English language

Taught at Kenilworth School & Sixth Form

Exam Board: AQA 

Assessment Method: You will be assessed by 2 written examinations worth 40% each, both sat at the end of year 13, and 2 pieces of NEA coursework worth 20% in total, produced within the A Level course. 

Why should I follow this course? 

English Language is a well-established and widely respected A Level that will give you a good foundation for both university and future employment. It will develop your critical and analytical reading skills as well as improving your writing skills for a variety of audiences and purposes. It will also give you an insight into the way language works on a societal level. Many students combine Language with Psychology, Sociology, Modern Foreign Languages, Politics, History and Business Studies, gaining a valuable balance of analytical skills, critical thinking and persuasive writing. 

What will I learn? 

Across the duration of this A Level, you will engage creatively and critically with a wide range of texts and discourses. You will create texts, reflect critically on your own processes of production, and analyse the texts produced by others. You will also debate different views and work independently to research aspects of language in use. 

In ‘Language, the Individual and Society’, you will study a range of texts about various subjects from different times and places. You will analyse how language is shaped according to context and how representations are produced, using methods of language analysis. You will also study children’s language development, both independently analysing and evaluating the research on how children learn to speak, read and write. 

In ‘Language diversity and change’, you will study how language is influenced by your identity and society, for example through gender, power, occupation, accents and dialects. You will also learn how language has changed over time. You will evaluate linguistic ideas and debates, compare and analyse texts that consider attitudes towards language use and produce your own opinion article. 

In ‘Language in action’, you will carry out your own research on an aspect of language. You will also produce a piece of original writing and comment on your own processes of production. 

Where will this qualification take me? 

Journalism, publishing, advertising and marketing, public relations, content creation, teaching, speech and language therapy, linguistics research (language acquisition, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics), writing, creative media, theatre and performance, law, politics, civil service, human resources, customer relations, corporate training, forensic linguistics, translation and interpreting, lexicography. 

Entry Requirements: Grade 6 or above in both GCSE English Language and English Literature.