English – Year 2
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 2, students learn that there are different modes of communication with distinct features that can be used when sharing ideas, thoughts and opinions 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 that may be imaginative, informative and persuasive. Texts may include oral texts, picture books, various types of print and digital stories, simple chapter books, rhyming verse, poetry, non-fiction, various types of information texts, short films and animations, multimodal texts, dramatic performances, and texts used by students as models for constructing their own work.
As Year 2 students transition to become independent readers, they continue to develop their decoding and comprehension skills, using a range of texts. Informative texts present new content about topics of interest and topics being studied in other learning areas, and may include illustrations and diagrams that extend the text. Literary texts may include sequences of events that span several pages, unusual happenings within a framework of familiar experiences and may include images that extend meaning. These texts include language features such as varied sentence structures, some unfamiliar vocabulary, a significant number of high-frequency words, more complex words that need to be decoded using phonic and morphemic knowledge, and a range of punctuation conventions.
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 2 students create texts whose purposes may be imaginative, informative and persuasive. Texts created may include recounts of stories and experiences, reports and explanations of learning area content, explanations of simple processes, and expressions of opinions about texts or experiences, including supporting reasons. These texts are created for an audience.
Achievement Standard
By the end of Year 2, students interact with others, and listen to and create spoken texts including stories. They share ideas, topic knowledge and appreciation of texts when they recount, inform or express an opinion, including details from learnt topics, topics of interest or texts. They organise and link ideas, and use language features including topic-specific vocabulary and features of voice.
They read, view and comprehend texts, identifying literal and inferred meaning, and how ideas are presented through characters and events. They describe how similar topics and information are presented through the structure of narrative and informative texts, and identify their language features and visual features. They use phonic and morphemic knowledge, and grammatical patterns to read unfamiliar words and most high-frequency words. They use punctuation for phrasing and fluency.
They create written and/or multimodal texts including stories to inform, express an opinion, adapt an idea or narrate for audiences. They use text structures to organise and link ideas for a purpose. They punctuate simple and compound sentences. They use topic-specific vocabulary. They write words using consistently legible unjoined letters. They spell words with regular spelling patterns, and use phonic and morphemic knowledge to attempt to spell words with less common patterns.