A-Level English Literature

You will need 5 GCSE's at grades 5-9, including English.

This course uses a dynamic range of teaching methods generally within a classroom environment. You will experience a range of activities including: Individual, paired and group work, creative interpretation and independent study skills. Your speaking and listening skills will be honed to perfection due to a strong emphasis on interactive, student-centred learning. You might also take part in theatre and university visits as a way of developing understanding of texts.

There will be a formal assessment in the style of three open-book exams in the summer of your second year. Leading up to this you will be assessed in class using a series of methods ranging from Q&A, debate, individual/group tasks and mock exams.

English and maths are important life skills that will help you to achieve your best in your studies and progress to your dream career. If you have not already achieved grade 9-4 in GCSE maths and/ or English at school, we will support you to improve your skills.

Our A Level programmes allow you to choose multiple subjects, enabling you to study 3–4 A Levels over two years or combine them with equivalent vocational qualifications, with each subject taught for 4 hours and 30 minutes per week across three separate lessons and your timetable determined by your chosen subjects (provided at the start of the academic year).
Although you are not required to be on campus when you do not have a timetabled lesson, we strongly recommend making effective use of our learning facilities and resources during these periods to stay on top of your work.

In the first year you’ll study Drama and Prose, this includes; a study of two plays from the Tragedy genre; the classical; William Shakespeare’s Othello and the modern; Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. This will help you understand the origins of Tragedy as well as how the genre relates in archaic, to more contemporary styles of writing. Your analysis and interpretation skills will be further stretched with a comparative study on the topic of Science and Society using Mary Shelley’s iconic Frankenstein (1818) and Margaret Atwood’s prophetic The Handmaid’s Tale. All of the above will be looked at holistically as narratives and you will be analysing why authors make certain choices when telling their stories, as well as the effect their writing has on the wider public.

The second year will focus on coursework linked by theme, movement, author or period (20%) and poetry. You will study Geoffrey Chaucer’s bawdy comic The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and a selection of poetry from modern poets writing in the early 2000s. All texts studied will involve wide reading on a largely independent scale and evaluated using a range of perspectives and literary criticism, including that of a psychoanalytic, Marxist and Feminist vein.