Science education in England
For the ages of 16, 17 and 18 (and older for those that remain in education below university-level), students in England do what is sometimes loosely called ‘key stage 5’ or KS5; it has no legal meaning (unlike the other key stages). And unlike KS1–4 in which the levels of complexity of topics learnt at each stage are prescribed within relatively narrow limits, at KS5, the levels of complexity of topics cover a wide range, although the highest level of complexity at KS5 is RQF level 3. Whether or not a student actually studies at this level of complexity in KS5 depends on his/her GCSE results—crucially on what subjects the student obtained passes at RQF level 2 standard (including mathematics and English) as well as the actual grades themselves. In other words, unlike KS1–4, where a specific student studies at one RQF level, at KS5, a specific student may be studying at several RQF levels depending on what s/he obtained at GCSEs. Regardless of the RQF-level mix, a KS5 student can do his/her post-16 study in one of the following:
Literature Circles in EFL
The study was conducted on two groups of students at a private high school in Sofia, Bulgaria. The first group consisted of 34 (fourteen-year-old) teenagers in eight-grade and the second group included 33 (eighteen-year-old) young adults in twelfth-grade. The aforementioned high school is an English language profile school, where eight-grade is a preparatory year with 21 hours of English language instruction weekly, starting from elementary level up to the intermediate throughout the year. In the school, starting from the ninth-grade onwards, the language of instruction for math, physics, chemistry and biology is English as well. Twelfth-grade is the graduation year, when students study intensively to get ready for university entrance exams such as, State-Graduation-Exam, TOEFL, IELTS or SAT. Because of these reasons English language is the most crucial subject for those age groups. The school has a multicultural setting as there are many students from different nationalities and family backgrounds. The class sizes are rather small with an average of 15 students per class.