Courses

English General

Year 11 and 12 Alternative Academic Pathway|English

English General

Rebecca Shiel
Curriculum Leader - English

English General

Nathan Wood

The General English course focuses on consolidating and refining the skills and knowledge needed by students to become competent, confident and engaged users of English in everyday, community, social, further education, training and workplace contexts. The course is designed to provide students with the skills that will empower them to succeed in a wide range of post‐secondary pathways.

The course develops students’ language, literacy and literary skills to enable them to communicate successfully both orally and in writing. It also encourages students to value using language for both imaginative and practical purposes. Students comprehend, analyse, interpret and evaluate the content, structure and style of a wide variety of oral, written, multimodal, digital and media texts. Students learn how the interaction of structure, language, audience and context helps to shape how the audience makes meaning. Both independently and collaboratively, they apply their knowledge to create analytical, imaginative, interpretive and persuasive texts in different modes and media.

Courses

Year 11 General Course

Unit 1

This unit focuses on students comprehending and responding to the ideas and information presented in texts.

Students:

  • employ a variety of strategies to assist comprehension
  • read, view and listen to texts to connect, interpret and visualise ideas
  • learn how to respond personally and logically to texts by questioning, using inferential reasoning and determining the importance of content and structure
  • consider how organisational features of texts help the audience to understand the text
  • learn to interact with others in a range of contexts, including everyday, community, social, further education, training and workplace contexts
  • communicate ideas and information clearly and correctly in a range of contexts
  • apply their understanding of language through the creation of texts for different purposes.
Unit 2

This unit focuses on interpreting ideas and arguments in a range of texts and contexts.

Students:

  • analyse text structures and language features and identify the ideas, arguments and values expressed; they consider the purposes and possible audiences of texts
  • examine the connections between purpose and structure and how a text’s meaning is influenced by the context in which it is created and received
  • integrate relevant information and ideas from texts to develop their own interpretations
  • learn to interact effectively in a range of contexts
  • create texts using persuasive, visual and literary techniques to engage audiences in a range of modes and media.
Assessments
  • Responding to a range of text forms
  • Creating a range of text forms

Year 12 General Course

Unit 3

This unit focuses on exploring different viewpoints presented in a range of texts and contexts.

Students:

  • explore attitudes, text structures and language features to understand a text’s meaning and purpose
  • examine relationships between context, purpose and audience in different language modes and types of texts, and their impact on meaning
  • consider how perspectives and values are presented in texts to influence specific audiences and develop and justify their own interpretations when responding to texts
  • learn how to communicate logically, persuasively and imaginatively in different contexts, for different purposes, using a variety of types of texts.
Unit 4

This unit focuses on community, local or global issues and ideas presented in texts and on developing students’ reasoned responses to them.

Students:

  • explore how ideas, attitudes and values are presented by synthesising information from a range of sources to develop independent perspectives
  • analyse the ways in which authors influence and position audiences
  • investigate differing perspectives and develop reasoned responses to these in a range of text forms for a variety of audiences
  • construct and clearly express coherent, logical and sustained arguments and demonstrate an understanding of purpose, audience and context
  • consider intended purpose and audience response when creating their own persuasive, analytical, imaginative, and interpretive texts.
Assessments
  • Responding to a range of text forms
  • Creating a range of text forms
  • Externally set task developed by the School Curriculum and Standards Authority
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