A-Level - English Lit, or English Lit&Lang?

Hi. Sorry, i don't know the answer to most of these questions but my cousin is doing both english language and literature. She did both and she said english literture is so so much easier and much more interesting. And she said english language was extremely boring and was extremely difficult. idk maybe do both?

English lit sole is more respected than English Lang, although I don't know where English lit and lang fits in. The amount of reading required for English lit isn't actually that much - we're doing one play and one extended poem (both ~100 pages each), some poems from a poetry anthology (the poems are short, at most 4 pages) and 2 books from last year (one about 240 pages and the other about 150).

Hear me out - I got advice from someone who know's what they're talking about, and I've realised they were speaking sense at the time.

An older student at Uni, providing English tutoring, advised me to go for the Eng. Lit option over the Lang/Lit. combined subject my sixth form was offering. Her reasoning was this:
In Language, there is a lot more freedom to write unrestricted, that's a bonus. (A lot of people in my Lit. class now wanted to do English Lang. just because they were good at creative writing). However, a lot of it is learning how to write [persuasively, essay-structure, etc.] This content is not viewed/respected as highly in the eyes of Universities compare to Lit:
In Lit., the exams assume you already have a good base when it comes to knowing HOW to write, and is a lot more to do with analysis, evaluation and deeper meanings within literature. Therefore, here you are combining the skills that you'd have learned in Lang. and using them to make arguments about possible interpretations of the texts you are studying. In this way, Unis see this a more-demanding subject, and rightly-so reward Lit. students as opposed to Lang students.

In fact, when A-level timetables and classes were being finalised for our year, the school decided to drop the Lang/Lit subject and go for straight Lit - while a lot of my classmates complained, it was a hidden blessing in disguise, since we now all have developed analytical skills we may not otherwise have done in Lang. since we wouldn't have studied as many texts and looked for meanings and whatnot. On top of that, the Edexcel spec. has blessed us with a coursework component in Year 13, where we are allowed to choose any two texts (plays, books, whatever takes your fancy) of any genre or form and compare them in a 3k essay. This helped compensate for the dissatisfied the creative writers

While for GCSE, many students find Lang the easier of the two, for Uni prospects, Lit is the favoured one (Lit. is a 'facilitating' subject (subjects that are respected by Unis, e.g. sciences, maths, humanities, etc) so while it may be 'harder', it's definitely worth it if you can hack the reading

Hope I could be of help Good luck with your choices

Hm, I might. I'm just wondering whether she found the english lit part easier bc they did more lang? I did english lit&lang on the taster day but you can't really trust taster lessons to be genuine so im still

Are they open book exams?

Thank you so much! I do favour the more analytical aspects of English, it's just memorising quotes from the text that I'm terrible at, in all honesty, that bumps my grade up in English right now - so I'm getting 9's more often in Language than Lit purely because of that.

The coursework sounds amazing in all honesty (I do enjoy creative writing ) but the Univesity favour is definitely leaning me towards English Lit. In our application forms (just to work out approx class numbers) I did put English Literature, and was only swayed slightly by my friends comment.

I think I'll probably stick with English Literature, thanks!