English General Senior Syllabus (2019, in force from 2019)
English is assessed through three internal assessments set and marked at school under QCAA conditions, together worth 75 per cent of the result, and one QCAA-set external assessment examination worth the remaining 25 per cent. The examination is issued as a question book with a separate response book you write into. QCAA publishes a marking guide covering English and English as an Additional Language together, since the two subjects share an examination structure, and releases a subject report for each cohort describing how students statewide handled the paper.
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 (current, in force 2019–present) · 2019–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.
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 is the first of the two units feeding the external assessment, and it is built on pairing. 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
- Analytical response connecting two different text types on a shared concept, identity, time or place (IA1 basis)
- Persuasive spoken response for a public audience (IA2 basis)
- Representation and perspective across paired/connected texts
- Purpose, audience and context in constructing meaning across text pairs
What the exam asks
The internal assessment for this unit is an analytical response connecting the paired texts, and the reasoning it develops — comparison as an argument rather than as a list of similarities and differences — is exactly what an examination response has to produce quickly and without the texts in front of you.
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 drawing on the studied literary text (IA3/examination basis, EA basis)
- Literary techniques, style and authorial choices
- Examination-style extended analytical/imaginative writing under timed conditions
What the exam asks
The QCAA-set examination draws on this unit. You work from a question book and write into a separate response book, producing extended writing under timed conditions, and the published marking guide — shared with English as an Additional Language — sets out the standards applied to that writing.
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.