English – Year 4
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 Year 4, students interact with audiences for different purposes.
Students engage with a variety of texts for enjoyment. They listen to, read, view and interpret spoken, written and multimodal texts. Texts may include oral texts, picture books, various types of print and digital texts, short novels of different genres, rhyming verse, poetry, non-fiction, film, multimodal texts, dramatic performances, and texts used by students as models for creating their own work.
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.
Literary texts that support and extend students in Year 4 as independent readers may describe sequences of events that develop over chapters and unusual happenings within a framework of familiar experiences. Informative texts include content of increasing complexity and technicality about topics of interest and topics being studied in other areas of the curriculum. These texts use language features including varied sentence structures, some unfamiliar vocabulary that may include English words derived from other languages, a significant number of high-frequency words, words that need to be decoded using phonic and morphemic knowledge, a variety of punctuation conventions, and illustrations and diagrams that support and extend the printed text.
Year 4 students create a range of imaginative, informative and persuasive types of texts that may include narratives, performances, reports, reviews, poetry and arguments for particular purposes and audiences.
Achievement Standard
By the end of Year 4, students interact with others, and listen to and create spoken and/or multimodal texts including stories. They share and extend ideas, opinions and information with audiences, using relevant details from learnt topics, topics of interest or texts. They use text structures to organise and link ideas. They use language features including subjective and objective language, topic-specific vocabulary and literary devices, and/or visual features and features of voice.
They read, view and comprehend texts created to inform, influence and/or engage audiences. They describe how ideas are developed including through characters and events, and how texts reflect contexts. They describe the characteristic features of different text structures. They describe how language features including literary devices, and visual features shape meaning. They read fluently and accurately, integrating phonic, morphemic, grammatical and punctuation knowledge.
They create written and/or multimodal texts including stories for purposes and audiences, where they develop ideas using details from learnt topics, topics of interest or texts. They use paragraphs to organise and link ideas. They use language features including complex sentences, topic-specific vocabulary and literary devices, and/or visual features. They write texts using clearly formed letters with developing fluency. They spell words including multisyllabic and multimorphemic words with irregular spelling patterns, using phonic, morphemic and grammatical knowledge.