Course Content

Choosing Thoughtcrime as your English programme for Level 3 means that, you probably find the darker, more dystopian aspects of world literature attractive; you’re somehow inexorably drawn to the unusual and deep down you sense that something is rotten in the state of… This programme will take a media-savvy journalistic approach. You’ll need to think fast, question everything and be willing to speak up. You will be asked to challenge yourself, take risks and show ambition. 

We’ll be reading the work of some of the 20th Century’s greatest satirists, poets and activists. We’ll explore modern text communication, political and online language and compare this with our own speech to learn how the wool can be so easily pulled over our eyes. We’ll look at the grammar and style of a range of journalistic writing and publish our own. We’ll explore how our very language itself can control our thoughts and – if we’re not careful – limit our freedom. We’ll read one of the 20th Centuries most disturbing political novels, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four and explore modern anti-heroes such as Donnie Darko and A Clockwork Orange’s Alex De Large. Throughout, you will be practising the key skills required to succeed in your NCEA programme.

In parallel to this everyone will be completing for homework their own longitudinal genre inquiry by investigating links between self-selected books, films and art and presenting these in documentary form.

Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

GEORGE ORWELL