English General Senior Syllabus 2025 v1.3 (for completion in 2026 or later)
The 2026 course has four assessments worth 25% each: IA1 spoken persuasive response, IA2 written response for a public audience, IA3 imaginative extended-response examination, and the QCAA external analytical essay. The external assessment relates to Unit 4, with 15 minutes planning and 120 minutes working time; students cannot bring the studied text or notes. Use the 2026 external-assessment prescribed text list. Literary examples in these notes illustrate transferable skills and are not a declaration that every example is a current examination option.
Past papers on this subject span more than one syllabus. Papers written under an older one still work as practice, but the units and topics they test have changed — the index labels every paper with the syllabus it was set under.
English 2019 syllabus · 2020–2025English 2025 syllabus (v1.3) · 2026–present
The units and topics, one by one
Each area below lists the concepts named in the syllabus, what the QCAA exam asks of them, and the mistake that most often costs marks.
- Unit 1: Perspectives and texts
- Unit 2: Texts and culture
- Unit 3: Textual connections
- Unit 4: Close study of literary texts
- Assessment objectives (cross-unit, examinable)
Area 1 of 5
Unit 1: Perspectives and texts
Unit 1 introduces the idea the rest of the course runs on: texts are constructed, and every construction carries a perspective. You examine how cultural assumptions, attitudes, values and beliefs are built into texts through language choice, structure, register and point of view, and you learn to name those choices rather than simply react to them. The unit works across print, spoken and multimodal texts so you can watch the same persuasive move performed in an essay, a speech and an advertisement. Assessment covers both dimensions of the syllabus: understanding, through an analytical response explaining how a text positions its audience, and creating, through an imaginative response written for a public or specified audience. The habits formed here — annotating for effect, quoting economically, writing to a brief — carry straight into Units 3 and 4.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 4 points
- How texts represent perspectives, cultural assumptions, attitudes, values and beliefs
- Analytical response to texts (understanding dimension)
- Imaginative/creative response for a public or specified audience (creating dimension)
- Introductory analysis of language, structure and register across print, spoken, multimodal texts
What the exam asks
Unit 1 is school-based and not assessed by QCAA, so the work is formative. What transfers into the external assessment is the analytical vocabulary: identifying representation, perspective and register, and explaining the effect of a specific choice on a reader instead of labelling the device used.
Where marks go missing
Naming techniques without effect. Writing that an author uses emotive language earns nothing on its own; the mark comes from what that choice does to the reader's view of the subject, which is the same standard applied in the examination.
Area 2 of 5
Unit 2: Texts and culture
Unit 2 turns from perspective to culture. You study how cultural assumptions, attitudes, values and beliefs are embedded in texts, and how a text can reinforce a dominant view, challenge it, or do both at once through irony, structure or an unreliable narrator. The unit works with texts drawn from different cultural contexts so you can see that conventions themselves carry cultural meaning — genre expectations, forms of address, and what a text treats as normal and therefore leaves unsaid. Assessment covers an analytical exposition responding to a single complex text, and a persuasive spoken or multimodal response delivered to a public audience, so you practise sustaining an argument aloud as well as on paper. Reading for what a text omits, not only what it states, is the skill this unit is built around.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 4 points
- How cultural assumptions, attitudes, values and beliefs are embedded, challenged or reinforced in texts
- Comparative/analytical exposition responding to a single complex text
- Persuasive spoken or multimodal response for a public audience
- Textual features and conventions shaping cultural representation
What the exam asks
Also school-based rather than QCAA-set. Its contribution to the external assessment is the ability to write about a text's cultural work — whose values it serves, which readers it assumes, what it invites an audience to accept — with evidence quoted precisely enough to carry the claim being made.
Where marks go missing
Turning a cultural reading into a verdict on the author's morals. The argument has to be built from the text's own choices — what it foregrounds, what it leaves out, whose voice gets the last word — rather than from assumptions about the writer.
Area 3 of 5
Unit 3: Textual connections
Unit 3 develops textual connections through representations of shared concepts, identities, times or places. You study two different text types sharing a concept, an identity, a time or a place, and analyse how each represents that shared subject differently: a film beside a novel, a memoir beside a documentary, a poem beside a speech. The work is comparative rather than sequential, because the point is what the difference between the two representations reveals about purpose, audience and context. The unit also carries a persuasive spoken response for a public audience, which demands a clear position, a structured argument and delivery choices matched to listeners rather than readers. Understanding that form itself limits and enables what a text can say is the core learning here.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 4 points
- Written response for a public audience connecting two texts on a shared concept, identity, time or place (2026 IA2)
- Spoken persuasive response (2026 IA1)
- Representation and perspective across paired/connected texts
- Purpose, audience and context in constructing meaning across text pairs
What the exam asks
Unit 3 supports IA1, a spoken persuasive response, and IA2, a written response for a public audience connecting two texts. These skills support later analysis, but the external examination specification relates to Unit 4 and requires an analytical essay on one prescribed literary text.
Where marks go missing
Structuring a comparison as two separate essays joined by a linking paragraph. Marks come from sustained integration, where each point tests the same idea against both texts, rather than describing one text fully and then starting again on the other.
Area 4 of 5
Unit 4: Close study of literary texts
Unit 4 narrows to a single literary text — a novel, play, film or comparable work — studied closely enough that you can move around it from memory. You work on the author's techniques and stylistic choices: narrative structure, characterisation, motif, imagery, tone, and the way form controls what a reader is allowed to know and when. The unit also asks for an imaginative response drawing on the studied text, which means demonstrating understanding of its style, voice and concerns rather than simply extending its plot. Because this unit sits closest to the external assessment, most of the year's examination preparation happens inside it: reading under time pressure, planning fast, and producing sustained extended writing in one sitting without the text open beside you.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 4 points
- Close analytical study of a single literary text (novel, play, film or similar)
- Imaginative written response (IA3); external assessment is a separate analytical essay on a prescribed literary text
- Literary techniques, style and authorial choices
- External analytical essay: Unit4, current external prescribed text list; illustrative or retired texts are not automatically eligible
What the exam asks
The external examination relates to Unit 4. Students respond to an unseen question about a literary text on the external-assessment prescribed list, writing an analytical essay. IA3 is a separate imaginative-response examination; its creative task must not be confused with the analytical external assessment.
Where marks go missing
Preparing a memorised essay on the studied text. Examination questions set their own focus, and a pre-written response bent to fit loses marks for relevance long before it loses any for expression, because the marker sees the argument answering a different question.
Area 5 of 5
Assessment objectives (cross-unit, examinable)
The syllabus objectives are the criteria every response is actually marked against, and reading them changes how you write. They cover comprehending and interpreting texts; analysing how texts are constructed to create meaning and effect; evaluating perspectives, representations and the ways texts position audiences; creating written, spoken and multimodal texts for a stated purpose and audience; and using language conventions and structures accurately. The distinction between analysing and evaluating matters most: analysis explains how a text works, while evaluation judges how effectively it works and for whom. Control of language sits as its own objective, which is why sentence-level accuracy, paragraph structure and register are marked even in responses carrying strong ideas. Checking a practice piece against the objectives one at a time is the fastest way to locate where marks are being lost.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 5 points
- Comprehending and interpreting texts
- Analysing how texts are constructed to create meaning and effects
- Evaluating perspectives, representations and how texts position audiences
- Creating (written, spoken, multimodal) texts for specified purposes and audiences
- Using language conventions and structures accurately and effectively
What the exam asks
Both the internal assessments and the external assessment are marked against these objectives through instrument-specific standards, so the same qualities are rewarded whether you are writing analytically, persuasively or imaginatively: accurate comprehension, explained effect, a defensible judgement, and controlled expression sustained to the end.
Where marks go missing
Writing fluently but never making a judgement. Responses that explain how a text works and then stop short of evaluating its effect on an audience settle in the middle standards regardless of how polished the prose reads.