English GCSE!

[cooksters]

I'm going back to college in 2 weeks to redo my english GCSE after 20 years, any advice of how i can prepare/refresh my mind would be great thankyou.

[sara3]

which books will you be reading?

good luck to you, btw :o)

[dotty.]

i went back to do my A levels in the mid 1990s and found it absolutely brilliant! the tutor groups were great as everyone was there because they wanted to be and everyone contributed to the general discussions. If you're doing literature they're probably doing Of mice and men, an inspector calls, great expectations and maybe a truman capote, depends which exam board,

[Mosaic]

English courses vary widely and so as a starter, we'd need to know which exam board and which option within that board you will be doing. That will narrow down the possible course content, but then we need to know what your teacher will select within that range.
Probably one of the biggest differences is that you will have some continually assessd pieces that contribute to your final exam score - usually one piece is an analysis of a poem, and one based around a novel or play.
By far the best thing you can do is find out which books / plays/ poems you will study, and read them repeatedly so that you get to know them inside out.

[saxy_jag]

Get into the habit of summarising. Read a short passage - whatever you like, and then write down the gist of it in a few sentences. Or think of a film you've seen or a book you've read and imagine you have a minute or so to tell someone what it's about.

And read - fiction, travel reviews, journalistic pieces - as full a spread of different types of writing as you can. A quality newspaper's Sunday supplement would be a good starting place, as well as some novels, poems or short stories. As Mosaic suggests, it could be worth contacting you tutor, if you can, to see what texts he or she will be using for the course. However, when I taught this course to adults, I usually compiled a shortlist (because the exam boards usually give a range of texts to choose from) so that we could discuss and decide as a group what they wanted to study.