“I have loved the English Language and Literature course at Xaverian, my teacher always made the lessons entertaining and engaging, and I genuinely looked forward to the lessons! I also enjoyed the depth we read into the texts, it feels like you get to know the writer and their intentions, not just remembering quotes for an exam. We look at analysing alternative genres within poetry, prose, drama or travel writing and, this week, we are researching different screenplay writers in preparation for a class discussion about their effective use of language to achieve a well-written piece of text. An activity we do regularly is to study the identifying features of a particular genre and then emulate this in our own writing. I’ve chosen poetry by Philip Larkin as this is an area of literature I am most interested in.

All English students have the opportunity to take part in workshop sessions where we write our own pieces and support each other to improve our work. We also take part in trips and visits and, next month, I’m planning to take part in the trip to London to watch Shakespeare’s play, ‘Othello’. Of course, we study great literary texts, such as Tennessee Williams’ ‘Streetcar Named Desire’ or F Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’, and debate the issues and ideas that these complex and controversial texts throw up, but the refreshing aspect at A Level is the ability to develop and construct our own critical perspective.”