Essential English (Version 8.4)

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Unit 1
Unit 2
Unit 3
Unit 4

Understand how Essential English works

Rationale/Aims

Essential English focuses on consolidating and refining the skills and knowledge needed by students to become competent, confident and engaged users of English in many contemporary contexts including everyday, community, social, further education, training and workplace contexts.

Structure of Essential English

Texts

Teachers will use an array of material in class. Texts include literary texts, fiction and non-fiction, media texts, everyday texts, and workplace texts, from increasingly complex and unfamiliar settings, ranging from the everyday language of personal experience to more abstract, specialised and technical language drawn from a range of contexts.

Representation of General capabilities

General capabilities covered in Essential English include: Literacy, Numeracy, Information and communication technology (ICT) capability, Critical and creative thinking, Personal and social capability, Ethical understanding and Intercultural understanding.

Achievement standards

Unit 1

Unit 1 Description

Unit 1 focuses on students comprehending and responding to the ideas and information presented in texts drawn from a range of contexts. Students are taught a variety of strategies to assist comprehension. They read, view and listen to texts to connect, interpret and visualise ideas. They learn how to respond personally and logically to texts, by questioning, using inferential reasoning and determining the importance of content and structure. The unit considers how organisational features of texts help the audience to understand the text. It emphasises the relationships between context, purpose and audience in different language modes and types of texts, and their impact on meaning. Students learn to interact with others in everyday and other contexts. Emphasis is placed on the communication of ideas and information both accurately and imaginatively through a range of modes. Students apply their understanding of language through the creation of texts for different purposes in real or imagined contexts.

Unit 1 Learning Outcomes

By the end of this unit, students:

comprehend information, ideas and language in texts selected from everyday contexts
understand language choices and the likely or intended effect of these choices in a range of texts
create oral, written and multimodal texts appropriate for audience and purpose in everyday, community, workplace and social contexts.

Unit 1 Content Descriptions

Use strategies and skills for comprehending texts including:

using structural and language features, for example, visual and aural cues to identify main ideas, supporting arguments and evidence (ACEEE001)

predicting meaning using text structures and language features (ACEEE002)

making personal connections with texts (ACEEE003)

questioning texts to draw conclusions. (ACEEE004)

Consider the ways in which texts communicate ideas, attitudes and values including:

how social, community and workplace texts are constructed for particular purposes, audiences and contexts (ACEEE005)

the ways text structures and language features are used to influence audiences, for example, image selection in websites, emotive language in speeches or films, stereotypes in video games and vocabulary choices in advertisements (ACEEE006)

the use of narrative features, for example, point of view in film, fiction and video games. (ACEEE007)

Using information for specific purposes and contexts by:

locating and extracting information and ideas from texts, for example, skim reading for general sense and scanning for key information (ACEEE008)

understanding how texts are structured to organise information, for example, hyperlinks, chapter headings and indexes (ACEEE009)

using strategies and tools for collecting and processing information, for example, graphic organisers and spreadsheets. (ACEEE010)

Create a range of texts:

using appropriate language, content and mode for different purposes and audiences, for example, in everyday, social, community or workplace contexts (ACEEE011)

using text structures and language features to communicate ideas and information in a range of mediums and digital technologies, for example, explaining workplace procedures, using navigation bars to create a web page, and developing a character’s back story (ACEEE012)

developing appropriate vocabulary and using accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar (ACEEE013)

using strategies for planning, recording sources of information and proofreading. (ACEEE014)