English Language

Course summary

This course explores both spoken and written language in use in a wide range of professionally written texts and transcripts. You will investigate many important language issues in society, addressing questions such as: • How do people use language to assert power? • Do men and women really speak differently? • Are men and women presented differently in the media? • How is technology bringing new words into the language and changing the way in which we communicate? • How do children learn to speak? • How and why has language changed from 1600s to present day? You will develop your own written skills, producing texts for a number of purposes, audiences and genres. You will learn a large amount of technical linguistic terminology in order to analyse how language works. To prepare you for an unseen texts examination, you will explore a variety of texts, such as transcripts of the spoken word, advertisements, speeches, magazine and newspaper articles, short stories and extracts from novels and plays. You will investigate many important language issues in society.