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Studies in Literature & English Language

Believing that literacy and communicative fluency are foundational to learning, Convent & Stuart Hall’s Studies in Literature & English Language Department develops compelling communicators and passionate participants in a culture of reading, writing and thinking.

Using the framework of the School’s Great Texts Philosophy and Canon as inspiration, the youngest students focus on decoding and encoding skills. Undertaking their path to communicative fluency and "sense making," students experience reading and writing as formative elements of the reflective and thoughtful self.

In the middle years, the skills of reading and writing continue to gain proficiency through textual inquiry, discovery and exploration. Students develop an appreciation for genre, narrative voice and authorship, and make connections across texts. An attention to research skills invites students to engage in topics of independent interest, to develop unique questions and to support their original ideas with textual evidence.

In the upper grades, students understand how to construct meaning from challenging texts and to evaluate them in terms of genre, artistry and rhetoric. At this level, the act of decoding text becomes an exercise in encoding meaning via extended written products and in performances and oral presentations.

Within this culture of reading, thinking and writing, Convent & Stuart Hall students claim and hone their voice. Through textual exploration, they access a universe of ideas, make sense of them and develop a sensibility for “truth” and “beauty.” The program equips each student to go out into the world with creative confidence, a capacity to see and make sense of nuance and the agency of a compelling and persuasive voice.