Introduction Welcome to the Collins Checkpoint English Teacher Guide 8. We hope it will provide useful support to teachers worldwide, as they prepare students for the freedom, challenge and enrichment offered by the Cambridge Secondary 1 course for Stage 8.
Using the Student Book The Student Book is structured so that it builds the fundamental skills that underpin success at the end of Stage 8. It is divided into seven chapters. Each of the first six chapters focuses on a different writing ‘purpose’, while the seventh offers the chance to put all the skills into practice through exam-style tasks. Chapters 1 to 6 address these different purposes in detail and cover the Stage 8 learning objectives that relate to them:
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Writing to explore and reflect Writing to inform and explain Writing to argue and persuade Descriptive writing Narrative writing Writing to analyse and compare
Chapter 6 focuses on literary analysis. While this is not a requirement of the Cambridge Secondary 1 English curriculum framework or assessments, it nevertheless has the benefit both of broadening the range of material students encounter and beginning to embed skills at a basic level, which will be useful in literature studies. Chapter 7 offers a series of resources for assessment practice. While these can be used separately to secure a particular assessment style, as each question type is covered, they could also be set together as a more formal ‘mock’ end-of-stage assessment.
Features of the Student Book Each of the first six chapters is based loosely on a theme such as ‘extreme sports’ or ‘significant moments in history’ and enables students to learn and practise a range of general reading, writing, speaking and listening skills, in particular those that are part of writing for the featured purpose. Students will read a wide variety of texts from writers from many social, cultural and historical backgrounds and will write a wide range of texts themselves. Each chapter provides them with opportunities to complete two substantial tasks to show what they have achieved: one on reading and responding to texts, and one on writing for each type or purpose. From these, you will be able to assess students’ work to see how their abilities are developing across the learning objectives for Stage 8. The book has also been designed so that students revisit particularly important skills several times across the chapters. In some cases, this is to make sure that they can apply the skills in new contexts; in others it will be because a new aspect of the skill has been introduced to help them to progress. Key features of the book include Check your progress panels at the end of each two- or four-page unit. These will help students to assess their own progress. Three other text features to note are Checklists for success, which lists criteria that students should cover when completing a task, Key terms, which define important literary and language terms, and Vocabulary panels to support students when reading an extract.
© HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Introduction • 1