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What is A Level English Language like?

and how does it compare to gcse?
It's very different to the GCSE.
At A-level you learn alot about speech and where our language comes from. Why we have slang, why people have different accents, things like that.
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Avatar for Tolgash
Tolgash
21
English language's A Level course starkly contrasts with its GCSE counterpart. In KS5, you learn about the linguistic aspect of English.

At this level, texts are analysed by considering their mode and the representation of the text producer, text receiver and subject. This involves the study of language levels (e.g. pragmatics, lexis, semantics, grammar etc.) and identifying patterns in the material you read.

Another component is the study of children's language acquisition. This entails studying the discourse surrounding the development of a child's literacy and spoken skills. The two key debates you will look at are accuracy v. creativity (for literacy) and nature v. nurture (for spoken). You will write evaluative essays, which respond to certain sentiments, that include theories, evidence to support them from a data set and your final judgement.

Language's use in society, and how it has changed over time, is another core focus of the course. You will delve into the philosophy of language, looking at the prescriptivism v. descriptivism debate, along with how it influences our opinions on language usage. You will write evaluative essays responding to statements about the state of English in different contexts (e.g. social groups, occupation, gender, technology etc.). You will also probably write essays about the language's history of change.

Original writing is still in the course, but it's assessed a little differently. Any creative writing that you do will either be based on a style model (i.e. another author's methods of written expression) or inform a non-specialist audience with linguistic theory (in the form of an article).

Finally, you will have non-exam assessment (coursework). This can be assessed differently depending on the awarding body, but it will always involve a language investigation at the minimum. This is where one's linguistic interests can be explored and discussed in a very methodical manner, with statistics and other theories that are off the specification.

I hope this helps.

- TE
(edited 3 years ago)

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