ENRICHMENT

Super-curricular research tasks

These tasks are part are our new Enrichment Level system for Year 9 and 10 only. They are designed to encourage you to look deeper into English Literature by finding out more about the individuals, movements or historical events that are important to the history of literature. Come to your Enrichment Day to hand in your completed project and receive your rewards. You will need to provide a list of your sources and you’ll need multiple sources for each project, which you explain when you hand in the project. If you produce something outstanding, you will receive a Head Teacher’s award.

Website exclusive research tasks

We will be adding new tasks to this section of the site over the course of the academic year.

General research tasks — for students in Year 9 and above

Research an important novelist, playwright or poet

Choose any one of the underlined writers in the Literature Playlists and produce a research project on them. When did they live? What were the key events in their life? What are their most significant works? Why they are important to English or World Literature?

REWARD: Check your Enrichment Book

Research a significant historical event

To fully understand literature, you need to understand the context from which it arose. Research one of these important historical events, including what literary texts it relates to:

  • The Renaissance and Humanism

  • The Protestant Reformation

  • The European witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries

  • The Enlightenment

  • The Industrial Revolution

  • The two World Wars and their impact on society and literature

  • The ‘New Woman’, Second Wave and Third Wave Feminism

REWARD: Check your Enrichment Book

Research an important text

Find out more about an important literary text from the past. You are best to start off with the texts on the All-time Essentials playlist – they’re the real biggies in terms of English Literature. However, you can choose any pre-1945 text from the Literature Playlists, or a text of your own choosing, with approval from your English teacher. It just needs to be important in terms of English or World Literature. What is the text about? Who is it by? Why is it important? What was its influence on future works of literature or on society at large?

REWARD: Check your Enrichment Book

Research a literary movement/genre

Choose one of the literary movements below and research its significance. When did it happen? Who were the key figures in the movement? What were some of the key texts in the movement?

  • Epic poetry

  • Tragedy

  • Sonneteering the history of the sonnet

  • Romanticism

  • The Gothic

  • The 19th Century Novel

  • Fin de siècle decadence

  • Modernism

  • Detective fiction

REWARD: Check your Enrichment Book

Create a timeline of important literature

Create a visual timeline of important literature over at least 500 years. Make it look as nice as possible, with summarised details of each text, including the writer and text-type.

REWARD: 2 Enrichment Levels

GCSE research tasks — for students in Year 10 and above

Research all of the essentials – the big one!

If you want to have a sense of the sweep of English Literature, you need to be able to see the big picture. This big task is all about seeing that. Complete an epic research project into all of the texts on the All-time Essentials playlist. Get a sense of what each text is about and why it’s significant, both in literary terms as well as in broader cultural terms. This must be a deep dive.

REWARD: Check your Enrichment Book

Research a school of literary criticism

Just as literature goes through trends and movements, so too does literary criticism (e.g. the discussion and analysis of literary texts). Research one of the schools of literary criticism below, including what its aims were, who some of the key figures were and what texts it particularly related to.

  • New Historicism

  • Post-colonial literary criticism

  • Marxist literary criticism

  • Feminist literary criticism

  • Queer and gender theory

  • Psychoanalytical literary criticism

  • Ecocriticism

REWARD: Check your Enrichment Book

Research an aspect of Linguistics

English is not just about literature – it’s also the study of language, both the English Language and other languages. This is called Linguistics and is a key part of English Language A Level. Get a head-start on this by researching one of these aspects of Linguistics.

  • Syntax

  • Semantics

  • Pragmatics

  • Morphology

REWARD: Check your Enrichment Book

Research the bible and its links to the literary canon

The Bible is one of the most influential books ever written and its influence on Western literature has been immense. Research the ways in which the Bible has influenced literature, including which books or passages from the Bible have had the biggest influence.

REWARD: Check your Enrichment Book