Details
Suitable for: GCSE and AS Level.
Available: Monday – Friday
Length: 90 minutes. Please allow more time after your workshop to explore the galleries and public spaces
Group size: minimum 10
Subjects and Key Skills
English language
Workshop outline
Examine original texts, including literary manuscripts, historical documents and early printed material on display in the Treasures gallery, to open up a world of questioning.
Participants will be encouraged to ask challenging questions such as:
- How do you question a text?
- How do texts encourage or discourage questions?
- What role does 'context' play in your understanding of an item?
- How does context change with place and time?
- How does the context of the reader influence the meaning of the text?
Pre-visit activities
Discover a rich and unusual collection of over 400 British Library texts, including cookbooks, ships' logbooks, slang dictionaries, quack doctors' pamphlets, Victorian guidebooks and traders' shopping lists in Texts in Context. Use the site to explore how language varies with situation and across time.
Post-visit activities
Explore our online resource Sounds Familiar? and uncover the UK’s rich landscape of diverse accents and dialects. Visit the Your Voices section of the website to find out how your class can make recordings of their speech, which will be added to the site and to the British Library's ongoing survey of speech patterns across the UK.
Also suitable for English language students…
We recommend booking this workshop in conjunction with Sounds Familiar?, a classroom based workshop focussing on spoken English. For more information, visit the Sounds Familiar? workshop page.
Ready to book?
