Sunday 28 October 2012

BBC Radio 4 In Our Time Archive

The In Our Time radio Programmes Archive are now available. Here you will find a wide range of radio programmes covering all the literary periods of your main texts. Hereis one on Oscar Wilde and The Aesthetes. There are also a series of Shakespeare Programmes to access. I have put a link on Twitter to the recent elizabethan Tragedies programme which will be useful for The Tempest and Tis Pity She's a Whore.

Sunday 21 October 2012

Students' Commentary on Great Gatsby chapter 8

Thank you to the students who produced this video commentary on Gatsby chapter 8. If you scroll down to the bottom of the blog you will also find more student soundcloud audio commentaries taken from student presentations on chapters 6,7,8 and 9.

Saturday 20 October 2012

Video lectures from the world's leading universities

I have been on Oxford university's English department site writersinspire.org ( we have a link on the blog.) They have some great links to video lectures.See below. The Harvard University one on The Tempest is particularly interesting and you should watch it. Find them here .There is a separate link below for The Tempest Lecture.

UC Berkeley ItunesU
On ItunesU, the University of California at Berkeley has published some audio lectures from a series of UC Berkeley courses given by the hilarious and engaging Professor Charles F. Altieri. Download Itunes free of charge, click on ‘ItunesU’ in the store, and search Altieri.
English 45B: Altieri offers a survey of the western canon, including: Lectures 6 & 7: Jonathan Swift Lecture 10: William Blake Lecture 11: Romanticism Lecture 15 & 16: Jane Austen’s Emma
English 117S: Altieri’s course on Shakespeare, covering Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, All’s Well that Ends Well, The Winters Tale, and The Tempest
McGill University
Professor Paul Yachnin analyses Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in his podcast The Trial of Shylock.
University of Cambridge
Dr. Raphael Lyne offers his free online audio course, Shakespearean Comedy.
Columbia University
Columbia offers a free online digital exhibition, Shakespeare and the Book.
Harvard University
Professor Marjorie Garber offers an online video/audio course on Shakespeare’s later plays, from Measure for Measure to The Tempest great lecture Shakespeare After All.
MIT
Diana E. Henderson gives a guest lecture at MIT, “Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare“, about adaptations of Shakespeare over time.
University of Chicago
David Bevington talks about Ben Jonson and his project compiling an edition of the Collected Works of Ben Jonson here.
OpenCulture
The Open Culture website offers free online courses on Spenser and Milton and A Survey of Shakespeare’s Plays.

Wednesday 17 October 2012

Tuesday 2 October 2012

Teacher video tutorials on writing and research skills

We have created a series of short video tutorials to help you improve as an English student. They are as follows:
1. Improving your oral contributions in class.
2. Becoming a more independent learner, research skills and heading for A *
3. Understanding exam questions and keywords.Structuring essay answers and handwriting.
4. Writing developed, well structured paragraphs and using quotes.
5. Improving sentence structure, vocabulary and style of your writing.
6. Avoiding common grammatical mistakes in writing. Common spelling mistakes explained.