Welcome to the wonderful world of High School English Language and Literature at TRIO World Academy (TWA)!

IGCSE (International General Certificate of Secondary Education) First Language English students at TWA quickly learn to develop the ability to communicate clearly, accurately, and effectively with particular emphasis on developing a personal style which is vital in the future world that they will face. Students are also encouraged to explore the infinite universe of imaginative writing, as well as other forms of writing that they will encounter in their lives, such as discursive essays, letters, reports, journals, speeches, interviews, reviews, and articles. In addition, Students are immersed in the creative process of evolving their own stories, whether they be imaginative or descriptive, and are encouraged to develop these skills in the wider world.

At TWA, we also study “Literature in English” at the IGCSE level. It is a bit of a mouthful, I know, but what it really means is that we study Literature originally written in English. Over the last eight years we have studied many different texts ranging from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” and “Macbeth” to Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” and John Knowles’ “A Separate Peace” via Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” The exuberance and danger of love and power in these texts has been counterpointed by an exploration of individual identity within a world of changing concepts of birth and nationality.

TWA has also enriched our students’ understanding of the world around them through over thirty poems. Poetry written by Maya Angelou, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sujata Bhatt, William Wordsworth, Seamus Heaney, Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Tennyson, Philip Larkin, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Emily Bronte have all been studied at TWA. We have taken the students on a journey through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stopping on the way to examine life’s central concepts of love and death as well as freedom and repression. TWA students have wondered at the imaginative potential of the human mind to witness and record, in beautiful words and rhythms, the experiences of many disparate people and their own perceptions and concerns.

In IB (International Baccalaureate®), TWA students’ study “Language and Literature” which, as the course title implies, is a mix of Language studies as well as an exploration of Literature. In Language, we study non-literary texts such as adverts, posters, blogs, newspapers, magazine articles and covers, songs and films as well as cartoon strips and graphic novels. The course is designed to enable the students to apply their analytical skills, developed in the study of global literature, to sources of information that they will encounter in their daily lives thus empowering them to question what it is they are reading and receiving. This is a crucially important skill as the students reach adulthood, about to be thrust upon the world in all its complexity and ambiguity, as they will possess the tools with which to decode and interpret not only the written text but also the visual elements that reinforce the experiences, we all encounter in the media. No longer is the TWA student a passive subject, merely receiving information. A transformation has taken place since the start of the course and an active citizen now stands before you, ready to make decisions that will alter lives forever.

The Literature part of the IB Language and Literature course at TWA covers a wider range of literature than the IGCSE course as we study six texts at Higher Level, and four texts at Standard Level. At the moment, everyone studies Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel “Persepolis,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920’s drama “The Great Gatsby”, William Shakespeare’s sixteenth century “Romeo and Juliet” and Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “Howl” that laid the foundation for the 1960s. Higher Level students also study George Orwell’s dystopian tale of the future, “1984”, and Samuel Beckett’s existentialist “Waiting for Godot”, written just after the Second World War. We have also studied William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” which explores the lives of two secondary characters from “Hamlet” when they are not taking part in Shakespeare’s play. One of the differences between the IB course and the IGCSE course is that two of the texts – “Persepolis” and “Waiting for Godot” – were originally written in French and then translated into English which extends the cultural experience beyond the English-speaking world.

Such cultural glory permeates through the consciousness of the student, subliminally rewarding and overtly influencing the core being of our students as TWA encourages our learners to develop the skills of empathy, leadership, and fortitude on their voyage towards becoming world-class leaders in an extraordinary environment of enrichment.