Year 11 English General

The English General course focuses on consolidating and refining the skills and knowledge needed by students to become competent, confident and engaged users of English in everyday, community, social, further education, training and workplace contexts. The English General course is designed to provide students with the skills that will empower them to succeed in a wide range of post‐secondary pathways, including vocationally based training or the workforce. Students comprehend, analyse, interpret and evaluate the content, structure and style of a wide variety of oral, written, multimodal, digital and media texts. Students learn how the interaction of structure, language, audience and context helps to shape how the audience makes meaning. Both independently and collaboratively, they apply their knowledge to create analytical, imaginative, interpretive and persuasive texts in different modes and media.

The course develops students' language, literacy and literary skills to enable them to communicate successfully both orally and in writing and to enjoy and value using language for both imaginative and practical purposes. Students do not sit an external examination but do complete an external task set by the Authority.

Unit 1

Unit 1 focuses on students comprehending and responding to the ideas and information presented in texts. Students:

  • employ a variety of strategies to assist comprehension
  • read, view and listen to texts to connect, interpret and visualise ideas
  • learn how to respond personally and logically to texts by questioning, using inferential reasoning and determining the importance of content and structure
  • consider how organisational features of texts help the audience to understand the text
  • learn to interact with others in a range of contexts, including everyday, community, social, further education, training and workplace contexts
  • communicate ideas and information clearly and correctly in a range of contexts
  • apply their understanding of language through the creation of texts for different purposes.

Unit 2

Unit 2 focuses on interpreting ideas and arguments in a range of texts and contexts. Students:

  • analyse text structures and language features and identify the ideas, arguments and values expressed
  • consider the purposes and possible audiences of texts
  • examine the connections between purpose and structure and how a text's meaning is influenced by the context in which it is created and received
  • integrate relevant information and ideas from texts to develop their own interpretations
  • learn to interact effectively in a range of contexts
  • create texts using persuasive, visual and literary techniques to engage audiences in a range of modes and media.

Assessment

The following types of assessments and weightings will be undertaken:

Responding: 60% | Creating: 40%

Reporting

The achievement for the unit will be reported as a College A - E grade. In addition, the student's approach to class work and behaviour will be reported via the usual key performance indicators.

Student Expectations/Homework

Students will be expected to complete approximately 1 hour of homework each week. This time should be spent consolidating material covered in class as well as any assigned tasks.