge look like in English and what should be taught? Making Meaning in English examines the broader purpose and reasons for teaching English and explores what knowledge looks like in a subject concerned with judgement, interpretation and value. David Didau argues that the content of English is best explored through distinct disciplinary lenses – metaphor, story, argument, pattern, grammar and context – and considers the knowledge that needs to be explicitly taught so students can recognise, transfer, build and extend their knowledge of English. He discusses the principles and tools we can use to make decisions about what to teach and offers a curriculum framework that draws these strands together to allow students to make sense of the knowledge they encounter. If students are going to enjoy English as a subject and do well in it, they not only need to be knowledgeable, but understand how to use their knowledge to create meaning. This insightful text offers a practical way for teachers to construct a curriculum in which the mastery of English can be planned, taught and assessed.

"If you read this book early in your career, you won’t need to go on the ten year mission I did to find this all out for myself and work out how to apply it. You have a clear road map here - take it!" - Amazon review ****** How can you take ideas from cognitive science and explicit instruction and use them to enhance teaching and learning in your secondary English lessons? Based on contemporary research findings and supported by a range of classroom examples, this accessibly written book demonstrates how cognitive load theory, Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, explicit instruction and broader cognitive science ideas can be applied to the teaching of English in secondary schools. Key topics include: Explicit teaching of grammar and writing Deliberate practice to improve student writing Broadening students’ vocabularies A guide to instructional sequencing Tom Needham has been teaching for over fifteen years and currently teaches English in South London.

researchED is an educator-led organisation with the goal of bridging the gap between research and practice. This accessible and punchy series, overseen by founder Tom Bennett, tackles the most important topics in education, with a range of experienced contributors exploring the latest evidence and research and how it can apply in a variety of classroom settings.In this edition, Clare Sealy explores how schools can get the most out of a rich curriculum, editing contributions from a wide range of writers.

This edited book examines how teacher education utilises international immersion and field teaching (or service-learning) experience to develop teachers’ global, multilingual and intercultural competencies, in preparation for entering today’s culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Through a series of theory-based case studies, the authors demonstrate how teachers’ awareness of social inequities and responsive actions, the ability to bridge one’s own and others’ perspectives, and understanding of key principles of second language learning are pedagogical concepts and skills that become ever more essential across all mainstream K-12 educational contexts. The chapters bring together the voices of teacher educators, intercultural learning theorists and pre- and in-service teachers to identify threads of practice and theory that can be applied within teacher education more broadly. This book will be of interest to academics, instructors and graduate students in the fields of teacher education, language learning, intercultural communication and social justice education.

Language, while seemingly static, is dynamic and ever-changing, necessitating adaptability in various fields of language studies. It is especially true in a globalized world and an information age. In the field of language and its applications, it is essential to reconsider and redefine existing issues and envision how the changes may have impacts on human beings and on the entire globe. Redefining the Role of Language in a Globalized World is an essential scholarly publication that explores the role language will play in a globalized world and how language changes over time through its interdependent relationship with technology. Featuring a wide range of topics such as bilingualism, native speaker prejudice, and social inequality, this book is essential for educators, linguists, researchers, curriculum designers, academicians, policymakers, librarians, and students.

Writing in the cosmopolitan metropolis of Baghdad, Alfarabi (870-950) is unique in the history of premodern political philosophy for his extensive discussion of the nation, or Umma in Arabic. The term Umma may be traced back to the Qur'ān and signifies, then and now, both the Islamic religious community as a whole and the various ethnic nations of which that community is composed, such as the Turks, Persians, and Arabs. Examining Alfarabi's political writings as well as parts of his logical commentaries, his book on music, and other treatises, Alexander Orwin contends that the connections and tensions between ethnic and religious Ummas explored by Alfarabi in his time persist today in the ongoing political and cultural disputes among the various nationalities within Islam. According to Orwin, Alfarabi strove to recast the Islamic Umma as a community in both a religious and cultural sense, encompassing art and poetry as well as law and piety. By proposing to acknowledge and accommodate diverse Ummas rather than ignoring or suppressing them, Alfarabi anticipated the contemporary concept of "Islamic civilization," which emphasizes culture at least as much as religion. Enlisting language experts, jurists, theologians, artists, and rulers in his philosophic enterprise, Alfarabi argued for a new Umma that would be less rigid and more creative than the Muslim community as it has often been understood, and therefore less inclined to force disparate ethnic and religious communities into a single mold. Redefining the Muslim Community demonstrates how Alfarabi's judicious combination of cultural pluralism, religious flexibility, and political prudence could provide a blueprint for reducing communal strife in a region that continues to be plagued by it today.

Contacts, on the individual and institutional levels and in the political and aesthetic spheres, lead to redefinitions of existing identities through frictions and, sometimes, clashes. Focusing on the material conditions of such contacts, frictions, and clashes, this volume particularly explores their essentially spatial nature, highlighting the stakes of such definitions and redefinitions of space. Efforts at defining and mapping spaces, physical experiences of contacts, frictions and clashes, tensions between different groups or genres and literary or political competition for space and influence lead to geographical, social, political, and aesthetic, but also bodily and psychological, definitions and redefinitions.

This short study offers a contribution to the flourishing debate on post-Reformation female piety. In an effort to avoid excessive polarization condemning conventual life as restrictive or hailing it as a privileged path towards spiritual perfection, it analyses the reasons which led early-modern women to found new congregations with active vocations. Were these novel communities born out of their founders' rejection of the conventual model? Through the comparative analysis of two congregations which became, in seventeenth-century France and England, the embodiment of women's efforts to become actively involved in the Catholic Reformation, this book offers a nuanced interpretation of female religious life and particularly of the relationship between cloistered tradition and aposotolic vocations. Despite the differences in their national political and religious backgrounds, both the French Ursulines and the Institute of English Ladies shared the same aim to revitalise the links between the Catholic faith and the people, reaching out of the cloister and into the world by educating girls who would later become wives and mothers. This study suggests that these pioneering Catholic women, though in breach of Tridentine decrees, did not turn their backs on contemplative piety: although both the French Ursulines and the English Ladies undertook work which had hitherto been the preserve religious men, they were motivated by their desire to help the Church rather than by a wish to liberate women from what eighteenth-century writers later perceived as the shackles of conventual obedience. It is argued that the founders of new, uncloistered congregations were embracing vocations which they construed as personals sacrifices; they followed the arduous path 'mixed life' in an act of self-abnegation and chose apostolic work as their early-modern reinterpretation of medieval asceticism.