Introduction; Part 1. AS Level: Unit 1. Reading non-fiction - reading and writing skills - types of question, language and style, key reading skills for responding to passages, planning and structuring a commentary, using evidence and quotations - types of non-fiction text - Descriptive writing, personal writing, persuasive writing, practice and self-evaluation; Unit 2. Writing non-fiction - approaching 'directed writing' questions, approaching 'writing for a specified audience' questions, planning written responses, text types and purposes, text types and key features, key focus - discursive writing and writing to argue, practice tasks; Unit 3. Imaginative writing - exploring imaginative writing tasks, key reading and writing skills, creating your own imaginative and descriptive writing, practice section; Part 2. A-Level: Unit 4. Text and discourse analysis - features of spoken language, speech strategies, transcribing speech, paralinguistic features, key points for discourse analysis; Unit 5. Spoken language and social groups - the context of spoken language, language used to include and exclude, non-standard features of English, speech sounds and accents, theories and studies of social variation in language, dialect, sociolect and ideolect; Unit 6: English as a global language - English and other languages, whose English is it? Kachru's Circles model, from British to global English, English - standard and non-standard, British vs American English, language death; Unit 7. Child language acquisition - the main stages of early development, language acquisition by children and teenagers, the functions of young people's language, theories of language acquisition; Index; Acknowledgements.