ABSTRACT
The swiftest of glances at any school inspection report will confirm that the big issue in the early years of adolescence is to do with how we maintain academic momentum in the transition between the end of primary education and the beginning of secondary. This is particularly true for the most able. The learning dip that occurs at this age can often be as a result of reassessments, consolidations and catch ups that occur on skills they may well have already been mastered several years before. This chapter is about how teachers can maintain the pace in English lessons so that the work not only becomes an important part of our students’ cultural frame of reference, but actually provides them with a stretching, pervasive and irresistible vocabulary of the imagination that will help to keep them on track between the ages of 11 and 14. Texts need the contribution of a reader in order to come alive; able readers need encounters with more ambiguous and complex texts in order to better understand their lives. This allows for and promotes a conversation – a conspiracy even – between reader and writer. For this to happen able students need extended encounters with texts that have a complexity which might promote such conversations and which allow for the uncertainties of real life, so immediate to adolescents, to emerge and be addressed. Koriat and Bjork’s notion of the importance of ‘desirable difficulty’, and Burns and Gentry’s ‘tension to learn’ theory are key, and this chapter offers a brief guide to how short stories might be analysed followed by a series of examples from science fiction and ghost stories through to the subverted folk tale – beginning with more accessible writers for younger students and then progressing through significantly more challenging works.
