English Language & Literature

The English Language and Literature Department aims to equip our students with 21st century critical thinking and effective communication skills, so as to prepare them for challenges of the future.

English Language

The school-based curriculum is designed to include both thematic and skills-based units, enabling students to deepen their content understanding and hone their linguistic skills. Through this and other school-based programmes, we create opportunities for Vistarians to develop competence in thinking and reading critically, as well as communicating confidently and empathetically in the English Language.

Literature in English                    

In the Literature classroom, opportunities are provided for students to read and respond to a variety of literary texts (prose, poetry and drama), as well as to explore different perspectives and give personal responses to different themes.

The texts offered from Academic Year 2021 are as follows:

Lower Secondary
Secondary 1	The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas tells the story of nine-year-old Bruno, a German boy and his friendship with Shmuel, a Jewish prisoner of his own age in the concentration camp at Auschwitz during World War II.
Secondary 2	Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed… is an anthology that contains three Singaporean plays for Lower Secondary students that revolve around the theme of family.
Upper Secondary Literature Drama Text[for Pure Literature]	Set in racially-segregated 1950s America, A Raisin in the Sun depicts the lives of the Youngers, an impoverished African American family living in a cramped apartment in the South Side of Chicago.
Upper Secondary Prose Text for Pure, Elective and Normal (Academic) Literature]	Kindred is set in two places: modern twentieth-century America, where Dana, a black woman is married to a white man, and 1815 Antebellum South, where Dana periodically time-travels to. The text explores the plantations in 1815 and the lives of slaves and plantation owners through the author’s vivid descriptions of the environment and people living there.