Teaching English Literature: free resources available online!
There are tons of resources out there for teaching English Literature - especially for the most popular exam boards, OCR and AQA. If you’ve been teaching English for a while, you’ll be aware that certain texts (especially Shakespeare!) are commonly chosen in schools; and as a result, these texts are easy to find resources for.
Free eBooks
If a text is more than 100 years old (as many of the school texts are - especially for GCSE and A-level!), then it’s out of copyright - and should be freely available online. You may be able to download a free eBook off Amazon, the Internet Archive or similar - have a Google, and definitely don’t pay for a book that is no longer in copyright!
Resources for plays and novels
Most texts studied school will have a dedicated Sparknotes and/or Cliffnotes section. These are fantastic free resources, providing detailed summaries, breakdowns of key themes and motifs, character analysis and more. Use these as a jumping off point for planning your lessons, or for brushing up on texts you haven’t read yourself.
Resources for poetry
For AQA and OCR, the GCSE poetry anthologies are available online. You can find the OCR anthology here, the AQA Power and Conflict cluster here, and an annotated version of the AQA Love and Relationships cluster here.
Generally speaking, any poems studied at school will be freely available online; try Poetry Foundation or AllPoetry to find what you need. For detailed analysis of the poems studied in most GCSE courses, PoemAnalysis is a brilliant free resource and a very good place to start!
Literary devices
Finally, when teaching language analysis, it’s a good idea to work from a list of literary devices. A thorough list of the basic devices learnt at school is here; or visit LiteraryDevices.net for a more comprehensive list!
With so many resources freely available online for teaching English, you should be able to find what you need without having to subscribe to anything - so avoid websites that try to make you pay for the above! Use these resources as a jumping-off point and get creative with your lesson planning…
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