English Language and Literature

English Language and Literature

Are you looking for a course which will combine your love and appreciation of literature with close linguistic analysis alongside the opportunity to develop your own creative writing skills? Then English Language and Literature is for you! Throughout the course, we will study a very wide variety of interesting and varied texts, focusing on different elements including literary and linguistic techniques, contextual factors, authorial intentions, and narrative themes.

Texts will include prose, blogs, play scripts, reviews, poetry and advertisements; we will work together to analyse these texts from a variety of angles, using both a broad literary lens and a close linguistic analysis. In addition to this, English Language and Literature gives you the opportunity to develop and refine your own interests in creative writing, and we will look as a class at the different techniques and skills you can employ to produce insightful and imaginative pieces.
We will work collaboratively and individually. We make this course relevant, interesting, intellectually challenging and fun! You will develop skills which are highly relevant to future careers and other subject disciplines.

We will explore different types of text including travel writing, personal viewpoint and historical accounts. We use close linguistic analysis to explore each text and to consider how each author positions the reader. We will read several outstanding texts including The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and a selection of poetry by Carol Ann Duffy. We will be concentrating on how these two fantastic authors present time and space, and how they use narrative voices.

Our Approach

AQA English Language and Literature includes the opportunity to analyse and scrutinise a diverse range of engaging texts. We will explore both linguistic and literary methods; we look at language theories and apply them to fiction, non-fiction, literary and non-literary texts.

Paper 1: Telling Stories – we explore dystopian literature with focused excerpts from Orwell’s 1984, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Our full set text is The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood with its shocking and challenging iconic message. We consider key features of dystopian literature and try to incorporate some in short examples of students’ original creative writing. We also analyse and investigate the meanings and techniques of the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy in a selection from her anthology Mean Time with its striking insights on contemporary society.

Paper 2: Exploring Conflict – we investigate the role of crime and the Victorian detective in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and the nature of conflict and relationship in Drama.

NEA: In your final year you also complete an extended essay (NEA) where you choose a theme and two texts for analysis, one literary and one non-literary– recent successful topics have included the language of sport in broadcasting and literature, representations of Northern Dialect comparing Wuthering Heights with The Road to Wigan Pier, the psychopath in
fact and fiction and comparing ‘authentic’ representations of Autism in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida.