If you are eligible for ESL most people reccomend doing it UNLESS you are capable and interested in doing extension english. Since you are in standard at the moment, or will be in standard i highly suggest you drop to ESL. The structure of the course is pretty similiar among ESL, Standard and Advanced so you will have to write essays and stuff, but im not sure about related texts. There is also some kind of listening component to it and less modules as a whole, other people might be able to elaborate. It does not scale the same as Standard Eng, it scales far better - closer to advanced english and not only that it is practically impossible to get a band 6 in standard and hard to get even a band 5 due to the poor aligning. From what i have seen some of the set texts are the same as advanced (selected poems of emily dickinson for eg) but thats nothing to be worried about. Less than 0.2% of people sitting the standard test got a band 6 in 2010 and around 4% got band 5 but for esl 3.6% got band 6 and 21.7% got band 5.