Coordinating GP with your English Department

Understanding how GP and English reinforce and complement each other could make things better for students who take both subjects – and easier for their teachers.

Students studying IGCSE Global Perspectives are likely to be doing an English IGCSE and perhaps a literature one as well. There are significant overlaps which we can exploit. Let’s take 0500 First Language English (FLE) as an example. In both subjects, students need to evaluate opinions, claims, views, arguments. As a GP teacher, take a look at the FLE Paper 2 Q1 (or the alternative coursework assignment), and you’ll see a striking similarity to GP exam Q3. This implies it could be very beneficial for response to text skills to be taught at the very start of the FLE course, before the GP projects which will use and reinforce them.

As well as this overlap, GP and English complement each other in three important ways:

Perspectives

In GP, students need to empathise with viewpoints different from their own, evaluating them objectively but with sensitivity. Meanwhile, in FLE, students need to empathise with the perspectives of different characters, both in their own narrative writing, and in the more literary of the short texts presented in the reading exam. Most English teachers will also incorporate some literature into the course, and it is common to ask students to retell an incident from another character’s point of view. 0408 World Literature actually has an official coursework assignment called “Empathic Writing”.

There is great potential for an English teacher to spin off an empathic writing task from material studied on the GP course. For example our Out of the Box unit on Troubled Teens features many striking authentic characters. Students need to empathise with difficult teenagers, desperate parents, and the proponents of “tough love”, as well as “survivors” who have been harmed by harsh interventions.

Topics

Almost all of the FLE Paper 2 topics fall within the scope of the GP course. Most, such as ageism in employment (Oct/Nov 2021 Paper 22 – QP/Insert) or eSports (Oct/Nov 2020 Paper 21 – QP/Insert) look exactly like GP exam topics.

Academic writing

It may be slightly surprising to teachers of other subjects that 0500 FLE does not have an explicit component of academic writing. The FLE assessments cover summary writing (very useful for GP), and the text types speech, letter, and article, as well as narrative and descriptive writing.

On the other hand, GP requires report and essay writing. The GP Individual Report (IR) is a hybrid text type in a formal academic mode but with elements of personal voice required to discuss the effect of the research on the student’s personal perspective. It requires skills of summarising information and arguments in one’s own words, relevant quoting, referencing and academic citing. GP exam questions 3 and 4 are analytical essays.

An English teacher delivering the FLE course will probably acknowledge that the FLE syllabus does not give much attention to these important skills and text types even though they clearly fall within an English teacher’s domain of expertise. One idea for collaboration between the courses is to use a piece of GP writing such as a draft IR or practice exam question as a stimulus for an English academic writing skills unit; a redraft could be graded purely for language by the English teacher as part of the English term grade.

To realise the synergy between English and GP courses, arrange a meeting between your course leaders. In our Premium Resources Section we have a slideshow specifically to facilitate such a discussion.

Best of luck building links between these courses at your school. If you discover other good ways to do so, we’d love to hear about them.

Jigsaw picture: Shutterstock. Uccello painting: Wikimedia Commons