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A Level English Language equips you with the skills to be critical readers of language, encouraging you to use academic principles when exploring and analysing all forms of written and spoken communication. Lessons take the form of seminars and workshops, allowing you to engage with diverse opinions and interpretations of a range of stimulating texts.
This particular specification aims to provide you with a natural progression from studying GCSE English. It helps you to understand how the English language has evolved, and continues to evolve, and encourages you to appreciate this through learning about its structures and its functions, its development and its variations. Furthermore, it allows you to develop your own language use, refining your ability to express yourself in speech and writing, and challenging you to produce texts for different audiences and purposes.
This course is particularly suitable if you wish to study English language, linguistics, English studies or other related subjects in higher education such as journalism, media studies, communication or politics.
At Windsor Academy Trust we want to inspire a love of language and literature and to ensure our learners become effective readers, writers and speakers.
This specification consists of four main topics - Language and the Individual, Child Language Acquisition, Language Diversity and Language Choice - and a Non-exam Assessment (NEA). You will develop your analytical skills and also your own writing skills, both for critique and creativity.
You will study the language frameworks, from phonetics and morphology, to discourse structures and graphology. These features will form the basis of analysis into how texts represent their topics and their readers.
You will learn about the earliest stages of child language development, looking at reading, writing and speaking. The study of different theoretical perspectives will allow you to critically analyse texts created by children.
This unit will teach you about the diversity of language as it exists among different genders, ages, ethnicities, occupations and regions. Further theories will be studied to allow you to become expert analysts of written and spoken communication.
You will explore how language has changed, and continues to change, in the face of new technologies and the globalisation of communication.
You will complete one Language Investigation into a language phenomenon in real-life texts, and will create one piece of original writing.
A Level English Language develops your abilities to analyse, communicate and read critically, therefore making it a suitable course to study alongside any subject. It will work well alongside any other course, but particularly subjects such as philosophy and ethics, history, sociology and law.
The skills you will develop studying English language are among the most transferable, meaning you will have a broad spectrum of opportunities available to you.
University courses you may wish to pursue include:
If you are considering an apprenticeship, you could think about working in:
A Level English Literature could lead you almost anywhere because the skills you will have developed are so appealing to employers. Some example careers are:
Students often progress to university. Example student destinations include: