The Bachelor of Arts program in English is designed to enable students to explore many aspects of English studies. The Department of English, Languages, and Cultures offers courses in composition, creative writing, film, literature, and literary theory. A distinctive feature of this English department is the commitment to improving students’ writing skills. Given this focus on writing and on reading different types of texts, students will find these programs useful for a variety of occupations and/or further study.

Graduates will be aware, not only of the historical and generic categories of English literature, but also of the role language plays in shaping our perceptions of everyday life. Mount Royal English graduates will be broadly literate for having engaged with written, visual and other types of social text. Mount Royal English graduates will be able to articulate the cultural processes that produce literatures in a variety of different geographic settings including Canada. In order to achieve this level of understanding, graduates will have taken a variety of courses stressing different literatures, genres, media and approaches to forms of cultural production.

Graduates will be able to communicate effectively in a variety of contexts. Graduates will be in firm possession of other core, transferable skills, such as thinking strategies, ethical reasoning, information retrieval and evaluation capabilities, computer literacy and group effectiveness, thus enabling them to succeed in further studies and career opportunities. Qualified graduates may go on to professional programs like law or develop careers in business, writing, or teaching. Graduates will have experienced different learning environments and developed metacognition (that is, a high level of self-awareness regarding learning and professionalization) around learning styles and preferences, an important outcome for the life-long learner in the education system or the workplace.

The graduate will:

1. demonstrate a writing style that exhibits clarity, eloquence, and precision.
2. consider the audience when selecting rhetorical strategies.
3. articulate positions clearly and persuasively.
4. support arguments with appropriate sources of information.
5. analyze, evaluate and synthesize information from different sources.
6. construct reasonable and informed readings of texts.
7. be aware of genre conventions and literary traditions.
8. recognize various theoretical and critical approaches to texts.
9. address different positions in the course of developing an argument.
10. interrogate the ways in which ethical assumptions are shaped and analyze how one’s own ethical framework affects one’s readings of texts.
11. document sources in an ethically responsible way.
12. use information technologies effectively.
13. apply group process skills in diverse settings.
14. assess personal effectiveness in learning.