We have selected a variety of literature texts commonly studied by students from Grade 10 upwards, and produced for them a series of Prompts based on actual classroom work.

The Prompts are study tasks (usually short pieces of writing) designed to take students into the heart of each chapter of a novel (or each scene of a play, or each poem in an anthology) as they have finished reading it. Together they help build up an overview of each of the five SCASI aspects of the whole piece of writing (Setting, Character, Action, Style and Ideas - the fundamental structure of the WordSmith Guides themselves).

They also include a range of more formal essay questions, varying in style and difficulty and easily adaptable to meet the demands of all major literature examinations for the 15-18 age range, including International Baccalaureate, Advanced Placement and GCE AS and A Level.

We plan to expand many of the WordSmith Prompts, in due course, into full-length study guides. We have made them available in this skeletal form to give teachers and students early access to them, and to allow users to offer us feedback on their appropriateness and effectiveness.

Here is the list of current Prompts. Each is downloadable as a .pdf file, and teachers should feel welcome to duplicate them for class use, or place them on a school network.

Click on the book title to download the file.

 

Prompts in preparation and to be released over the next few months:

  • Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
  • Jane Austen Northanger Abbey
  • E. M. Forster A Passage to India
  • Robert Frost Selected Poems
  • Nadine Gordimer Some Monday for Sure
  • Thomas Hardy The Return of the Native
  • Ernest Hemingway Across the River and Into the Trees
  • Khaled Hosseini The Kite Runner
  • Ruth Prawar Jhabvala Heat and Dust
  • Mary Shelley Frankenstein
  • Paul Theroux The Mosquito Coast

We'd be pleased to have your comments on any of the material: wordsmith@clix.pt. If you yourself have developed resources in a similar style for other texts, and would like to have them considered for inclusion under the WordSmith Prompts banner (with an authorship acknowledgment), please do get in touch.