English as an Additional Language: 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.

Unit 1, AOS 1 — Reading and exploring texts (not examinable, foundational)

Unit 1 starts with personal connection rather than formal analysis. You read or view one set text, or extracts from it, and work on inferential reading: what a text implies about character, setting, plot, point of view and voice rather than what it states. The area of study asks you to notice how vocabulary, text structures and language features build meaning on more than one level, and to compare the cultural, social and historical values embedded in the text with your own. Class and small-group discussion is treated as a skill in its own right — testing an idea aloud before committing it to paper — and your writing moves from personal response towards formal essay structures with metalanguage and textual evidence.

Unit 1, AOS 2 — Crafting texts (not examinable, foundational)

This is where the Section B skill set begins. You read three mentor texts in depth — short stories, speeches or monologues with transcripts, essays, podcasts with transcripts, poetry or songs, feature articles, memoir or biography, whole or in extract — and study them as models of how writing actually works, not as content to be summarised. From there you write your own texts for a stated purpose, a situated context including mode, and a specific audience, experimenting with vocabulary, text structures and language features, and applying standard or non-standard conventions where they suit the piece, including colloquial and idiomatic language. You then explain the decisions you made.

Unit 2, AOS 1 — Reading and exploring texts (not examinable, foundational)

Unit 2 takes the Unit 1 reading skills and pushes them towards analysis. You study one set text of a different text type from Unit 1, this time reading for how vocabulary, text structures, language features and conventions work together to construct meaning, and for how historical context and social and cultural values shape the way different readers understand the same text. The writing goal is explicit: respond to a set topic, apply metalanguage accurately, integrate evidence rather than bolt it on, and organise the whole thing as a formal essay that can be reviewed and edited.

Unit 2, AOS 2 — Exploring argument (not examinable, foundational)

Here you meet the Section C material for the first time, through a contemporary local or national issue. You read, view and listen to persuasive texts and break each one down into contention, sequence of arguments, supporting evidence and persuasive strategies, then examine the language and visuals and state the intended effect on the audience. Audio and audio visual texts are handled explicitly through intonation, volume, pace, pausing and stress. Practice runs through note taking, summaries and short-answer questions before formal analytical writing, and the unit closes with you building your own point of view text for oral presentation.

Unit 3, AOS 1 — Reading and responding to texts (examinable, Part 1)

You study one text from the annual VCE English and EAL Text List, of a different text type from your Unit 4 text, and read it critically: the dynamics of the text, characters' motivations, tensions in relationships, the function of settings, the complexities of plot and the role of point of view, alongside its ideas, concerns and conflicts. Historical context and social and cultural values are studied as things that position readers differently, not as background trivia. Sustained analytical writing is the output — metalanguage used accurately, evidence integrated, organisational structure controlled. EAL students additionally complete a listening task that frames the text's historical, cultural and/or social values through an interview, podcast episode, lecture or presentation.

Unit 3, AOS 2 — Creating texts (examinable)

You study three mentor texts aligned with one idea from the Framework of Ideas — writing about country, writing about protest, writing about personal journeys, or writing about play — from List 2 of the annual text list, and use them to learn how effective, cohesive writing is put together. You then create your own texts with a clear purpose: to explain, to express, to reflect or to argue. Purpose, context including mode, and audience shape every choice of voice, vocabulary, text structure and language feature. Drafting, feedback and refinement are part of the outcome, and you comment on your own authorial decisions in roughly 250 words of annotations.

Unit 4, AOS 1 — Reading and responding to texts (examinable)

A second text, a different text type from your Unit 3 one, read with a sharper focus on what is implied rather than stated. The area of study centres on explicit and implicit ideas, on how the values in a text are conveyed and how historical context and social and cultural values shape a reader's understanding, and on the impact of vocabulary, text structures and language features on meaning. The writing demand is a planned, edited analytical response of roughly 700 to 900 words that answers the set topic explicitly, sustains a line of argument and supports it with key evidence.

Unit 4, AOS 2 — Analysing argument (examinable, Part 2)

You analyse argument, language and visuals in texts debating a contemporary and significant national or international issue that has appeared in the media since 1 September of the previous year. Contention and supporting arguments are studied through sequence and structure, supporting evidence, language, and techniques and strategies; visuals are studied as things that support and augment argument. You examine how the context a text appears in and the identity of its author affect an audience's reaction, how effective persuasive texts rebut opposing views respectfully, and how print, digital, audio and audio visual texts differ — including intonation, volume, pace, pausing and stress in spoken material. You also build and deliver your own point of view text.