The study of English is integral to our students’ learning at Gippsland Grammar. We foster a learning environment that is stimulating, challenging and fun for our students to experience the study of language and literature. We aim to promote a passion for the English language and a love for learning that continues throughout life.

Year 9

The aim of Year 9 English is to provide an exciting and engaging course designed to prepare students for their senior years of schooling. A range of challenging literature and resources are studied with a view to developing and extending skills in reading, writing, oral presentation, and analysis. The importance of being able to communicate effectively with others is a central element in the course, and students will have many opportunities to develop skills through regular group discussions and activities, writing in a range of differing styles, editing and proofreading each other’s work and thorough critical self-analysis. The course incorporates learning and experiences from outside the classroom and also from other core subjects.

VCE

English/English as an Additional Language (EAL)

VCE English and English as an Additional Language (EAL) prepares students to think and act critically and creatively, and to encounter the beauty and challenge of their contemporary world with compassion and understanding. Through engagement with texts drawn from a range of times, cultures, forms and genres, and including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge and voices, students develop insight into a varied range of ideas. They extend their skills in responding to the texts they read and view, and their abilities in creating original texts, further expanding their language to reflect accurately the purpose, audience and context of their responses.

Unit 1

In this unit, students read and view texts with a focus on personal connections with the story. They discuss and clarify ideas and values presented by authors through their evocations of character, setting and play, and through investigations of the point of view and voice of the text. Students read and engage imaginatively and critically with mentor texts that model effective writing, employ and experiment with the qualities of effective writing in their own work. Considering clear purpose, context (including mode) and audiences for their writing, and through engaging with and expanding on ideas drawn from mentor texts and other reading, they extend their creativity, fluency and range. As they craft their texts, students explore text structures and language features, and ideas.

Areas of Study

1. Reading and exploring texts
2. Crafting texts

Unit 2

In this area of study, students develop their reading and viewing skills, including deepening their capacity for inferential reading and viewing, to further open possible meanings in a text, and to extend their writing in response to text. Students will develop their skills from Unit 1 through an exploration of a different text type from that studied in Unit 1. students consider the way arguments are developed and delivered in many forms of media. Through the prism of a contemporary and substantial local and/or national issue, students read, view and listen to a range of texts that attempt to position an intended audience in a particular context. Students apply their knowledge of argument to create a point of view text for oral presentation.

Areas of Study

1. Reading and exploring texts
2. Exploring argument

Unit 3

In this area of study, students apply reading and viewing strategies to critically engage with a text, considering its dynamics and complexities and reflecting on the motivations of its characters. They analyse the ways authors construct meaning through vocabulary, text structures, language features and conventions, and the presentation of ideas. Through participation in discussion, students test their thinking, clarify ideas and form views about a text that can be further developed in their writing. Students work with mentor texts to inspire their own creative processes, to generate ideas for their writing, and as models for effective writing. They experiment with adaptation and individual creation, and demonstrate insight into ideas and effective writing strategies in their texts. They reflect on the deliberate choices they have made through their writing processes in their commentaries. They also make connections with experiences and events in their own lives, observing and recording to enrich their writing, and to extend their ideas.

Areas of Study

1. Reading and responding to texts
2. Creating texts

Unit 4

In this unit. students further sharpen their skills of reading and viewing texts, developed in the corresponding area of study in Unit 3. Students consolidate their capacity to critically analyse texts and deepen their understanding of the ideas and values a text can convey. They then analyse the use of argument and language, and visuals in texts that debate a contemporary and significant national or international issue. Students consider the purpose, audience and context of each text, the arguments, and the ways written and spoken language, and visuals are employed for effect. They analyse the ways all these elements work together to influence and/or convince an intended audience.

Areas of Study

1. Reading and responding to texts
2. Analysing argument

English Language

This study aims to combine learning about the nature of language in human thought and communication with learning how to use English more effectively and creatively. It is informed by the discipline of linguistics and integrates a systematic exploration of the nature of the English Language. Students develop skills in the description and analysis of a diverse range of spoken and written English texts.

Unit 1: Language and Communication

The focus of this unit is language and its use in communication.

Areas of Study

1. The nature and functions of language.
2. Language acquisition.

Unit 2: Language Change

The focus of this unit is language change. Languages are dynamic and change is an inevitable and a continuous process. Students consider factors contributing to change over time in the English language and factors contributing to the spread of English.

Areas of Study

1. English across time.
2. Englishes in contact.

Unit 3: Language Variation and Social Purpose

In this unit students investigate English language in the Australian social setting, along a continuum of informal and formal registers. They consider language as a means of societal interaction, understanding that through written and spoken texts we communicate information, ideas, attitudes, prejudices and ideological stances.

Areas of Study

1. Informal language.
2. Formal language.

Unit 4: Language Variation and Identity

In this unit students focus on the role of language in establishing and challenging different identities. Many varieties of English exist in contemporary Australian society, including national, regional, cultural and social variations.

Areas of Study

1. Language variation in Australian society.
2. Individual and group identities.

Literature

The study of VCE Literature fosters students’ enjoyment and appreciation of the artistic and aesthetic merits of stories and storytelling and enables students to participate more fully in the cultural conversations that take place around them. By reading and exploring a diverse range of established and emerging literary works, students become increasingly empowered to discuss texts. As both readers and writers, students extend their creativity and high order thinking to express and develop their critical and creative voices.

Throughout this study, students deepen their awareness of the historical, social and cultural influences that shape texts and their understanding of themselves as readers. Students expand their frameworks for exploring literature by considering literary forms and features, engaging with language, and refining their insight into authorial choices. Students immerse themselves in challenging fiction and non-fiction texts, discovering and experimenting with a variety of interpretations to develop their own responses.

Unit 1

Students consider how language, structure and stylistic choices are used in different literary forms and types of text. They consider both print and non-print texts, reflecting on the contribution of form and style to meaning. Students reflect on the degree to which points of view, experiences and contexts shape their own and others’ interpretations of text. They students explore the concerns, ideas, style and conventions common to a distinctive type of literature seen in literary movements or genres. Examples of these groupings include literary movements and/or genres such as modernism, epic, tragedy and magic realism, as well as more popular, or mainstream, genres and subgenres such as crime, romance and science fiction. Students explore texts from the selected movement or genre, identifying and examining attributes, patterns and similarities that locate each text within that grouping. Students engage with the ideas and concerns shared by the texts through language, settings, narrative structures and characterisation, and they experiment with the assumptions and representations embedded in the texts.

Areas of Study

1. Reading Practices
2. Exploration of literary movements and genres

Unit 2

Students explore the voices, perspectives and knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors and creators. They consider the interconnectedness of place, culture and identity through the experiences, texts and voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including connections to Country, the impact of colonisation and its ongoing consequences, and issues of reconciliation and reclamation. They students focus on the text and its historical, social and cultural context. Students reflect on representations of a specific time period and/or culture within a text. They explore the text to understand its point of view and what it reflects or comments on. They identify the language and the representations in the text that reflect the specific time period and/or culture, its ideas and concepts. Students develop an understanding that contextual meaning is already implicitly or explicitly inscribed in a text and that textual details and structures can be scrutinised to illustrate its significance.

Areas of Study

1. Voices of Country
2. The text in its context

Unit 3

Students focus on how the form of a text contributes to its meaning. Students explore the form of a set text by constructing a close analysis of that text. They then reflect on the extent to which adapting the text to a different form, and often in a new or reimagined context, affects its meaning, comparing the original with the adaptation. By exploring an adaptation, students also consider how creators of adaptations may emphasise or minimise viewpoints, assumptions and ideas present in the original text.

Areas of Study

1. Adaptations and Transformations
2. Developing interpretations

Unit 4

Students explore the different ways we can read and understand a text by developing, considering and comparing interpretations of a set text. Students first develop their own interpretations of a set text, analysing how ideas, views and values are presented in a text, and the ways these are endorsed, challenged and/or marginalised through literary forms, features and language. These student interpretations should consider the historical, social and cultural context in which a text is written and set. Students also consider their own views and values as readers. Students then explore a supplementary reading that can enrich, challenge and/or contest the ideas and the views, values and assumptions of the set text to further enhance the students’ understanding. Examples of a supplementary reading can include writing by a teacher, a scholarly article or an explication of a literary theory. A supplementary reading that provides only opinion or evaluation of the relative merits of the text is not considered appropriate for this task.

Areas of Study

1. Creative responses to texts
2. Close analysis of texts