In my experience of teaching English, I think that National 4 is one of the most difficult classes to teach. Many learners are placed in this class due to their ability level and/or, to be frank, their behaviour needing more support before they can be presented for exams. They might have huge gaps in attendance or other disruptions in their learning that resulted in them not obtaining enough evidence of them working at the required level before the end of S3.
Whatever has happened before they join your National 4 class, this means you will be working with a mixed ability group, often presenting challenges that could derail your lessons, and this requires patience, time and fresh approaches to learning. All of these additional demands on to your everyday teaching practice can make it difficult - and we at Conduit English are here to help. Our blogs might be a great place for a newly qualified teacher to start, or an experienced teacher looking for new ideas.
To start your year, we have created a National 4 English Course Organiser. This resource can be used as an editable template to create your own course organiser for National 4, editing information and applying it to your text choices to plan the year and share this with your learners. This is part of a whole course outline for National 4 and begins the teaching journey for the course. The learning continues with our National 4 English Editable Self Assessment. Learners will use this resource to check and rate their current ability in English to begin National 4. This should be revisited throughout the academic year to chart individual learner progress.
Our Editable National Four English Internal Assessment Tracker is designed to keep you on track if attendance is patchy or learners wish to know where they stand in terms of units passed.
For work on ‘Analysis and Evaluation’, we offer a National 4 English Reading Assessment: The Impact of Earthquakes. This well-received resource contains questions and has the answers provided; this can be used to consolidate skills in reading, understanding, analysing and evaluation. To strengthen listening skills, this National 4 English Practice Listening Assessment: The Academy Awards explores the history of the ceremony, the popular reasons people watch it and some of the more controversial events from the awards.
When working on writing, we present our National 4 Discursive Essay Plan: Choices. This is an essay plan aimed at teenagers that breaks down the steps to writing their discursive folio piece and bolsters the ‘Creation and Production’ part of the course. I have found that encouraging reflection and focusing on the choices learners have made (and the choices they will make to get where they want to be in the future) results in a fantastic response brilliant to showcase their writing.
At the end of the year, learners could complete the National 4 English Language Checklist. Its aim is to help learners to identify their areas of strength and development when it comes to key language terms they should know within the National 4 course as they prepare to move on to National 5 if this is their pathway.
What is changing?
I have heard that change is inevitable, except of course from a vending machine. Therefore, it was no surprise to read that the SQA have begun to 'tweak' their courses in preparation for 2025's complete exam overhaul, beginning with National 4's Added Value Unit this June.
"From session 2024-25, learners will be required to read one text or more and present their findings in a critical essay or oral presentation. The updated added value unit assessment will also state that learners can choose a literary text."
Many teachers will be relieved at this change, but it does mean that our AVU offerings will need to be revisited. We currently offer a National 4 AVU Assessment Booklet (Non-fiction) - but a new resource has been added in preparation for August 2024.
Our new AVU unit for National 4 focuses on Robert Frost’s fantastically disturbing poem ‘Out, Out’ and contains a cloze exercise, analysis questions and a final critical essay, with planning paragraphs to guide a learner response. This should hopefully allow learners to obtain their unit pass.
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