English Language: should I choose it?

The nature and functions of language

Language acquisition

English across time

Englishes in contact

Unit 3, Area of Study 1: Informality

This area of study examines informal English and why speakers reach for it. You look at how Standard English sits alongside non-standard usage, and at register and tenor — how the relationship between participants shapes the language chosen. The features are studied across all subsystems: phonological reductions and elision, morphological shortenings and diminutives, colloquial lexis, slang, taboo language, dysphemism and swearing, and the looser, more elliptical syntax of casual speech. Written informality brings its own resources, including emoticons, emojis and context-specific graphemes. You also study discourse strategies and how cooperation is managed in informal exchanges — turn-taking, overlaps, minimal responses, topic shifts — and the conventions used to transcribe spoken texts. Underpinning all of it are the social purposes: intimacy, solidarity, equality, in-group membership, negative and positive politeness strategies, and linguistic innovation.

Unit 3, Area of Study 2: Formality

Formality is the mirror image of the previous area of study, and the two are examined together. You look at the role Standard English plays in formal contexts, and at how register and tenor shift when social distance, authority or an institutional audience is involved. Features are again studied across the subsystems: careful phonology and full articulation, nominalisation and complex noun phrases, elaborate and embedded syntax, formulaic openings and closings, and specialised lexis. The distinctive lexical territory here is rhetoric, jargon, euphemism, doublespeak and non-discriminatory language. Discourse strategies cover how cooperation is managed in formal exchanges, along with cohesion and coherence through referencing, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, lexical choice and consistent information flow. Public language is the applied context — the language of politics, reportage, law and bureaucracy, where clarifying, obfuscating and manipulating are all live possibilities.

Unit 4, Area of Study 1: Language variation in Australian society

This area of study is about the varieties of English used in Australia and the attitudes attached to them. You study Standard Australian English and what its role is in national life, along with the Broad, General and Cultivated accents and the social judgements each attracts. Aboriginal Australian Englishes and migrant ethnolects are examined as systematic varieties with their own phonological, lexical, morphological and syntactic patterns, not as deviations. Set against these are prescriptivist and descriptivist attitudes, which you need to be able to identify in commentary and evaluate rather than simply take sides on. The area also covers how global contact and modern technologies feed into Australian English, particularly through American English and online usage, and how language is bound up with perceived national identity — including established stereotypes such as laconic mateship and newer ones emerging in contemporary media.

Unit 4, Area of Study 2: Individual and group identities

This area of study looks at how language builds and signals who we are, individually and collectively. Sociolects are studied across the variables that shape them — age, gender, sexuality, occupation, interests, aspirations and education — alongside idiolects, the particular combination of features that marks one speaker. Central to the outcome are overt and covert prestige: the pull of the standard variety on one side, and the value a non-standard variety carries within its own community on the other. You examine linguistic repertoires and how speakers move between them, code switching as a way of signalling belonging or accommodating an audience, and how convergence and divergence position a speaker relative to others. The area also deals with the harder edge of the topic: how language choices carry social attitudes and prejudice, and how discrimination and disadvantage are enacted through the way particular varieties and speakers are treated.

Unit 1, Area of Study 1: The nature and functions of language (school-assessed only, not examined)

This Unit 1 area of study establishes the conceptual toolkit the rest of the subject uses. You learn that language is an arbitrary, convention-governed system for making meaning, and study the major functions language performs in context. Register, tenor and audience are introduced here, as is the analysis of situational and cultural context — field, mode, setting, text type and authorial intent — which becomes the standard opening move of an analytical commentary. Most importantly, this is where the subsystems are defined: morphology, lexicology, syntax and semantics as the core four, with phonetics and phonology and discourse and pragmatics introduced alongside them. You also study the differences between speech and writing, including paralinguistic features such as gesture and facial expression and prosodic features such as stress, pitch and intonation, which are essential for handling transcripts later.

Unit 1, Area of Study 2: Language acquisition (school-assessed only, not examined)

This Unit 1 area of study covers how language is acquired. You work through the developmental stages for first-language learners and for people acquiring an additional language, and compare the competing explanations — universal grammar and an innate language faculty against usage-based theories that ground acquisition in interaction and frequency. Differences between child and adult learning are examined, along with multilingualism and code switching in bilingual speakers. The area also introduces phonetics and phonology in practical form, including the International Phonetic Alphabet used to transcribe sounds precisely. You then track development subsystem by subsystem: babbling and phonological simplification processes, morphological milestones such as overgeneralised past tense forms, vocabulary growth, syntactic development from single words through telegraphic speech to complex sentences, and semantic development including overextension. Fieldwork methods for collecting and analysing genuine language data round out the outcome.

Unit 2, Area of Study 1: English across time (school-assessed only, not examined)

This Unit 2 area of study traces English through time. You study its historical development and the events that reshaped it, and its position within the Indo-European family. Codification is a major thread: how dictionaries, grammars and printing helped fix a standard variety, and how Standard English continued to evolve afterwards. Change is examined subsystem by subsystem — the Great Vowel Shift in phonology, and the processes of morphological, lexical, syntactic and semantic change including borrowing, compounding, affixation, acronyming, and semantic shift, broadening, narrowing, elevation and deterioration. The prescriptivist and descriptivist debate returns here in historical form, applied to how change has been resisted or welcomed. An elective depth study then focuses on either Incursions, such as Viking settlement, the Norman conquest, religion and plague, or Inventions, such as the printing press, dictionaries, typewriters and the internet.

Unit 2, Area of Study 2: Englishes in contact (school-assessed only, not examined)

This Unit 2 area of study follows English as it spread and met other languages. You study the drivers of that spread — trade, colonisation and contemporary global forces — and how distinct varieties emerged, including the Australian Englishes and Aboriginal Australian Englishes. Pidgins and creoles are examined as systematic outcomes of language contact, with attention to how a pidgin develops and how it becomes a creole with native speakers. English as a lingua franca is treated as a separate phenomenon again, with its own consequences for who is advantaged in international communication. The area then turns to language and identity: how a language carries a worldview, and what happens through language maintenance, language shift and language reclamation. Language loss is studied with particular reference to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and the cultural consequences of that loss.