Welcome to the Virtual English Department!
The English Department teaches its students the full National Curriculum programme of study for English, from age 11 to age 16. The attainment targets cover the principal areas of our work in developing students’ skills and understanding in:
Speaking and Listening Students work to develop their powers of listening and speaking effectively in an increasing range of contexts, from pair and small group discussions to those involving larger and less familiar audiences.
Reading Students are challenged to move beyond the skills which allowed them to decode text to the point where they achieve confident, fluent understanding of, and responses to, implied and latent meanings beyond the literal.
Writing Students write for a wide range of purposes and audiences in a variety of forms, so that they become equally fluent in both the private and personal, and the formal and public modes. They are taught the basic skills of legible handwriting, accurate spelling and the use of a range of grammatical structures, including punctuation, although these alone to not make competent writers, and neither are they acquired before other important aspects of writing.
Our Aims
We have four interrelated aims in our work. These can be summarised as:
Qualifications Helping students to achieve qualifications which will be of use to them in their future studies and in their working lives. The examination courses we follow is English GCSE by WJEC.
Personal Growth We provide students with opportunities for personal growth, for developing an understanding of themselves and others, and of their place in their local communities and the wider world. We do this by offering them a range of contexts for talk and discussion, by encouraging them to read literature, information texts and other media, and by helping them develop their skills in writing down their experiences and thinking in clear effective English.
The Social Dimension We also stimulate discussion, thinking and writing which focuses on issues of general concern to young people as they prepare themselves for citizenship – issues which bear on their close family and personal relationships, on their rights and obligations in their dealings with others, and on the organisation of groups in wider society, whether in Britain, Europe or the wider world.
How Language Works We teach students about the language so that they are increasingly able to understand its potential and its limitations as a vehicle for communication and the negotiation of meaning and significance. We do this in the belief that knowing how a system works gives enhanced control over it.
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