English: should I choose it?

Reading and exploring texts

Crafting texts

Reading and exploring texts

Exploring argument

Reading and responding to texts

This area of study is close reading turned into argument. You study set texts — novels, plays, films, collections of short stories or poetry — and learn to discuss the ideas, concerns and values they present, and how they present them. That means attending to the specifics of construction: vocabulary and imagery, text structure, narrative point of view, dialogue, staging or cinematography, and how each shapes a reader's response. Unit 4 pushes the same skill further, asking you to handle implicit as well as explicit meaning, so that a text's silences, ironies and unresolved tensions become evidence rather than gaps. Throughout, the emphasis is on the author or composer as the maker of meaning: not what happened in the story, but what the text invites its audience to think about the world, and how it does so.

Creating texts

Creating texts replaced the comparative essay in the current study design, and it is a genuinely different skill. You work from a framework of ideas — themes such as protest, personal journey, play or country — and read a set of mentor texts that show how experienced writers handle voice, structure and form. You then produce your own writing in response to a specified context, audience and purpose, choosing a form and mode deliberately: a memoir piece, a speech, a feature article, a hybrid or fictional narrative. The choices have to be defensible, because the study design also requires you to explain the decisions you made through the writing process — why this opening, this register, this structure for this reader. The craft skills being developed are precision of language, control of tone, and shaping a piece so its ideas land.

Analysing argument

This area of study is about how persuasion operates. You take unseen contemporary material — an opinion piece, an open letter, a blog post, a speech — and identify its contention, the arguments supporting that contention, and the sequence in which they are made. You then analyse how the language works on a reader: word choice and connotation, tone and shifts in tone, appeals to values such as fairness or common sense, inclusive language, anecdote, evidence, and the visual argument in an accompanying image or cartoon. The current study design also requires you to handle a text presented in another mode, so audio or audio-visual material is analysed alongside the written piece, including how delivery, pacing and sound contribute. The complementary skill is productive: developing and presenting your own point-of-view text.

Exploring argument (Units 1–2 foundation)

This Unit 1 and 2 area of study lays the groundwork for the analysing argument work that is examined in Year 12. You read persuasive texts in written, spoken and multimodal forms and practise the underlying identification skills: locating a contention, separating an argument from an example used to support it, and recognising the tone a writer adopts and where that tone changes. You look at bias and how the selection of evidence shapes a case, and at rhetorical strategies including repetition, rhetorical questioning, inclusive pronouns and appeals to authority or expertise. The productive half of the outcome asks you to construct and deliver a point of view of your own on an issue currently in the media, which forces you to make the same choices from the inside — deciding what to argue, in what order, and for whom.

Reading and exploring texts (Units 1–2 foundation)

This Unit 1 and 2 area of study is where students first learn to read a whole text closely and write about it. The emphasis is on personal engagement — making connections between your own experience and the ideas, characters and situations a text presents — and then moving beyond that response to explain how the text constructs its meaning through structure, voice and language. You explore how a writer's choices create atmosphere, shape sympathy and set up the concerns the text returns to. Alongside the reading, the outcome asks you to demonstrate an understanding of effective writing by crafting texts of your own, which is where the habits later needed for Units 3 and 4 begin: choosing words deliberately, varying sentence structure for effect, and revising rather than submitting a first draft.

Reading and responding to texts

This area of study is close reading turned into argument. You study set texts — novels, plays, films, collections of short stories or poetry — and learn to discuss the ideas, concerns and values they present, and how they present them. That means attending to the specifics of construction: vocabulary and imagery, text structure, narrative point of view, dialogue, staging or cinematography, and how each shapes a reader's response. Unit 4 pushes the same skill further, asking you to handle implicit as well as explicit meaning, so that a text's silences, ironies and unresolved tensions become evidence rather than gaps. Throughout, the emphasis is on the author or composer as the maker of meaning: not what happened in the story, but what the text invites its audience to think about the world, and how it does so.

Creating texts

Creating texts replaced the comparative essay in the current study design, and it is a genuinely different skill. You work from a framework of ideas — themes such as protest, personal journey, play or country — and read a set of mentor texts that show how experienced writers handle voice, structure and form. You then produce your own writing in response to a specified context, audience and purpose, choosing a form and mode deliberately: a memoir piece, a speech, a feature article, a hybrid or fictional narrative. The choices have to be defensible, because the study design also requires you to explain the decisions you made through the writing process — why this opening, this register, this structure for this reader. The craft skills being developed are precision of language, control of tone, and shaping a piece so its ideas land.

Analysing argument

This area of study is about how persuasion operates. You take unseen contemporary material — an opinion piece, an open letter, a blog post, a speech — and identify its contention, the arguments supporting that contention, and the sequence in which they are made. You then analyse how the language works on a reader: word choice and connotation, tone and shifts in tone, appeals to values such as fairness or common sense, inclusive language, anecdote, evidence, and the visual argument in an accompanying image or cartoon. The current study design also requires you to handle a text presented in another mode, so audio or audio-visual material is analysed alongside the written piece, including how delivery, pacing and sound contribute. The complementary skill is productive: developing and presenting your own point-of-view text.

Exploring argument (Units 1–2 foundation)

This Unit 1 and 2 area of study lays the groundwork for the analysing argument work that is examined in Year 12. You read persuasive texts in written, spoken and multimodal forms and practise the underlying identification skills: locating a contention, separating an argument from an example used to support it, and recognising the tone a writer adopts and where that tone changes. You look at bias and how the selection of evidence shapes a case, and at rhetorical strategies including repetition, rhetorical questioning, inclusive pronouns and appeals to authority or expertise. The productive half of the outcome asks you to construct and deliver a point of view of your own on an issue currently in the media, which forces you to make the same choices from the inside — deciding what to argue, in what order, and for whom.

Reading and exploring texts (Units 1–2 foundation)

This Unit 1 and 2 area of study is where students first learn to read a whole text closely and write about it. The emphasis is on personal engagement — making connections between your own experience and the ideas, characters and situations a text presents — and then moving beyond that response to explain how the text constructs its meaning through structure, voice and language. You explore how a writer's choices create atmosphere, shape sympathy and set up the concerns the text returns to. Alongside the reading, the outcome asks you to demonstrate an understanding of effective writing by crafting texts of your own, which is where the habits later needed for Units 3 and 4 begin: choosing words deliberately, varying sentence structure for effect, and revising rather than submitting a first draft.