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AS/A2 English Combined
The course is designed to enable you to:
Experience and respond to a wide range of literature including novels, poetry, drama through discussion, analysis and creative writing
Learn how to analyse and discuss the techniques that writers and speakers use to communicate depending on the audience and purpose
Apply language and literature methods and terminology to the writing of others as well as your own
Communicate through discussion and well-planned and clearly structured essays
Become an independent and reflective reader
If you enjoy reading literary works and analysing English language, this is the course for you. Assessment is predominantly exam based.
What's involved?
Introduction to Language and Literature Study
This unit introduces you to the methods and terminology that you will use throughout the course to analyse a variety of texts.
You will be given an anthology containing about 30 texts on the theme of travel, transport and locomotion. There is a wide variety of texts including poems, postcards, adverts, comic strips and you will use these to learn about and practise different writing techniques to suit different audiences and purposes.
Themes in Language and Literature
You will study two novels and produce two pieces of work on a given theme. One piece will be an analytical essay and for the other you will produce a piece of creative writing based on one or both of the set texts. The novels we have chosen to study are ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley and ‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote. The theme for this year is HORROR!
Talk in Life and Literature
The focus for this unit is the study of spoken language. You will learn how and why we alter what we say depending on the situation, and also how writers use features of real speech and dramatise them to entertain an audience. We will study a play – ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ by Tennessee Williams and a range of other extracts from novels and plays, plus poetry and compare these to real speech.
Text Transformation
You will choose two texts from a list that we will give to you and study them carefully. You will then transform them into another genre – you don’t need to do the whole text! For example you could change a collection of poems by Seamus Heaney into a short story or a play. You will also write a commentary where you discuss your language choices to suit the audience, purpose and genre of your new text.
English Combined will give you a wide range of options when you progress to university including English degrees, Teaching, Journalism and compliments many other subjects.