Length: Full Year

Recommended background: Successful completion of Stage 1 English Literary Studies

Content:

English Literary Studies emphasises reading, viewing and textual analysis. This is an academic course with rigorous, challenging texts that prepares students for university requirements. There is a strong focus on the complex relationship between a text and its context, audience and author and that the interpretation of a text can be influenced by the cultural perspective brought by the reader.

A big focus on the course is the exploration of texts with ‘literary merit’ through selection of poetry, drama, film and prose texts from a prescribed SACE list. In the past, such texts have included The Secret River, King Lear and poets such as Sylvia Plath, Gwen Harwood and Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Students will:

• study four shared texts as a class (poetry, prose, film and a play) with two of them forming a comparative task
• transform a text’s ideas into a different mode to form their own creative text
• create a written, oral or multimodal text
• choose one text independently, and pair it with a text from the shared studies choices to write an individual comparison
• critically read, analyse and write to one or more unfamiliar texts in exam conditions

Assessment:

Students’ performance will be determined according to the subject’s Performance Standards as outlined in the Subject Outline. Grades A+ to E- will be used for reporting purposes.

School-based assessment (70%):

• Responding to Texts (50%) – Four responses (total word count 5,000 words; one may be oral or multimodal of up to 6 minutes)
• Creating Text Study (20%) – One transforming text linked to another text with a writer’s statement (1500 words) and one written, oral/multimodal text (1000 words or 6 minutes or multimodal equivalent)

External Assessment (30%):

• Part A – Comparative Text Study (15%) – Critical essay on one of the shared texts and one chosen by the student (1,500 words)
• Part B – Critical Reading (15%) – 100-minute Critical Reading examination of one or more short texts