Literature of the Hart

by Michael Hartland As an English tutor, I am often asked to help students improve their ability to study and write about literature texts .  Especially in the summer term! The first thing to do (after the student has read the text, of course!) is to  get an overview of the text . This means being able to stand back and see the wood for the trees.  How does it all fit together?  What's important at the beginning?  How do things develop?  How does it end? There are some very practical exercises I use to help students get an overview of texts they are studying either at GCSE or A Level.  This improves confidence and ultimately their performance and grades. Find out more about our  tutoring services   here . Find out more about the   free introductory session   here . Find out more about English  ebooks    here .

by Michael Hartland GCSE ENGLISH LANGUAGE requires students to produce a piece of transactional writing, like an article, blog, speech or letter. It’s a deceptively difficult task to do well, and I have learnt as an English tutor that many students do not have a process to follow.  Many don’t even plan. I’ve developed a very clear way to structure this kind of writing by planning arguments and counter arguments.  Usually students’ writing improves immediately once they grasp this structured approach. The next level is then to build in different sentence types: starting each paragraph with a topic sentence (simple sentence) and including more complex forms including colons and semicolons to develop detail. Our ebooks give practical examples about how to do this, and the material in them are used in our lessons - to great effect! Find out more about English  ebooks    here . Find out more about our  tutoring services   here . Find out more about the ...

by Michael Hartland NARRATIVE AND DESCRIPTIVE WRITING are both examined at GCSE and above. As an English tutor I am always being asked to help students improve in these areas, whether it's for primary school tuition, 11+, preparation for GCSE, GCSE itself, and for English at A Level and beyond. My ebook “ But I’m no good at creative writing ” was written to help students succeed, and I use material from it regularly in my online tutoring.  You can even read an eleven chapter mini-novel that one of my teenage students wrote, inspired by this teaching, here . Often students don’t know simple structures to write descriptively or to frame a short piece of narrative writing.  My ebook, and my tuition, address these issues through easy-to-learn guidance.  Without fail, students feel much more confident once they have a framework, and they are then set free to let their ideas flow! Find out more about Hartland English Guides, our English  ebooks    here . Find ou...

by Jenny Hartland YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE is an essential part of your identity. So when you are looking for an English language tutor, you want someone who will respect that.  At Hartland Educational Consultancy Services, your own language is very important to us. Our EAL tutors know that every language has its own characteristics and distinctive features. And when you start lessons in English as an Additional Language, you are bringing your experience of your own language, or languages, to the learning process.   Maybe your language doesn’t have a word for ‘the’, maybe it gives nouns a gender, or maybe it has fewer tenses for verbs than English. It is possible that the English language has sounds that don’t exist in your language. Don’t worry - our EAL tutors understand this. We know that your route to learning English needs to be as individual as you are.  So when you start English language lessons through Hartland Educational Consultancy Services, we design a person...

Sukitha started lessons with me quite recently, and this is her first completed story.  She is still in primary school, but by working together we improved on her first draft so that there are five different sentence types used in her exciting adventure story! Can you spot them? In the dark, creepy jungle I was trying to find a jaguar so I could take a picture and send it to my exploring group but before I could look around a jaguar came charging towards me. I was extremely scared and ran off . "Grrr!" The sound made me jump.  I took a step backwards which made the jaguar come closer to me . When the jaguar came closer I thought that I should charge to the opposite direction which made the jaguar charge which freaked me out a little but I kept running. When the jaguar was out of sight, I rested a bit and carried on my adventure in the jungle which was quite hard because the jaguar charged  towards me again, so I ran again. Luckily , I had a sword and I poked the s...

MANY STUDENTS are looking for final improvements to develop their writing before their summer exams. As a teacher of English over many years I learnt that students could learn how to use colons and semicolons quite quickly if they were presented in the right way. As students get older, they naturally will write sentences that need these wonderful punctuation marks, but sadly the majority of students have not usually been taught them. “Explain and expand” , and “connect or contrast” are some of the guidelines I offer, and you can read more in my ebook “ A Dash of Punctuation ” which is available here . Using colons is not something to fear : they can seriously improve your writing. Semicolons confuse some ; they liberate others! Do you see how you can use these great punctuation marks? You can find out more about how I help students develop their writing in my other ebooks: The Five Sentence Type Workbook here  and But I'm No Good At Creative Writing! here . Find o...

by Michael Hartland I'VE RECENTLY been giving some tips, especially designed for students about to take summer exams, but relevant to anyone wanting to improve their English. Today’s post is about varying sentence types. In my experience as an English teacher and tutor, most students do not understand the basic grammatical structures of sentences.  This is true even of very bright students. You can only get so far without understanding grammar.  Without this grammatical understanding, you can’t access more complex structures and more sophisticated punctuation. If you read the following, you’ll see five different sentence types in use: Really?  Students write sentences all the time.  Many rely on simple sentence forms and this can make their writing unambitious.  Complex sentences, which require more exact punctuation, are rarely used.  Multiple complex sentences, which are really quite advanced sentence structures, are usually unheard of, but this means th...

by Michael Hartland THIS IS ANOTHER student story, this time by Aahil.  We used the well-known poem 'Jabberwocky' by Lewis Carroll as the starting point. I then applied teaching from my ebooks to help Aahil improve the variety of sentence types he was using and to improve his characterisation and description. You can find out more about how I help students develop their writing in my ebook But I'm No Good At Creative Writing! here , and in my other guides, The Five Sentence Type Workbook here and A Dash of Punctuation here . The lush green jungle riddled with trees smelt like sap and bear honey. It was filled with velvet moss and when the birds cried they sounded like a choir singing in harmony together... You can read the full story here . Find out more about Hartland English Guides, our English  ebooks    here . Find out more about our  tutoring services   here . Find out more about the  free introductory session   here .

This is another student story, this time by Aahil.  We used the well-known poem 'Jabberwocky' by Lewis Carroll as the starting point, then Aahil added characterisation and description to develop his short story...   The lush green jungle riddled with trees smelt like sap and bear honey. It was filled with velvet moss and when the birds cried they sounded like a choir singing in harmony together.  A person with the name of James was directed by a rainforest exploration group and was sent to the jungle to explore the mythical creature, the Jabberwocky. There was a thought that puzzled his mind: how could he find such a creature as the Jabberwocky in such a serene place? Then, he heard animals chanting with a scared tone, “Beware of the Jabberwocky, he's close and he’ll eat you if you get near him !”  He wandered he could take down such a fierce creature so he turned around and watched the scared animals flee behind him and he knew that he couldn’t let the Jabberw...

by Jenny Hartland This is another great teaching resource we use in the teaching of EAL and ESL for those who are learning or seeking to improve their English. We ask you to imagine that you have been shipwrecked on a desert island. We give you a list of resources that you can choose from to help you survive - from a box of matches to a length of rope. This always prompts a wide range of opinions about what would be the most useful, creating lots of discussion and opportunity to practise spoken English . Very soon, and after a lot of fun, you will have mastered the English past conditional , through lots of practise of this key grammatical construction. Find out more about the  tutoring we offer   here . Find out more about the  free introductory session   here . Find out more about our  ebooks  to encourage better writing  here .

By Michael Hartland I RECENTLY PUBLISHED an 11 chapter story by one of my students who is in Year 9  - it's a mini novel!  It was inspired by using teaching material from one of my ebooks - "But I'm No Good At Creative Writing"  - and also by one of his favourite books! Anas worked on this for over three months, and we reviewed each chapter as part of each week's tuition.  You can read the opening chapter below, and the full story  here . Chapter 1 Butler crashed into Orion’s  study. “What is it Butler?” “It’s… it’s.. Mrs Fowl. She's really sick.” Orion pushed past Butler and sprinted up the grand stairs. When he reached her bedroom, he realized that his mother’s distinct odour was no longer there . Instead, it was replaced with a sick fragrance. Orion slowly entered the bedroom. “Mother! What is it?” Mrs Fowl groaned softly. She didn’t reply. Orion panicked and was about to rush to his mother’s bedside table and cry on her shoulder when his scientific bra...

  Sometimes students complete surpass all expectations!  This story is by Anas.  He has been working on it for over 3 months, completing one chapter each week as part of his ongoing tutoring.  I think you will be impressed!  Chapter 1 Butler crashed into Orion’s  study. “What is it Butler?”   “It’s… it’s.. Mrs Fowl. She's really sick.”   Orion pushed past Butler and sprinted up the grand stairs. When he reached her bedroom, he realized that his mother’s distinct odour was no longer there. Instead, it was replaced with a pretty yet sick fragrance. Orion slowly entered the bedroom. “Mother! What is it?”   Mrs Fowl groaned softly. She didn’t reply. Orion panicked and was about to rush to his mother’s bedside table and cry on her shoulder when his scientific brain kicked in. He approached her and examined her. “I’ve never seen this before…”    He decided to call his magical fairy friends to help him. He started speaking into his hand an...

by Michael Hartland EVERYONE wants to do better in exams.  As an English tutor, I train my tutees to plan. Without planning, you can’t write a thoughtful, structured answer to a question.  Without planning, you won’t even write clearly, because you won’t have thought through what you want to say. Without planning, you may not even write relevantly, or you may change your line of argument halfway through an answer. There are so many different ways to plan: mindmaps, bullet points, comparison tables, for example. But what matters most of all is that students take seriously the need to plan, and use that valuable planning time to create the structure for a good quality answer in their exams. Find out more about our  tutoring services   here . Find out more about the  free introductory session   here . Find out more about English  ebooks    here .

by Michael Hartland MANY students are now approaching their summer exams, and as an English tutor and teacher I have developed a whole range of strategies to help young people succeed in their exams. The first tip is to really understand the mark allocation and timings required for different questions . For example, in English Language GCSE, some questions are worth only 1 or 2 marks, but some can be worth 12 or 16 marks.  And to make it worse, the higher mark questions come later in the paper so that poor timing early on can have disastrous results. If you calculate the available number of marks and divide it by the number of minutes then you can work out how long you can spend on each question.  Usually 1 or 2 mark questions should only take 1 or 2 minutes, but higher mark questions worth 12 or 16 marks should take something like 15 or 20 minutes. Low mark questions should be done quickly. The worst that can happen in a 1 mark question is that you lose just 1 mark. Bu...