English – Foundation Year
Learning Objectives
The English curriculum is built around the 3 interrelated strands of Language, Literature and Literacy. Together, the 3 strands focus on developing students’ knowledge, understanding and skills in listening, reading, viewing, speaking, writing and creating. Learning in English is recursive and cumulative, building on concepts, skills and processes developed in earlier years.
In the Foundation year, learning in English builds on the Early Years Learning Framework and each student’s prior knowledge and experiences. Students understand that English is the shared language of the learning environment, used to interact and communicate with familiar audiences for different purposes.
Students engage with a variety of texts for enjoyment. They participate in shared reading, viewing and storytelling. Spoken, written and multimodal texts may include traditional oral texts, picture books, various types of stories, rhyming verse, poetry, non-fiction, film, multimodal texts and dramatic performances. The range of literary texts for Foundation to Year 10 comprises the oral narrative traditions and literature of First Nations Australians, and classic and contemporary literature from wide-ranging Australian and world authors, including texts from and about Asia.
Foundation students develop their reading in a text-rich environment through engagement with a range of texts. This range includes literature that expands and reflects their world, and texts that support learning in English and across the curriculum. Beginning readers start with and practise reading using decodable texts that align with phonic development. These texts systematically introduce words with a limited number of grapheme–phoneme correspondences and add grapheme–phoneme correspondences as proficiency develops. Developing readers engage with some authentic texts that involve straightforward sequences of events and everyday happenings, some less familiar content, a small range of language features including simple and compound sentences, high-frequency words, and other words that can be decoded using developing phonic knowledge.
Foundation students create short imaginative and informative texts that may include pictorial representations, short statements, performances and short recounts, for a small range of purposes and audiences.
Achievement Standard
By the end of Foundation, students listen to texts, interact with others and create short spoken texts, including retelling stories. They share thoughts and preferences, retell events and report information or key ideas to an audience. They use language features including words and phrases from learning and texts. They listen for and identify rhymes, letter patterns and sounds (phonemes) in words. They orally blend and segment phonemes in single-syllable words.
They read, view and comprehend texts, making connections between characters, settings and events, and to personal experiences. They identify the language features of texts including connections between print and images. They name the letters of the English alphabet and know and use the most common sounds (phonemes) represented by these letters (graphs). They read words including consonant–vowel–consonant words and some high-frequency words.
They create short written texts, including retelling stories using words and images where appropriate. They retell, report information and state their thoughts, feelings and key ideas. They use words and phrases from learning and texts. They form letters, spell most consonant–vowel–consonant words and experiment with capital letters and full stops.