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Private candidate English

Hello
I want to study English so I was thinking to either retake my GCSE or go straight to A level. I am 20 and haven't been in education since the age of 16. I work full time so What would be best for me was doing my own study at home, I was looking into and saw that I would have to go to a centre for exams which is fine but I am confused about the study maiterals, do I get these from the exams board or do I just study all the texts myself.

i hope this makes sense as I am using my phone so it's a bit hard to type. If you have any links to other posts on this forum about private candidate study please comment so I can see other people's studying. Thanks :smile:

Reply 1

The Empire Odyssey

Original post by BooksAndCoffee94

First of all, did you get a GCSE in English? In which case, which English; Language or Literature, or both or just English GCSE? Usually, it's better for candidates to achieve a grade B. Even though the specs say minimum of grade C is fine.

For English Literature, there's not really any materials online unless there's something like schemes of work or teaching resources like worksheets and etc. However, you wouldn't really need this. English Lit is all about teaching skill for the exam and coursework like close reading analysis and etc. Teachers are obviously best at this teaching this with their expertise. You also need someone to check and mark your essays and practice exam papers. Perhaps if one of the teachers who teaches the same spec as you will be able to do this out of the goodness of their heart. Since A-levels are changing it'd be beneficial to go with the centre you're going with because the teacher is most likely going to accept if it's the same exam board.

English Language is a different story; you will definitely have to self-teach yourself all the nuts and bolts of grammar, phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics and pragmatics. All these linguistic toolboxes are what you need to look at for English Language. Not to mention Children's Language Acquisition, where there is a ton of stuff on the internet you can look for. But I'm sure if you did Lang, the exam board will tell you what theories you need to cover.

English isn't hard to self-teach. It is hard to improve on your skill from GCSE to A-level immensely without a teacher/uni student there to help you. It's a subject where you need a lot of verbal and written feedback in order to improve. You need to do a lot of independent learning in order do do this.