English study is mandatory in NSW from Kindergarten to Year 12.
Students learn about the English language through written, spoken and visual texts of increasing complexity as they progress through their schooling.
An understanding of the English language is central to how we communicate and essential for intellectual, social and emotional development.
The study of English should develop a love of literature and learning and be challenging and enjoyable. It develops skills to enable students to experiment with ideas and expression, to become active, independent and lifelong learners, to work with each other and to reflect on their learning.
In Year 11 and 12, the study of English is mandatory. Courses offered include:
- English Advanced
- English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D)
- English Extension 1
- English Extension 2
- English Standard
- English Studies.
English in Years 7-10 is challenging and enjoyable. As students move into secondary years, they improve their knowledge, skills and understanding about language by responding to and composing texts including visual and multimedia texts. They develop clear and precise control of language by reading, viewing, writing, representing, listening and speaking for an increasingly wide range of social purposes.
Through a close study of texts and a wide range of texts in context, students engage with more challenging and complex texts than in the primary years to reflect their maturing view of the world.
Students have increasing opportunities to consider situations with detachment, enabling the development of critical and imaginative faculties and the broadening of cultural understanding. They become confident users of information and communication technologies that will help them in lifelong learning.
In the later secondary years students are supported to improve and extend their knowledge, skills and understanding in English by responding to and composing texts. They use the language modes of reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing and representing to articulate how meaning is shaped in and through texts. Students expand their purposes and strategies for engaging with texts as they connect with a widening range of ways of communicating. Texts are not confined to the use of the written word and include oral, visual and Multimedia texts.
Students further develop and refine their knowledge of language forms and features to consider situations with detachment. This enables the development of a language selection for a broader range of purposes, audiences and situations.
Students are taught to engage in close textual analysis and reflect on the purposes and effects of conventions in texts. Students extend their interpretations of texts, develop more complex reasoning and justify arguments with substantial evidence from text and context.
They evaluate texts critically and imaginatively, dealing with them in more complex ways. They continue to develop their knowledge and understanding of, and skills in using, a range of technologies in order to respond to and compose texts.
Students consider the effects of personal, vocational, social, historical, cultural and workplace contexts on the ways that people respond to and compose texts. This leads them to understand the ways that texts reproduce experience and modify language practices, values, ideas and ways of thinking. Their composition reflects this understanding.