GCSE English

There is always hope.  The secret to passing exams, not only English exams is to find out what the examiners are looking for and give it to them.  Unfortunately in my youth I had no idea what they wanted.

Many years ago at school we still took GSE O levels with the old grading scheme.  On my first attempt I obtained a grade U (Ungraded) in both English language and literature.  Second attempt another grade U in English language.  Third and fourth attempt grades D and D.

Finally, a couple of years ago I did a functional skills English course at a local centre, this is equivalent to GCSE and I passed the level 2 with record highest scores for that centre. I scored 100% in the comprehension exam and good scores in the other exams.  So there is always hope.

Hi there! I can understand your concerns about your son's struggles with GCSE English. I came across a really cool tool that might be helpful for him. It's called Langly. Langly is an AI language learning platform that helps students learn languages in a personalized and engaging way. They cater to different learning styles and adapt to the student's needs, which could be perfect for your son with his unique way of thinking. You can check out their English courses at https://langly.ai/en/products/. I hope this helps and your son gets the support he needs to excel in English. Good luck!

Thanks, that's great you've had the chance to ask for extra time, best of luck to your son too. :)

What a lovely reply, thank you for taking your time to give me an insight into your experiences. Your comment about rules, strategies and having a game approach is most helpful.

I spoke to school today about extra time, so hope this will help him too. 

Thank you again, and best of luck with your studies.

Thank you for your reply, yes he really struggles with the interpretation. Interestingly he is doing drama gcse too and is top of the class! We have found him doing drama and in particular being in the school has had a really positive affect in his development especially friendships wise.

thank you again. 

(If you spot any typos it's because of dslexia and my hyper focus cannot hold it together as well so late at night as I'm getting tired now. I swear I do know how to spell I just don't have the battery power to go back and correct every fault this late at night.)

Yes, as someone who actually got a better GCSE in English Language than Maths as a teenager I attribute it to the fact that I recognised that English language has rules, you can treat it like a game/strategy, emotional language is more difficult but if you can take basic emotions like happy, sad, angry, you can use a dictionary and thesaurus to find the words for those more complicated overlapping feelings. If a sentence sounds too rigid use a thesaurus to help learn alternative words to liven it up a bit, etc.

It sounds odd as stereotype would suggest that peopel with ASC usually tend towards maths, but it wasn't until I retook GCSE maths as a mature student that I learned to treat it like a puzzle that could be solved as long as I knew what method to use. And then it became fun, and now my most hated: algebra is my fave.
I think you can apply that to English too, it just looks more complcated, and maybe Eng Literature is, but English Language has rules you can learn to help you detangle it.

For context I originally took my GSCES in 2005 and I retook them in 2017, did a lvl 3 foundation in 2020, and I'm in University doing my BA hons now. Autism really doesn't have to be a barrier to higher education. Just make sure you have all teh support he can get including extra time in exams to allow for re-reading the questions if there is tricky phrasing.
When I retook English btw the course seemed to mix English literature with English language (maybe it's one GCSE now not 2 separate ones) but the liteature part I also found easier by turning my fixation onto it, no great magic trick just what you are interested in sinks in easier. If you can get him to get at all interested in the more "meh" parts of the subjects they will get easier.

I went to primary and secondary school in Poland, so instead of english I had polish.

I was unable to fathom out desired by teachers interpretations of poems and novels, I struggle to remember names, if unused they fade from my memory quickly. But the final nail to my coffin of failure in polish literature was being unable to talk/write at required length about topics. For me it makes more sense to be concise, logical, and to the point instead of over excessively talking/writing, creating muddy waters and often repeating the same thing just to create required volume. 

Written equivalent of GCSE in polish I passed with lowest grade, because iot was assessed elsewhere, not by teachers from my schools. 

I would fail oral part of exam, if teacher leading school theatre didn't convince others to show me mercy on account of being a member of that group. An idea to join school theatre came from my math teacher, she was trying to find ways arround my difficulties with polish classes.

Hi, I'm not sure this will be of any help but I have a few ideas. I really don't like writing and struggled with it at school (to the point of once even just handing in a blank piece of paper in an English test where we were meant to write an essay in class under timed conditions). I also regularly struggle to get things on paper even when I have ideas. I think the issue with writing is that involves many decisions. There are so many different ways that something could be formulated and this gets me stuck as I get paralysed or just cannot pick between the options. The other issue is that in my head ideas are often linked in a non-linear way- so I really struggle to then write them down in a linear fashion. Lack of confidence is another one- do any of these resonate with your son? If he understands the reasons why he is struggling to get ideas down in writing, it will be easier to come up with strategies. 

What happens if he has to talk about the essay question rather than write it down? I realised that I often do better when I talk about something out loud so I sometimes end up doing that whilst recording myself. I can then type up part of my recording and that helps me get something down on paper.

Does typing help? For me this is a mixed one. I really struggled with handwriting especially if I had to do it in pen as I felt like there was even more pressure to get it right the first time around as it is not so easy to change or rearrange things. I therefore much prefer writing in pencil. When I type that removes the pressure of not being able to change things but that causes new issues as I then end up writing many options of each sentence and also get stuck. 

Practice also really helps- I got much much better at writing under time pressure when doing my IB history course as our teacher forced us to regularly do handwritten timed essays in class- It was awful at first and so anxiety inducing but I did somewhat improve... I would have never done that unless I had been forced to though. I still avoid writing at all costs. 

What does he have to write/do for the English GCSE (I did IGCSE English Language and Literature and English Literature and later IB so I'm not so familiar with the GCSE)? Does it involve analysing a text? Creative writing? If it is text analysis it might help to just come up with a clear method of going about it (eg. looking for any figures of speech then writing a bit about each etc)- it helped me to have a 'recipe' to follow- maybe the tutor could help coming up with this. It just helps to make it more predictable and structured. 

Not sure if any of this is helpful- luckily I don't have to take English exams anymore- I'm a scientist now, though sadly this still involves quite a bit of writing.