It's all change at A-level. Well, not quite all, but in English we will find that there are substantial differences between the work demanded of students at 'A' Level and that involved in the 'Advanced Subsidiary/Advanced' GCE qualifications that are replacing them. September 2002, when the first Curriculum 2000 students start their degrees, may seem a long way down the road, but we may arrive there sooner than we think.
There are three Englishes offered at A-level: English Language, English Literature, and a combined Language and Literature course, usually just called (as in this article) English. All three Englishes have changed, but it is in the combined course that the changes are greatest.
All the new English specifications, regardless of Exam board, seek to integrate the study of language and literature. In AQA Specification B some modules are close to what we traditionally expect, but others, such as AS 2, The Changing Language of Literature (see table) are not. Students have to compare/contrast a pre-twentieth-century with a twentieth-century text, for instance More's Utopia with Huxley's Brave New World, from the viewpoint of changing attitudes to writing and to language. These are interesting texts, but they are not drawn from the usual A-level 'canon' AS 5, Talk in Language and Literature, does not examine a Shakespeare play from the traditional A-level angle of theme and characterisation, but from the angle of dialogue construction. Students analyse ordinary conversation and see to what extent Shakespeare uses or ignores its features in producing heightened dramatic dialogue.
There is also more emphasis in AQA Specification B on students producing their own texts. For AS 3 'Coursework Production of Texts', a student might write, for instance, a short story, and for A2 4 'Text Transformation', a thirty minute puppet version of, say, Twelfth Night, to introduce young children to Shakespeare. For both modules students have to write an accompanying commentary on their texts, analysing the choices they have made and the reasons for them.
I do not want to suggest that this new specification is better or worse than previous syllabi: clearly the activities listed can be shown to develop important skills in a responsive student; rather I wish to emphasise how different it is, and how different may be the skills it produces. Students who don't read beyond the set books will have studied two collections of extracts and short texts (AS 1, A2 6), four complete texts (AS 2, AS 4, AS 5), at least two of them pre-1900; but responsive students will be used to encountering texts in a much more active, creative way, to thinking more about the process of writing, and to reading a much greater variety of language, including speech, than most of their predecessors.
Specifications such as this give impetus to unresolved questions such as, 'Should degree level English courses be primarily literature-based?' 'Should the texts studied in the course be primarily from the “canon”?' Many degree courses include other aspects of English study, but in most literature and language go their separate ways. We'd need to travel a long way to produce a more integrated course. Should we be doing so? Are the skills involved in the new specifications ones which should be developed more explicitly at degree level?
There's another implication too. Given that students may have studied one of three Englishes, and that the specifications vary to some extent between Exam Boards, should departments run in the first term or semester, or even throughout the first year, an induction to degree level English studies? (Anglia Polytechnic University's Speak-Write project, described below, is a successful example of this). My own experience of teaching Study Skills, which is an attempt to induct students of very different ages and backgrounds into degree level study, has been that a few students don't see the point of extra work, but most are enthusiastic and even grateful that time has been set aside for this.
Traditionally, the transition from A-level or Access course to university has been taken for granted; the new curriculum encourages us to be more active in making this transition successful.
Newsletter Issue 1 - May 2001
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