This case study is by the convenor of a compulsory first-year module called 'Introduction to Textual Analysis' which teaches close reading skills to students in the first semester of their first year.
We teach using texts selected across a range of historical periods spending three weeks consecutively on prose poetry and drama. We ask the student in class and in assessment to pay particular attention to the language of the piece studied in the process ensuring that they understand the parts of speech including recognising verbs adjectives adverbs and nouns the importance of punctuation syntax. We hope that along the way this will help the students' own writing too. In order to assist with the teaching of this specific aspect of the module I designed a series of multiple choice tests on sentences commas semi-colons and apostrophes which are accessed by the student in Blackboard (the virtual learning environment at Bangor).
