BA Arts

The Bachelor of Arts (Arts) programme of the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Cape Coast is a four-year undergraduate programme in English Studies covering both the English language and Literature in English. It runs over eight semesters, from Level 100 to Level 400.

The first two years lay the foundation. Level 100 covers the use of English, an introduction to literature and an introduction to academic writing and prose fiction, alongside the University-wide Communicative Skills, Information Literacy Skills and African Studies courses and two subsidiary subjects taken in other departments of the Faculty of Arts and the College of Humanities and Legal Studies. Level 200 adds public speaking, grammar from morpheme to phrase, the language of drama, the forms and functions of the English clause, the techniques of poetry, and literature and law, together with Critical Thinking and Practical Reasoning.

From Level 300 the programme specialises. Each semester offers two core courses and a wide list of electives spanning phonetics and phonology, semantics, discourse, sociolinguistics, business and technical English, corpus linguistics, the history and varieties of English, and a literature strand covering contemporary African writing, British, American, Caribbean, Ghanaian and diaspora literature, critical theory, Shakespeare, gender and writing, literature and film, ecocriticism and popular culture. Single-subject students take the two core courses and three electives each semester; double-subject students combine core English courses with courses from their second subject. ENG 399 Research Methods is required of every student who intends to write the ENG 499 Long Essay in the final year.

In all, thirteen new courses - six in language and seven in literature - were introduced in this revision to capture advances in the field of English Studies.