Close Third Person

Setting creative homework tasks has been one of the most enjoyable aspects of private tutoring.

This week, for example, I introduced a student to the idea of ‘close third person’. It was a revelation for them to see that third-person narration needn’t be the ‘omniscient’ viewpoint they’d assumed it had to be.

In the final minutes of the lesson, we abandoned the original homework (an analytical paragraph) in favour of a creative-critical alternative: rewriting part of a GCSE English Language Paper 1 extract in close third person, from the viewpoint of another character.

Although this kind of task might have been possible in the classroom, the constraints of time, planning and assessment would have made it far harder.

I’d love to hear from other teachers and tutors: what creative tasks and homework do you set as part of your English Language teaching?