Your exams and how this blog works

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In your English lessons, you are studying for TWO GCSEs.

English
and English Literature.

English
60% exam (2 2-hour papers, Paper One and Paper Two)
20% speaking and listening coursework
20% written coursework (four essays: creative writing, transactional writing, Shakespeare, poems from other cultures)

English Literature
70% exam (one 2.5-hour paper consisting of three sections - one on a play, one on a novel, one on an unseen poem)
30% coursework (four essays: Shakespeare, poems from other cultures, pre-1914 poetry, pre-1914 prose)

The exam board is WJEC, the Welsh board.

This blog has been designed to help you understand and revise for all three papers. There is lots of information, tips, practice questions and links.If you look on the right, there is a list of labels. Click on these and it will direct you to all the information about that particular label. For example, click on An Inspector Calls and you will get four posts about the play, how to answer a question on it, key quotes, etc. Or, if you are worried about answering Section B type questions, click on that and you will get all the posts helping with that.

Saturday 9 May 2009

An Inspector Calls - Sheila Birling


Sheila is the Birlings' eldest child, and engaged to Gerald. She got Eva sacked from a shop job because Eva laughed at how she looked in a hat.
  • 'And so you used the power you had, as a daughter of a good customer and also of a man well-known in the town, to punish the girl just because she made you feel like that?' (24)
  • Her views change as the play progresses. When she hears what her father has done to Eva, she says 'but these girls aren't cheap labour - they're people' (19)
  • As the play progresses and the Inspector reveals their complicity with Eva's death, Sheila gets more and more agitated, and her parents call her 'hysterical.' (48)
  • At the end she repeats the words of the Inspector's last speech - 'fire and blood and anguish' (71), and unlike the elder Birlings is genuinely changed by the night's events.