Exploring English Through Fantasy Literature
The goal of the course is to develop learners’ advanced English proficiency through sustained engagement with fantasy literature, while deepening their understanding of how language creates meaning, shapes relationships, and reflects genre. The course also aims to foster analytical and reflective awareness of literary language in ways that are relevant to advanced language use and to future teaching practice.
Principal Learning Outcomes
Read a range of fantasy texts in English with a high level of comprehension and with sensitivity to tone, register, context, and implied meaning.
Analyse how lexical, stylistic, discourse, and pragmatic choices shape meaning, atmosphere, characterisation, and interpersonal relations in literary texts.
Identify how language expresses power, politeness, authority, conflict, and social hierarchy in literary and semi-literary discourse.
Distinguish between literal meaning and implied meaning in spoken and written exchanges.
Use an appropriate range of literary-linguistic terminology to comment on texts in both spoken and written form.
Produce clear, well-structured written and spoken responses to fantasy texts for different communicative purposes and audiences.
Adapt register, tone, style, and pragmatic choices in their own language use, including analytical, descriptive, persuasive, and genre-based tasks.
Expand advanced vocabulary and phraseological repertoire through close engagement with literary texts.
Reflect critically on how literary texts can support advanced language development and, where relevant, English language teaching.
Course Syllabus
Each unit is a new chapter in your adventure through the realms of fantasy literature.
Creating Atmosphere Through Language
Explore how register, lexical choice, and sentence style shape atmosphere and genre, and practise adapting your own language to create different tonal effects
Telling Stories in English
Examine how fantasy narratives are organised through tense, sequencing, discourse markers, and point of view, and how these choices guide the reader’s experience
Building Worlds Through Words
Analyse how writers use sensory detail, spatial language, and complex noun phrases to create vivid fantasy settings, and apply these resources in your own descriptive writing
What Characters Really Mean
Investigate how characters use language to imply, control, persuade, threaten, and negotiate power, and develop your ability to interpret and produce meaning beyond the literal level
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How Language Reveals Character
Explore how vocabulary, rhythm, syntax, and interactional habits create distinctive character voices, and practise writing dialogue that sounds consistent, purposeful, and believable
Explaining Magic Systems
Develop control of formal explanatory English by analysing how fantasy texts classify, define, and explain complex systems, then applying these patterns in clear academic-style writing
Rhetoric in Fantasy
Examine how fantasy speakers build arguments, appeal to audiences, and use rhetorical devices to persuade, and practise crafting your own structured persuasive texts
Integrating Skills
Bring together the course’s linguistic and analytical tools to compare texts, synthesise evidence, and produce extended critical writing in a clear, well-supported academic voice