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Please scroll down for information on this course, course units, subject guide and assessment criteria.

Click here to go to the Purple Duck. While following this course, please work harder to improve your handwriting, unlike Ben Jonson (above). He was always playing second fiddle to Shakespeare and it was probably the state of his handwriting that held him back.


English Language & Literature is a new course that began in 2011, with the first exams held in 2013. This course focuses on the meaning generated by language in a variety of texts, both literary (novels, short stories, plays, poems) and non-literary (media sources, essays, opinion pieces etc.). The course looks at how meaning is created, and how it is interpreted in different contexts by different readers. It is a demanding course that requires reading, analysis, discussion and writing skills. To succeed, the student also needs a detailed awareness of what is going on in the world around him/her, and an inquiring mind that is able to look behind the language that we take for granted to see how it works and what it is capable of. Imagine yourself as the driver of a car instead of the reader of a text. This course teaches you that it is not enough just to drive the car; you need to look inside the engine, take it apart, find out how it works, understand how all the parts belong within the context of the whole car, and then put it together again. You’re the man with the spanner!


All details about assignments, student work and homework can be found on Veracross (link at the bottom of this page).


There are four parts that comprise the Language & Literature course. Below, these are listed in order of study.

Part 1. Language & Cultural Context (Grade 11)

Part 2. Language & Mass Communication (Grade 11)

Part 4. Literature: Critical Studies (Grade 11)

Part 3. Literature: Texts & Contexts (Grade 12)

Writing Tips

Know what to say but don’t know how to say it? Use this list of literary criticism terms to help you. You will not need all of them (many of them are, for example, specifically for criticism of poetry) but refer to this list anytime you write a piece of literary criticism and use them as you need them.

Chart of connectives and conjunctions

Grammar Check Sheet

Formal and Informal Language

Glossary of Literary Terms

Literary Terms (for prose texts)


Found a literary device? Not sure what it is? Check Literary Devices here!


If you need to contact us at any time, here’s our email:



