English

"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart." - Salman Rushdie

Course Overview:

Literature and language act as an essential vehicle for consciousness, granting us privileged access to thousands of minds. We engage critically with profound and provocative texts, examining the writer’s craft. The analytical study of this artistic craft—the careful selection of structure, rhetoric, and style—is the key to unlocking the world's most enduring stories. Our curriculum cultivates the ability to read with analytical precision and write with imaginative fluency, empowering students to wield language as a tool for communication, and also as a means of revealing truths and shaping discourse. To master the craft of literature and language is to understand human experience and shape a more perceptive and articulate world.

Course Aims:

Decentre personal experience by engaging with diverse, revelatory human narratives across time and place, fostering understanding and empathy
Cultivate the art of original textual production, refining a voice and aesthetic across various forms
Develop the specialist knowledge and critical vocabulary needed to understand and appreciate the mechanics and aesthetic of literature and language
Foster an enduring aesthetic appreciation for literature and inspire lifelong, habitual engagement with texts
Achieve accurate, sophisticated, and nuanced communication, honing the technical skill of a compelling communicator

Course Outlines

Grade 9

Unit 1: Global Voices: How Do We Tell Stories, And Why?

This narrative unit explores the diversity and revelatory power of storytelling across contexts. Focusing on how writers construct meaning, we examine the inventive ways authors employ narrative structure and linguistic technique in different forms and genres. Students analyse how the writer's craft provides access to unique perspectives and human experiences, appreciating that storytelling is a universal form used to articulate ideas that are both locally specific and globally resonant.

Unit 2: Stories That Matter: News And Non-fiction

This unit investigates how non-fiction text types shape narrative and representation within wider public discourse. Students become critical consumers by analysing various journalism, focusing on the intentionality of the writer's choices. We explore how context matters in shaping and challenging credibility and public belief, and examine the linguistic and structural techniques writers employ to mediate meaning, persuade, and frame the stories deemed newsworthy.

Unit 3: When Words Aren't Enough: Exploring Visual Representation

This unit is a focused study of the graphic novel as a genre-bending literary form. We examine how writers utilise the interplay of image and text to articulate complex narratives involving history, collective memory, and socio-political themes. Students analyse the sophisticated literary craft required to synthesise visual language with memoir or historical account, appreciating the critical role the reader's interpretation plays in constructing meaning from this hybrid medium.

Grade 10

Unit 1: Language and Power: The Art of Rhetoric

This unit is a forensic examination of the craft of persuasion, focusing on how language is strategically deployed to shape ideology, influence social values, and drive action. Students learn to recognise a diverse range of rhetorical and linguistic techniques in speeches, manifestos, and public campaigns, critically evaluating their effects and potential for influence. The core focus is on how writers and orators harness linguistic strategies to win and sustain an audience's attention, and how these techniques can be used ethically to articulate and promote positive social change.

Unit 2: Pardonable Plagiarism: Studying Shakespeare

This unit focuses on Shakespeare's compositional brilliance and the concept of intertextuality. Students study the evolution of his work, moving into a detailed exploration of a major drama. We examine how Shakespeare masterfully borrowed from, transformed, and synthesised pre-existing sources to create new dramatic forms, defining his unique literary voice. The unit analyses how these works have been adapted, re-told, and re-imagined for diverse audiences across more than four centuries.

Unit 3: The Versatility Of Verse: The Poetic Form

This unit explores the aesthetic and technical evolution of poetry, tracing its journey through diverse regions and historical periods. Students build on their knowledge of verse mechanics by analysing how poets intentionally utilise the constraints of form to innovate new ways of seeing and understanding our emotional and relational experiences. The focus is on appreciating the craft and dexterity poetry requires, honouring the genre's capacity for distilled expression and profound insight.

Skills Developed

These critical skills are forged through a variety of explicit instruction, collaborative workshops, and independent and guided practice. Mastering this comprehensive toolkit sets students up for success in advanced English studies and equips them to become perceptive, articulate contributors across their subjects.

Critical Reading and Analysis:

Contextual and intertextual analysis
Comparative analysis
Multimodal and aural / visual literacy
Unseen text explication

Argument and Discourse

Analytical essay writing
Rhetorical and discourse analysis
Socratic discourse and strategic oratory
Critical literacy

Composition and Production

Writing / essay process
Narrative and empathic writing
Poetic and aesthetic appreciation

Assessment

Assessment in English is a dynamic process encompassing both evaluation and continuous development. They vary in their form and purpose, but all assessments are structured around measuring proficiency in interpretation, analysis, critical thinking, language conventions and communication, and creating text.

Assessment for Learning is a formative approach that involves frequent practice and providing specific, iterative feedback, allowing students to refine their work. These include annotations, close reading exercises, responses to texts, academic discussions, analytical writing, creative writing, peer evaluation.

Assessment of Learning measures mastery of skills through more formal and culminating tasks. These include analytical essays and commentaries, unseen text deconstruction, creative portfolio, oral presentations/commentaries, comparative studies (essays or presentations), end-of-year examinations.

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