English Language

Course summary

As an English Language student at Stratford, you will explore how language works, from how words are formed to how they are used to influence our decisions. You will build a toolkit for linguistic analysis. You will engage in debates around language use, looking at accent and dialect; language and gender; how social class, age, and ethnicity affect language use; how children learn language, and how language changes over time. In addition to benefiting from the expertise of passionate, specialist teachers, you will be given opportunities to engage in a variety of enrichment activities, which in the past have included conferences and workshops with eminent linguists and visits to places of interest such as the British Library and The Guardian newspaper in London. This specification consists of three main units: 1. Language: the individual and society: provides a thorough grounding in the concepts of audience, purpose, genre, mode, and representation. You will become adept in linguistic analysis, studying lexis, semantics, grammar, phonology, discourse structure, and graphology. You will also get to discover how language develops in children including, how babies and toddlers acquire spoken language and how children learn to read and write. 2. Language diversity and change: you will study social attitudes and debates about areas as diverse as idiolect and sociolect; gender; occupation; English around the world; attitudes to language varieties and how language changes. 3. Language in action: you will complete your research project where you will collect and analyze your data. You will write your piece of original writing, which may include a piece of journalism, poetry, prose, formal speech, or blog – it’s entirely up to you!