To help you excel with your GCSE English and GCSE English Literature check out our GCSE English and GCSE English Literature learning songs.  All songs have been created with practicing teachers and professional musicians and are independently proven to help with revision and learning.

For a limited period of time all downloads are only £1.79 per subject!!

Downloads include the featured song, sing-along backing track and a complete lyrics set, that includes extra GCSE revision notes.

We have learning songs that can help you with:

1.    Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

2.    An Inspector Calls by JB Priestly

3.    To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

4.    A view From the Bridge by Arthur Miller

5.    Blood Brothers by Willy Russell

6.    The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

7.    Othello by William Shakespeare

8.    Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

9.    Macbeth by William Shakespeare

10.  Lord of the Flies by William Golding

11.  Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austin

12.  Stone Cold by Robert Swindells

13. Exam Paper 1

14. Exam Paper 2

15. Persuasive Writing & Technique

Also check out our free GCSE English and English Literature articles. Providing you with great exam tips, hints and GCSE English Literature and GCSE English revision  notes.

We help GCSE English students learn and revise key exam and coursework topics through modern music.

We Love GCSE English and GCSE English Literature and want everyone else to love it as well. We believe that using music to help you learn and revise will help you remember key GCSE texts, GCSE persuasive writing techniques and the format of GCSE English and GCSE English Literature examination papers.

You can listen to demos of all our GCSE English and GCSE English literature songs within the shop section of this site. For free revision tips check out our LearnThruMusic community section, where free GCSE tips, revision techniques and notes are available on subjects such as:

• Lord Of The Flies

• Blood Brothers

• Pride And Prejudice

• To Kill A Mocking Bird

• Persuasive Device And Techniques

• Romeo And Juliet

• Of Mice And Men

• Macbeth

• A View From The Bridge

• Othello

• Stone Cold

• An Inspector Calls

• The Merchant Of Venice

• Persuasive Writing

• GCSE English exam paper 1

• GCSE English exam paper 2

• GCSE English and GCSE English Literature exam exam dates

Please get in touch with us here at LearnThruMusic and let us know what you think of our GCSE English and GCSE English Literature learning songs.

We want to help you revise and learn GCSE English and GCSE English Literature to your full potential.

Lord of the Flies, William Golding Chapter 11
“A single drop of water that had escaped Piggy’s fingers now flashed on the delicate curve like a star.”

Lord of the Flies, William Golding Chapter 11

“Behind them on the grass the headless and paunched body of a sow lay where they had dropped it.”

Lord of the Flies, William Golding Chapter 11

“Ralph–remember what we came for. The fire. My specs.”

Lord of the Flies, William Golding Chapter 11

“Samneric protested out of the heart of civilization”

Lord of the Flies, William Golding Chapter 11

“You’re a beast and a swine and a bloody, bloody thief!”

Lord of the Flies, William Golding Chapter 9

“‘Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!’”

Lord of the Flies, William Golding Chapter 7

“The desire to squeeze and hurt was over-mastering.”
Lord of the Flies, William Golding Chapter 7

“‘We musn’t let anything happen to Piggy, must we?’”

Lord of the Flies, William Golding Chapter 3

“Then, amid the roar of bees in the afternoon sunlight, Simon found for them [the littluns] the fruit they could not reach, pulled off the choicest from up in the foliage, passed them back down to the endless, outstretched hands.”

Lord of the Flies, William Golding Chapter 4
“I painted my face–I stole up. Now you eat–all of you–and I–”

Jack tosses piece of meat to Simon and shouts in frustration and rage,

Lord of the Flies, William Golding Chapter 8

“You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?”

Be sure check out our GCSE English Literature learning song, Lord of The Flies by William Golding “Before its too Late”

There are hundreds of free GCSE resources available online. Over the run up to this years GCSE exams we will be asking you to review your favorite free GCSE revision resource.

At LearnThruMusic we are dedicated to helping you excel at GCSE English and GCSE English literature, therfore we would like you to review free GCSE English and GCSE English learning resources. Starting with GCSE Bitesize

The BBC’s popular Bitesize revision guides have proved to be a valuable revision resource for students preparing to sit their GCSE’s.

GCSE Bitesize English Literature covers the following topics:

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Frankenstein
Great Expectations
Jane Eyre
Lord of the Flies
Of Mice and Men
Pride and Prejudice
To Kill a Mockingbird
Flight
Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit
The End of Something
Your Shoes
A View from the Bridge
An Inspector Calls
Hamlet
Macbeth
Much Ado About Nothing
Othello
Romeo and Juliet
The Merchant of Venice
William Blake: The Little Boy Lost / The Little Boy Found
William Blake: London
John Clare: Sonnet
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Inversnaid
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Charge of the Light Brigade
Walt Whitman: Patrolling Barnegat
William Wordsworth: Upon Westminster Bridge
W B Yeats: Song of the Old Mother
Simon Armitage
Gillian Clarke
Carol Ann Duffy
Seamus Heaney
Wilfred Owen: Dulce Et Decorum Est

If you have used the BBC GCSE Bitesize English or English Literature resource then please send us a review to help other students who may be approaching their GCSE exams.

As part of our FREE character profiles for 12 key GCSE texts. We want to help you revise and learn GCSE English and GCSE English Literature to your full potential.

Mrs. Johnstone: The very poor mother of 7 kids. Mrs. Johnstone was left by the fathers of the kids
Mickey: One of the twins central to the Blood Brothers story, Mickey lives with his mother. Micky falls in love with Linda.
Eddie: One of the twins central to the Blood Brothers story, Eddie lives with a rich foster mother.
Narrator: The narrator of the Blood Brothers Story.
Mrs. Lyons: Eddie’s foster mother. Mrs. Lyons is desperate for Eddie not to meet Mickey.
Linda: Linda falls in Love with Micky
Sammy: Son of Mrs Johnstone, Sammy is a nasty man.

Be sure check out our GCSE English Literature learning song, Blood Brothers by Willy Russell “Careful Mrs. Johnstone”

This article focuses on the stereotypes portrayed in the GCSE English Literature text To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee:

Original article sourced from the super teacher resource website Teachkit. Teachkit offer a great selection of free GCSE English and GCSE English Literature notes to help you revise and learn.

Stereotyping: To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird sets out to challenge some stereotypes but it may also reinforce some alternative stereotypes. One common criticism of the novel is that the black characters are idealized. Lula is an exception, objecting to the appearance at First Purchase of the Finch children.

Harper Lee attacks the stereotype of the promiscuous and sexually voracious black man, but she endorses the stereotype of “White trash”, in the Ewell family. In the USA there are many people who disapprove of dependency on the state, and on welfare payments – both the poor Cunninghams and the wealthy (but emotionally poor) Radleys are proud of their self-reliance.

The stereotype of aristocratic white women is held up to ridicule – their virtue is seen as excessive delicacy, and they appear as selfish and hypocritical. Scout wants to be like a boy, because she likes to be active. In general, the novel depicts men more favourably – or perhaps it shows that men may commit worse actions but women are more spiteful in what they say. Perhaps only a woman can be so tough in depicting her own sex (in this respect, Harper Lee writes rather in the manner of Jane Austen).

In a novel with a huge cast of characters, there is no reason to avoid using stereotypes in every case. There are plenty of characters, from Atticus to Dolphus Raymond, from Miss Maudie to Boo Radley, who do not conform to any stereotype.

We hope this article helps with your GCSE English Literature revision. Be sure to check out the LearnThruMusic learning song “From the other Side” To Kill a Mocking Bird.

If you have any links that you believe could help others excel at GCSE English or GCSE English Literature please let us know and we will post them.

In the meantime keep an eye on the community section of the LearnThruMusic website over the next few weeks. As we will be adding special promotion codes for a selection of our GCSE English and GCSE English Literature learning songs.

This article taken from Teachkit focuses on giving you an introduction to A View From the Bridge by Arthur Miller.

A short history of A View From the Bridge by Arthur Miller

A View from the Bridge has an unusually complicated performance history. It was originally a screenplay called The Hook, written by Miller with assistance from Elia Kazan, who had previously directed the playwright’s All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. The script, dealing as it then did with “waterfront corruption and graft” was eventually withdrawn by Miller in response to the Hollywood studio’s complaints that it was un-American (this was, of course, the age of McCarthy – the early 1950s). The Hook’s basic themes would nonetheless resurface in Kazan’s 1954 film, On the Waterfront.

Inspired now by the true story of a Brooklyn dockworker who informed on two illegal immigrants, Miller reconceived The Hook as A View from the Bridge. The play, a one-act verse drama, was a mild failure on Broadway in 1955; critics found its austere style uninvolving. Miller had wanted to create a play that would simply tell the tale he himself has heard, with no attempt to gain audience sympathy for Eddie’s – or anyone else’s – plight. Consequently, nothing was allowed onstage that did not directly contribute to the action. But Miller ultimately found that he had created a cold play, rather than a fascinating and suspenseful one.

In 1956, A View from the Bridge was revised for a new London production. The verse became prose, the length was expanded to two acts, and the characters were allowed to speak more – thus becoming more human and more sympathetic. While we may not identify with the Eddie Carbone of the final version, we are better able to understand what motivates him and therefore to sympathize with his basic dilemma: how to “let go” of the niece he has raised and loved as a daughter. As Miller writes in his introduction to the published revision,

“Eddie Carbone is still not a man to weep over…But it is more possible now to relate his actions to our own and thus to understand ourselves a little better, not only as isolated psychological entities, but as we connect to our fellows and our long past together.”

We hope this article helps with your GCSE English Literature revision. Be sure to check out the LearnThruMusic learning song “Think of Yourself” A View from the Bridge

The second, is part two of an extract from Teachkit. The article focuses on assessment and preparing for examinations in GCSE English Literature and GCSE English. The aim is to help GCSE (ks4) pupils in the build up to GCSE English and GCSE English Literature revision.

Comparison and contrast

What’s the difference? ask your students. As a method, no difference at all – you put A and B together (or A, B and C). And when they show some similarities we find a comparison and when we see some difference we make a contrast. So we compare Piggy and Simon as outsiders (in Lord of the Flies) and contrast Piggy, a rational and objective child-adult with Simon, a visionary dreamer.

Children need to beware of finding a contrast or comparison which is meaningless. Suppose they are comparing the Gradgrind family in Hard Times with the Conways in Time and the Conways. They could look at ideas of reaping and sowing, of single-parent families, of the relationship of house and home, of work and play and of the way both texts explore glimpses of the future. But it would be silly to write: “Hard Times is a novel written in 1854 but Time and the Conways is a play written in 1937”. And even sillier to write: “These texts are similar because both have women in them.” It’s not enough to find similarities or differences – they need to be interesting or tell us something.

So what kinds of similarity or difference are worth looking for? Are there things we can expect students to look for in any texts? There are – some of them will be in many and some are almost guaranteed to be in all texts. These could include comparisons or contrast in:

time (relative or absolute, short term or long term)
sex and gender
attitude, mood, atmosphere
purpose and audience
language, form, genre, structure and other technique or method
Relevance
the reader’s preference

And this list can be used twice over. First for comparisons between two (or among several) texts, and second for comparisons within a single text. Examples: we can compare (very usefully) Pip in Great Expectations with Jane in Jane Eyre – both are characters from humble homes in search of fulfilment through social mobility. But we can also compare each character within each text at different stages in the narrative. In fact both authors do this for us. And Kay in Time and the Conways does so – at the end of Act Two she asks what has happened to the family of which she used to be part:

“Oh, silly girl of Nineteen Nineteen! Oh, lucky girl!…Remember what we once were and what we thought we’d be. And now this. And it’s all we have…it’s us. Every step we’ve taken – every tick of the clock – making everything worse”

Implied meaning

Implied meaning is not anything the reader imagines to be in a text – it must be implied by something the reader has found. What the students needs to look for is anything which should maybe not be taken simply in its plain or obvious sense.

The Teacher Training Agency’s National Curriculum for Initial Teacher Training in secondary English teaching reads: “Teachers must develop pupils as critical readers, recognising that:

writers manage authorial relationships, e.g. those between (sic.) narrator, author and reader
* texts can be construed and interpreted in different ways.”

Allusion

This is a kind of reference – the text may contain a phrase or longer structure which echoes another text. Example? In Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ the line “And the first one now/Will later be last” is an allusion to the gospel of St. Matthew (19:30): “But many that are first shall be last.”

Understatement and overstatement

How can you tell when writers understate or overstate things? It’s not easy, but sometimes an author will appear to exaggerate or minimize a statement or attitude. A good example of understatement would be the final line of Mid-Term Break, where Seamus Heaney describes the coffin of his young brother as: “A four foot box, a foot for every year”. The understatement is partly in the slang eupehmism “box” for “coffin”, but mostly in the use of the measurements to tell us the age of the child and indirectly show the poet’s grief.

Irony

This takes many forms – what they all have in common is some space between what appears and what really is. A very familiar and crude form of irony is sarcasm, as when you greet a foolish action with “That’s really brilliant”. Dramatic irony occurs when the character on stage does not know what the audience or other characters realize, or when actions or words earlier in the play lead to some later action or consequence – as when Othello says to Desdemona “Honey, you will be well desired in Cyprus”, but it is his fear of another’s desire that leads to him killing her.

More generally, students should look out for the kind of irony where writers in some way distance themselves from the views expressed in their work – does the author really mean what he or she appears to mean? If there were no irony in the author’s stance, Swift’s A Modest Proposal would be horrible and inhumane. At different times, questions of good and bad taste may limit a writer’s readiness to be ironic.

Readers and readings

Reading the text | Reading the author | Reading the reading

This guidance will help students make use of the principles outlined above, as they make coherent responses to texts they study.

Students should look for ambiguity (alternative meanings). They should look for these both in the text, and in their response to it – for example where they change their reading after some reflection.

Students should look for ambivalence (alternative attitudes). They should look for these both in the text and in their reading of it.

Reading the text

In reading the text, students should try to achieve knowledge of content, familiarity with the text in detail and an appropriate (perceptive, sensitive) response. (Assessment objective 1)
Reading the text (AO1): examples

He has to shoot him in the head because if he didn’t do it, something more cruel would happen to him and he wouldn’t understand about it.

This book is about prejudice and injustice. It’s also about growing up and getting into other people’s shoes.

It’s mainly about racism but there’s a lot about growing up and learning about people.
There’s a lot of description about where they go but I like the bits where they are talking to each other.

At the start of the story…but later on…

When she talks to [name] she is…but when she talks to [other name] she…

Reading the author

In reading the author, students should try to achieve understanding of the writer’s purposes (in relation to the audience), of the writer’s means of control of the text and of the writer’s use of literary devices, methods and techniques. (Assessment objectives 1 and 2)
Reading the author (AO1 and 2); purpose and devices: examples

He wants you to think that Jack is organised and confident because the first time you meet him he’s leading the choir and giving orders

She makes you feel sorry for TJ when his “friends” let him down, even if you don’t like him because of the way he treated other people himself.

He thought all humans have evil in them, even if they are posh or so called civilised British. This is because he saw what decent people were like in war when there were no rules. Also he was a teacher and he must have seen nasty parts in lots of people he taught.

Keep you eyes peeled on the news section in the next few weeks we will be adding more articles to help with GCSE English and GCSE English literature revision.

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