The Australian Curriculum: English Foundation to Year 10 is organised into three interrelated strands that support students' growing understanding and use of Standard Australian English (English). Each strand interacts with and enriches the other strands in creative and flexible ways, the fabric of the curriculum being strengthened by the threads within each sub-strand.
Together, the three strands form an integrating framework of disciplinary knowledge and focus on developing students’ knowledge, understanding and skills in listening, reading, viewing, speaking and writing from Foundation to Year 10. The three strands are:
Content descriptions in each of the three strands are grouped into sub-strands that, across the year levels, present a sequence of development of knowledge, understanding and skills. The sub-strands are shown in the table below.
Table1: Overview of sub strands and threads in the Australian Curriculum: English (F-10)
Strands | |||
---|---|---|---|
Language | Literature | Literacy | |
Sub-strands and threads | |||
Language variation and change
|
Literature and context
|
Texts in context
|
|
Language for interaction
|
Responding to literature
|
Interacting with others
|
|
Text structure and organisation
|
Examining literature
|
Interpreting, analysing and evaluating
|
|
Expressing and developing ideas
|
Creating literature
|
Creating texts
|
|
Phonics and word knowledge
|
N/A | N/A |
Each strand contributes to the study of English its own distinctive goals, body of knowledge, history of ideas and interests, and each relates to material worth studying in its own right. Teaching, learning and assessment programs should balance and integrate the three strands to support the development of knowledge, understanding and skills. The key focal point for a unit of work or a learning activity may arise from any one of the strands, but the intention is that units and activities draw on all three strands in ways that are integrated and clear to learners.
In the language strand, students develop their knowledge of the English language and how it works. They learn that changes in English are related to historical developments and the geographical differences of its users over the centuries, and that there are many differences in dialect and accent. They learn how language enables people to interact effectively, to build and maintain relationships and to express and exchange knowledge, skills, attitudes, feelings and opinions. They discover the patterns and purposes of English usage, including spelling, grammar and punctuation at the levels of the word, sentence and extended text, and they study the connections between these levels. By developing a body of knowledge about these patterns and their connections, students learn to communicate effectively through coherent, well-structured sentences and texts. They gain a consistent way of understanding and talking about language, language in use and language as system, so they can reflect on their own speaking and writing and discuss these productively with others. This strand informs the planning and conduct of teaching and learning activities in English and provides resources that connect to key concepts and skills in the other strands.
The literature strand aims to engage students in the study of literary texts of personal, cultural, social and aesthetic value. These texts include some that are recognised as having enduring social and artistic value and some that attract contemporary attention. Texts are chosen because they are judged to have potential for enriching the lives of students, expanding the scope of their experience, and because they represent effective and interesting features of form and style. Learning to appreciate literary texts and to create their own literary texts enriches students’ understanding of human experiences and the capacity for language to deepen those experiences. It builds students’ knowledge about how language can be used for aesthetic ends, to create particular emotional, intellectual or philosophical effects. Students interpret, appreciate, evaluate and create literary texts such as short stories, novels, poetry, prose, plays, film and multimodal texts, in spoken, print and digital/online forms. Texts recognised as having enduring artistic and cultural value are drawn from world and Australian literature. These include the oral narrative traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, texts from Asia, texts from Australia’s immigrant cultures and texts of the students’ choice.
Each year level description in the Australian Curriculum: English Foundation to Year 10 gives information about the nature of texts to be studied including appropriate types of texts and typical linguistic and structural features. Across the years of schooling, students will engage with literary texts in spoken, written and multimodal form, including digital texts, such as narratives, poetry, prose, plays and films.
The literacy strand aims to develop students’ ability to interpret and create texts with appropriateness, accuracy, confidence, fluency and efficacy for learning in and out of school, and for participating in Australian life more generally. Texts chosen include media texts, everyday texts and workplace texts from increasingly complex and unfamiliar settings, ranging from the everyday language of personal experience to more abstract, specialised and technical language, including the language of schooling and academic study. Students learn to adapt language to meet the demands of more general or more specialised purposes, audiences and contexts. They learn about the different ways in which knowledge and opinion are represented and developed in texts, and about how more or less abstraction and complexity can be shown through language and through multimodal representations. This means that print and digital contexts are included, and that listening, speaking, reading, viewing, writing and creating are all developed systematically and concurrently.
The processes of listening, speaking, reading, viewing and writing – also known as language modes – are interrelated, and the learning of one often supports and extends learning of the others. To acknowledge these interrelationships, content descriptions in each strand of the Australian Curriculum: English incorporate the processes of listening, speaking, reading, viewing and writing in an integrated and interdependent way.
Classroom contexts that address particular content descriptions will necessarily draw from more than one of these processes to support students’ effective learning. For example, students will learn new vocabulary through listening and reading and apply their knowledge and understanding in their speaking and writing as well as in their comprehension of spoken and written texts.
Content descriptions can also be viewed on the website by language modes, using the mode view function which presents each content description under one of three possible mode category groups. The three groups are: reading and viewing, writing, and speaking and listening. Content descriptions can be filtered to identify the most relevant processes or mode group in which the major focus of the learning occurs.
Each content description is also identified with all relevant language modes through the allocation of the following icons: