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Key Stage 3 English · Reading

KS3 reading: Shakespeare, classics and reading for pleasure

In Years 7 to 9, pupils are expected to read widely and with growing independence: whole books, short stories, poems and plays from different periods, genres and authors. The curriculum names three things in particular: high-quality English literature from before 1914 and from today, two Shakespeare plays, and seminal world literature. It also asks for something harder to measure, that pupils choose books for their own enjoyment and return to books they have read before.

Reading widely: Shakespeare and beyond, explained

The Key Stage 3 curriculum is about breadth. Pupils should read fiction and non-fiction, prose, poetry and drama, from different periods and by different authors, and they should read whole books rather than only extracts. There is no national reading list at this stage. The curriculum says what kinds of texts must be covered, and each school decides which books to teach, so the novels your child studies may be quite different from those in a neighbouring school.

Two Shakespeare plays must be read across the key stage. Schools choose which ones and when, and many pick from the best-known tragedies and comedies, but that is a choice rather than a requirement. Pupils often read key scenes aloud, watch performances or recordings, and work from an edition with notes alongside the text. The language is more than 400 years old, so some words have changed meaning or disappeared. Teachers help pupils see that the difficulty is mostly vocabulary and word order, and that the stories and feelings are very recognisable.

Alongside Shakespeare, pupils read English literature from before 1914 and from the present day, including prose, poetry and drama. Pre-1914 texts, such as nineteenth-century novels or older poems, have longer sentences, unfamiliar words and different attitudes, which makes them a good stretch. Contemporary writing shows how language and subjects have changed. The curriculum also names seminal world literature, which means influential works from outside the English literary tradition: some written in English in other parts of the world, others read in translation. Which works count is left to the school.

The curriculum also cares about attitude. It asks schools to develop an appreciation and love of reading, to encourage pupils to choose books independently for challenge, interest and enjoyment, and to have them re-read books they met earlier, so that they can notice more the second time and make comparisons. Reading for pleasure often slips in the early teenage years as homework grows and other interests compete, so this part of the curriculum is worth supporting at home. At Key Stage 4 this wide reading narrows into GCSE English literature study, which is why a confident, varied reader in Year 9 has an easier path.

Words your child will hear

Genre
A type of writing with familiar features, such as crime, fantasy, historical fiction, science fiction or poetry.
Pre-1914
Written before 1914, the year the First World War began. The phrase covers everything from Shakespeare’s time and earlier to nineteenth-century novels.
Contemporary
Written in the present day, or close to it.
Seminal
Hugely influential: a work that shaped the writers who came after it.
World literature
Important writing from different countries and cultures, often read in an English translation.
Soliloquy
A speech in a play where a character, alone on stage, says their thoughts aloud to the audience.
Verse
Writing in lines with a regular rhythm. Shakespeare’s plays mix verse, often unrhymed blank verse, with scenes and characters in prose.

What the National Curriculum says

In Key Stage 3, pupils should be taught to:

  • Develop an appreciation and love of reading, and read increasingly challenging material independently through reading a wide range of fiction and non-fiction, including in particular whole books, short stories, poems and plays with a wide coverage of genres, historical periods, forms and authors
  • Read a range that includes high-quality works from English literature, both pre-1914 and contemporary, including prose, poetry and drama
  • Read a range that includes Shakespeare (two plays)
  • Read a range that includes seminal world literature
  • Develop an appreciation and love of reading through choosing and reading books independently for challenge, interest and enjoyment
  • Develop an appreciation and love of reading through re-reading books encountered earlier to increase familiarity with them and provide a basis for making comparisons

Objectives from the National Curriculum in England, © Crown copyright, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Try it: tackling a first Shakespeare speech

Romeo and Juliet is one play many schools choose at Key Stage 3. In Act 2, Romeo stands in the dark in the Capulets’ orchard, sees a light at Juliet’s window and says: “what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” He opens the speech with “But, soft”. How can a pupil work out what it means?

  1. Read it aloud twice before trying to understand it. The punctuation tells an actor when to pause, and the rhythm sounds more natural out loud than on the page.
  2. Unlock the old words. “Soft” here means hush or wait, as if Romeo has just noticed something. “Yonder” means over there. “Breaks” means shines out or appears suddenly. In plain English: “Wait, what is that light shining out of the window over there?”
  3. Spot the surprise. Romeo answers his own question: the light is Juliet, and she is the sun. Since the east is where the sun rises, he is saying that she makes it feel like morning.
  4. Ask what the image does. It is a metaphor, a comparison without “like” or “as”. A young man standing in a dark orchard is overwhelmed by someone, and Shakespeare uses the brightest thing he can think of to show it.
  5. Re-read it after finishing the scene. Light and dark return as images through the play, so the line means more the second time and can be compared with how other characters speak about love.

Romeo is saying: “Wait, what is that light at the window over there? That window is the east, where the sun rises, and Juliet is the sun.” He compares her to the sun to show how bright and wonderful she seems to him, and the picture of light in a dark orchard sets up a theme of light and darkness that runs through the play.

Common mistakes and how to help

Believing you must understand every word before you can follow Shakespeare

Children are used to texts they can read word by word. A speech with several unfamiliar words feels like failure, so they stop.

What helps: Read for the gist first and use the notes for just the words that block meaning. Saying the line aloud with the right tone often reveals the sense, and the meaning of a word frequently becomes clear a line or two later.

Thinking “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” means “Where are you, Romeo?”

Wherefore sounds like where. It actually means why, so Juliet is asking why Romeo has to be a Montague, the family her family is feuding with.

What helps: This is a good example of a word that has changed meaning. Keep a short list of old words with their modern meanings, such as thou, thee, hath and anon, and try using them for fun at home.

Treating a film, a summary or a study guide as the same as reading the text

It can seem efficient, and the plot is often much the same. But the pupil then misses the language, which is where the meaning and the enjoyment are.

What helps: Use summaries and performances as support, not a substitute. Seeing a scene performed first often makes the written text much easier to read afterwards.

Believing re-reading is for younger children or a waste of time

Teenagers often feel they should always be on to something new, and they may have grown out of the older books.

What helps: Explain that re-reading is what serious readers do. Return to a favourite from Year 6 and see what jumps out now, or re-read a poem from Year 7 in Year 9 and compare.

How to help at home

  • Protect a little reading time. Set aside 15 to 20 minutes most evenings for reading something chosen for pleasure. It does not have to be a classic. Teenagers who stay in the reading habit find the harder texts at school less daunting.
  • Swap books and talk about them. Read something your teenager is reading, or recommend something from your own teenage years, and talk about it in the car or over a meal. Disagreeing about a character is excellent practice for the kind of discussion the curriculum asks for.
  • Watch a performance alongside the text. When the class is studying a play, watch a filmed or live performance together, or read a scene aloud in different voices. Some libraries lend recordings. Hearing the language performed makes it far easier to read on the page.
  • Add one stretch book. At the library, suggest your child chooses one book they will love and one slightly harder one: an older novel, a collection of poems, or a translated book. Talking about why it is hard, and which bits worked, is more useful than finishing it.
  • Re-read something old. Pick a book or poem your child loved a few years ago and ask what they notice now that they did not before. The curriculum values this as a way to compare and to see how their own reading has grown.

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