English Literature and Language with Foundation BA Honours

Critical thinking is fundamental to our ability to progress in an increasingly complex and changing world. It is an essential skill across a range of academic and practice-based disciplines.

This module helps you understand the importance and function of critical thinking both at university and beyond. By working in partnership with academic staff and peers, you will explore how critical thinking aligns with disciplinary practices, shapes scholarly knowledge, and addresses inequalities. Through problem-posing education and anti-racist practices, you will engage with real-world problems, fostering the ability to create a more just and sustainable world.

This module introduces you to the concepts of history and memory. Using topical case studies, the module invites you to consider how the past is related to the present and how history and memory are constituted, challenged and constantly evolving. Through the module, history is made relevant to you by asking to whom history and historical objects belong and what they mean to individuals and society.

This module introduces contemporary political questions in the global context. Current political issues such as statelessness, politics of underdevelopment, power and inequality, and climate change will be discussed and analysed. The idea of nations and nationhood features prominently in the module, as do the issues related to faith, religion and ideological belief. The module is designed to introduce concepts and themes such as democracy, power and politics, inequality, global society, human rights and states, territories and statelessness.

This module provides a foundation in the theory and practice of intercultural communication, to help you better understand the complexities of communicating with people from other cultures. You'll explore what is meant by culture and the relationship between cultures and identities and examine how culture influences you and others. You will reflect on how the language and non-verbal communication you use can impact understandings and what strategies you can develop to manage misunderstandings both socially and in more formal contexts. Throughout the module, you are given the opportunity to practice your communication skills through a range of activities.

This module introduces you to the key academic, professional, and personal skills essential for success at university. It encourages good practices in writing, presentation, and time management, while also fostering reflection to help you build confidence as you transition to higher education. Open to all students enrolled in courses delivered through Westminster Foundation Pathways, the module provides a creative and supportive environment where you can reflect on and develop their academic and professional journey. You'll work with specialist facilitators who play a crucial role in guiding your academic and professional development.

With a focus on managing academic choices in a higher education setting, the module emphasises the importance of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), using methodologies that prioritise equality, diversity, and inclusion. Through these lenses, you'll explore topics that prepare you to address real-world challenges as highlighted in the SDGs in a socially conscious, inclusive, and responsible manner.

This module explores some of the issues and intersections of identity through written and spoken expressions. It will include aspects such as language and gender, writing auto/biography, forms of writing, cultural identity and linguistic identity, and reading and writing about ‘others’ in fiction and non-fiction.

This is a module where teaching and learning takes place in small groups, with students meeting their tutor on a weekly basis. The content of the tutorials is tailored to the group and used to develop a grasp and understanding of the degree as a whole at Level 4, to support the development of academic and research study skills, and to prepare for the synoptic essay.

This module gives you the knowledge and skills necessary to start analysing and describing the English language systematically (according to grammar, morphology and phonology) and prepares you for future modules at Level 5. The module develops your theoretical awareness of spoken and written mediums, how they are structured, and how they can be used as linguistic data. It also gives you a thorough understanding of the concepts of style, register and genre, and introduces you to some of the main historical developments of the English language over time.

This module introduces a series of ‘keywords’ that have been historically central to the study of literature, and explores these in relation to specific critical approaches to, and theoretical understandings of, literary works.

This module investigates how language works in texts, and how texts produce their effects through examination of writers’ lexical and grammatical choices. Students analyse how writers’ linguistic choices indicate the attitudes of characters and narrators, and represent characters as powerful or passive. Students discover how analysing the language of literary texts differs from the approaches taken by literary scholars.

This module examines English around the world as an international, intra-national, native, second, and foreign language. It considers the distinctive features of these varieties and the social and cultural implications of English as a global language. British varieties of English may be referred to as examples in the introductory part of the module but are not the main content or part of the assessment.

This module introduces some of the most exciting developments in poetry over the last 200 years. It examines how poetry intervenes in the modern world, exploring the role poetic form plays in the poet’s critique of key social and political issues. Spanning work from William Wordsworth to Frank O’Hara, Emily Dickinson to Nat Raha, the module considers issues such as the role of poetry and the poet, the politics of form, poetry’s engagement with political resistance, social reform, gender, the body, sexuality, class and cultural identity.

This module samples a generic mix of Shakespeare’s plays and provides a broad introduction to contemporary Shakespeare study. The specific forms of Shakespearean drama are explored not only in their early modern contexts, including the performance practices of the time, but also in terms of other key approaches and topics in current Shakespeare performance, criticism and theory.

This core module is central to the English Literature and Language degree, supporting you in the development of your ability to synthesise your studies on your core and option modules throughout your second year of study. Teaching and learning take place in small groups; you will meet your tutor on a weekly basis. The content of the tutorials is partly tailored to the needs of the group, and partly used to develop a wider synoptic engagement with the degree as a whole (working towards the final year dissertation), and nurturing study skills and awareness of skills relevant to the future workplace.

This module focuses on the role of the reader to the process of textual interpretation. You will be introduced to topics in cognitive poetics to examine the ways in which readers combine their real-world knowledge and their understanding of characters to create discourse worlds, and how they respond to cues in texts to build an understanding of text worlds.

The module gives you an overview of the history of the English language and focuses on specific lexical and syntactic variants present throughout the ages. It considers texts as discourses in order to demonstrate the varied history of English in all its historical forms through to the present day.

The module provides you with the necessary tools to analyse spoken texts in terms of the phonological, lexical, morphosyntactic, and discourse features they display. Texts are analysed as products of discourse, that is, language that is situated in, and takes significance from, particular times and places, and is constructed with a particular purpose.

This module examines the development of different aspects of language in the early years. Within the module, you will focus on the development of (1) phonological abilities (how children perceive and produce words), (2) syntactic abilities (how children combine words to form phrases and sentences), (3) lexical and semantic abilities (how children build their vocabulary and map words and meanings), and (4) morphological abilities (how children acquire inflections). It also discusses theories which seek to explain the development of these linguistic abilities.

This module introduces you to the key debates and concepts that have been central to the formation of current understandings of memory, and its relationship to culture, history, and representation. Sample topics include slavery and its contemporary legacies; the Holocaust; and 9/11.

This module explores literature’s claims to ‘represent’ reality. It focuses on the emergence, development and contestation of realist aesthetics in literature from the rise of the English novel in the 18th century to the present. It investigates how these aesthetics have been challenged and consolidated, and on the many forms of realism that now constitute literature as a result.

This module is an introduction to the theory and practice of learning and teaching and is designed for individuals with little or no teaching experience. You are introduced to major pedagogic theories which have been influential in recent decades and invited to look at them critically. The main currents of contemporary education are explored in relation to practice and extended to broader contexts such as community and outreach education. You are introduced to some techniques commonly used to enhance learning, engagement and inclusion in teaching contexts and in the community. The last sessions of the module will familiarise you with the principles of lesson planning and evaluating teaching.

This module examines the literature, society and politics of the Victorian period, an age of considerable change and upheaval. Through close consideration of a range of texts – including poems, novels and visual material – you'll consider responses to pressing social and political issues such as industrialisation and the ‘Condition of England’, scientific developments, faith and doubt, psychology and the mind, gender, sexuality, imperialism and the empire, and decadence and the fin de siècle.

This module examines the literary innovations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, relating these developments to the period’s central religious, social, and political upheavals. The module examines an array of literary and theatrical experimentation, emphasising works of the late Elizabethan period through to the English Revolution. It is organised in three thematic groups: religion, the social individual, and power and politics. The themes identify the transformations not only inspiring new formal experimentation in verse, prose, and drama, but also influencing changes in literary culture more generally, such as the establishment of the professional playhouse and the development of women’s authorship.

This module interrogates cultural constructions of the present by putting the contemporary into conversation with the past. The module will historicise current social concerns and aesthetic forms to question how and why particular cultural flashpoints have become so important. In so doing, this module asks students to question the value of literature today.

This module is an independent study module in which you plan and carry out a small year-long research project into a language topic of your choice resulting in the writing of a dissertation. The choice of topic, project planning and final writing up is supported throughout the year by a designated supervisor who meets with you on an individual basis and through regular workshops run by the module leader.

In this module, you'll explore the English novel after 1950 through the lens of temporality. You'll examine how the legacy of modernism and the events of the Second World War challenged ideas about the relationship between past, present, and future. The module will guide you through the conceptual debates these challenges provoked and show how they influenced the shape and form of the novel. You'll focus particularly on novels that have most clearly experimented with formal conventions in response to these temporal concerns.

In the first part of this module, you'll explore a range of contemporary socio-cultural issues through readings by key theorists and commentators. Indicative topics include mass culture, privilege and intersectionality, cultural appropriation, public culture, bodies in public space, digital culture and surveillance, national culture, citizenship and immigration, and working culture. You'll examine how these issues manifest in everyday life as well as in contemporary art, film, literature, music, and popular culture. In the final part of the module, you'll be supported in developing an individual project in which you critically analyse a cultural issue and a chosen cultural object. This project is assessed through a linked presentation and essay.

From the mid-1800s to the present, ideas around sexuality and the politics of desire have been central to many literary and cultural artefacts. In this module, you'll examine the construction and deployment of notions of sexuality across that time period. Through close examination of a range of novels, poems, films and television series, you’ll consider how understandings of, and engagements with, sexuality have been represented. As you consider homosexuality, queerness, trans* identities, and heterosexuality, you’ll interrogate ideas of identity, the body, intimacy, desire, history, and representation.

This module is focused on putting pedagogical theory into practice in educational settings. You'll review some theoretical principles of contemporary learning and teaching. An educational setting will then be identified and appropriate approaches to supporting learning will be explored. You are supported in planning for and in facilitating a short learning activity, which could be for traditional classrooms, for online learning or non-formal education, such as museum outreach or community education. After the activity you'll evaluate and reflect on the learning and teaching that has occurred.

This module allows students to consider how linguistic theory and description can be applied in different ways. In doing so it shows how linguistics can be applied to real-world problems and workplace contexts and uses the students’ knowledge about linguistics to do so. Students may apply the expert linguistic knowledge required to determine the authorship of texts, for example, with accompanying theoretical and methodological understanding of the processes that enable them to do so. The module allows students a high degree of flexibility to select subjects ranging from the practice of translation, to forensic linguistics whilst maintaining a solid focus on the theoretical, analytical and critical thinking associated with the systematic study of language.

Through close analysis of selected key texts from the history of literary tragedy, you'll trace the development of tragedy as a genre. You'll explore its origins in the Ancient Greek polis through the works of Sophocles and Aeschylus, examine its revival in Renaissance England with Shakespeare, and consider its much-debated ‘crisis’ in modernity.

This is a work experience placement associated with employment with an appropriate employer that you as a graduate might eventually join, such as a small or large business, an arts organisation or a subject-based placement in a school.

Assessment consists of a portfolio which you'll complete. You'll need to source your own placement. Support is provided via three face-to-face teaching sessions: one introductory session, one session focused on the assessment, and one drop-in session to discuss work towards the assessment. You are also strongly encouraged to make full use of the support offered by discussing your placement and coursework with the module leader during the semester. In cases where you are unable to secure a placement by the end of the first week of the semester, or where a placement has fallen through, the University will support and facilitate a change in module.