Clarification details
Updated December 2017. The section on choosing a connection has been updated in its entirety to address new issues that have arisen from moderation.
Choosing a connection
Students need to select the specific connection/s themselves. Teachers may have chosen texts with some similarities, but students will refine the ideas to focus on connection/s that interest them. At least one of the texts must be student selected.
There must be enough commonality so that the connection/s link across the four texts. If students choose several, quite different connections, it may be difficult for them to move beyond identification and into the required level of interpretation across all texts. Students generally find it easier to do this with fiction and with the text types that they respond to in the external standards.
One approach is for students to support their analysis of connections though differentiation. For example, the theme ‘fathers and sons’ might be differentiated by communication gaps between fathers and sons, consequences of these gaps, and how these relationships change over time. Another approach is to have more than one connection from the outset, for example figurative language use and ideas of patriotism in WW1 poetry.
Text choice
Overall, the texts selected need to be appropriate to curriculum level 7, so that students are able to meet the required level of analysis. The use of children’s fiction or several song lyrics is unlikely to provide sufficient depth for interpretation of a thematic connection.
Analysing the connection/s
Once students have identified and defined their connection, they will recognise it in the texts and interpret/analyse the connection using specific evidence from the texts as examples. Students may wish to consider each text separately, concluding with analysis of the connection that incorporates all texts, or they may wish to incorporate the recognition and analysis of the connection across the texts throughout their answer.
Supporting evidence
The selected evidence must link to and support the interpretation of the significant connection/s. Personal response to a connection, without analysis that incorporates specific details from the texts, does not meet the standard.
The English Secondary Student Achievement national co-ordinators provide a support document for assessing this standard. Below is the video: