As you say O level English language and O level English literature and A level more literature in depth. Then BA English is literature in even more depth. No way would I pass A Level English these days, so do I start learning a foreign language for when I'm slung out?
That's something that is taught and tested in BA Politics, Philosophy and Economics in the first year, if you answer the exam questions correctly you fail.
I dont know what A level English is, I dont even know what O level English is, never stayed long enough at school to find out any of it, it never interested me. But what I will say is I wish doctors who come here from other countries were better at speaking English. Its bad for them and bad for me when I have to keep saying sorry, I dont understand, so just a decent pronunciation of the English language is more important than all the A level crap, IMO.
If you move your mouse over the video whilst it is playing, you get a load of icons along the bottom. One is CC for closed captions/subtitles - you might find that useful. You could turn the audio off altogether and just read those. Next to it is the cog symbol for settings. If you click that, you'll find the option to change playback speed. And yes, it will change pitch - it sounds very weird at 25%. You just have to experiment until you find something that sounds OK to you. I think this particular video is already speeded up because the voice sounds quite high. A lot of people use playback speed to speed up videos so they can get through them quicker.
If you google there does seem to be an A-level in English Language. I think most schools just don't offer it.
I don’t know about A level English being a useful test of someone’s command of the language. Here is a nice publication designed for foreign health workers who have to deal with real life English in their jobs. English “at the coal face”, as it were. Nursing bosses create ultimate 46-term guide to British slang so foreign medics know what patients mean - Medical diagnosis
That's fine until you run into somebody over 50 who speaks Geordie rather than Estuary English. I've great admiration for a German friend of mine who spent a summer in a central Birmingham hospital A&E dealing with drunken brummies as standard English was not on offer.
Or even my poor, received pronunciation speaking, husband who, shortly after we first met, visited my ancestral homeland of South Yorkshire and couldn’t understand a word people were saying to him. When he asked one old bloke in a pub for a repeat of the last sentence he’d just uttered, the man next to him said “Weeer duz tha come frum?” The question summed it all up!
When I was at school we learned how to parse sentences, recognising subject, verb, direct and indirect objects, various forms of clause and verb moods and tenses. That and Latin have helped me enormously with not being boggled by the subjunctive and agreements that are rife in French. When we moved to Belgium I became friends with 2 British women, just 2 years younger than me and whose schools had decided English language grammar rules were not essential to life. They never managed more than supermarket French because they didn't know even the basics like subject, verb, object. OH is from Worcester but he and my daughter have both picked up northern expressions from me. I have friends here who use Vendée expressions and vocabulary which they have to explain.
My secondary school was really hot on correct grammar and we, eventually, didn't find it too difficult as we had four grammar lessons per week. So we quickly learned English as she is spoke! Continual mistakes were soon ironed out by a clip round the ear.
Not acronyms, but one of my bosses had a habit of throwing buzzphrases into almost everything he said. "Blue Sky Thinking" was one of his favourites. So one day I decided to see how he reacted if somebody did it back. I said something along the lines of "Blue sky thinking is OK as long as you don't trip over when getting out of the box and squash the low hanging fruit". The rest of the people in the meeting were either trying desperately not to laugh or had given up trying not to. He just sat there looking confused.
"Sound bites" gets me going, someone used it once on me and I said what does that mean, he didn't seem to really know, maybe he knew but couldn't explain it.
