English – Year 1
Learning Objectives
The English curriculum is built around the 3 interrelated strands of Language, Literature and Literacy. Teaching and learning programs should balance and integrate all 3 strands. 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 Year 1, students learn that language is communicated in ways that meet the needs of diverse learners. They learn to interact with familiar audiences for different purposes.
Students engage with a variety of texts for enjoyment. They listen to, read and view spoken, written and multimodal texts. Texts may include picture books, various types of stories, rhyming verse, poetry, non-fiction, various types of information texts, short films and animations, dramatic performances, and texts used by students as models for constructing their own texts.
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.
Year 1 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. Some students will continue to practise their reading with decodable texts that align with phonic development. These texts systematically introduce words with grapheme–phoneme correspondences. Developing readers engage with authentic texts that support and extend them as independent readers. These texts include straightforward sequences of events and everyday happenings with recognisably realistic or imaginary characters. Informative texts, with illustrations and diagrams, present a small amount of new content about familiar topics of interest and topics being studied in other learning areas. These texts use a small range of language features including simple and compound sentences, some unfamiliar vocabulary, high-frequency words and other words that need to be decoded using developing phonic knowledge.
Year 1 students create short texts whose purposes may be imaginative, informative and persuasive. These texts may explain simple procedures, recount real or imagined events or experiences, report and describe learning area content, retell stories, express opinions, and describe real or imagined people, places or things for an audience.
Achievement Standard
By the end of Year 1, students interact with others, and listen to and create short spoken texts including recounts of stories. They share ideas and retell or adapt familiar stories, recount or report on events or experiences, and express opinions using a small number of details from learnt topics, topics of interest or texts. They sequence ideas and use language features including topic-specific vocabulary and features of voice.
They read, view and comprehend texts, monitoring meaning and making connections between the depiction of characters, settings and events, and to personal experiences. They identify the text structures of familiar narrative and informative texts, and their language features and visual features. They blend short vowels, common long vowels, consonants and digraphs to read one-syllable words. They read one- and two-syllable words with common letter patterns, and an increasing number of high-frequency words. They use sentence boundary punctuation to read with developing phrasing and fluency.
They create short written and/or multimodal texts including recounts of stories with events and characters. They report information and experiences, and express opinions. Ideas in their texts may be informative or imaginative and include a small number of details from learnt topics, topics of interest or texts. They write simple sentences with sentence boundary punctuation and capital letters for proper nouns. They use topic-specific vocabulary. They write words using unjoined upper-case and lower-case letters. They spell most one- and two-syllable words with common letter patterns and common grammatical morphemes, and an increasing number of high-frequency words.