English

Year Level Objectives

Year 4 students experience learning in familiar contexts, as well as a range of contexts that relate to study in other areas of the curriculum. They interact with peers and teachers from other classes and schools in a range of face-to-face and online/virtual environments.

Students engage with a variety of texts for enjoyment. They listen to, read, view and interpret spoken, written and multimodal texts in which the primary purpose is appreciation, as well as texts designed to inform and persuade. These encompass traditional oral texts including Aboriginal stories, picture books, various types of print and digital texts, simple chapter books, rhyming verse, poetry, non-fiction, film, multimodal texts, dramatic performances, and texts used by students as models for constructing their own work.

Literary texts that support and extend students in Year 4 as independent readers, describe complex sequences of events that extend over several pages and involve unusual happenings within a framework of familiar experiences. Informative texts present new content about topics of interest and topics being studied in other areas of the curriculum. These texts use complex language features, including varied sentence structures, some unfamiliar vocabulary, a significant number of high-frequency sight words and words that need to be decoded phonically, and a variety of punctuation conventions, as well as illustrations and diagrams that both support and extend the printed text.

Students create a range of imaginative, informative and persuasive types of texts including narratives, procedures, performances, reports, reviews, poetry and expositions.

Achievement Standard

Reading and Viewing

• Understands that texts have different structures depending on the purpose and audience.
• Explains how language features, images and vocabulary are used to engage the interest of audiences.
• Describes literal and inferred meaning, connecting ideas in different texts.
• Expresses preferences for particular texts and respond to others’ viewpoints.

Speaking and Listening

• Listens for key points in discussions.
• Uses language features to create coherence and add detail to their presentations.
• Understands how to express an opinion based on information presented.
• Creates texts that show understanding of how images and detail can be used to extend key ideas.
• Creates structured presentations relevant to different audiences.
• Makes presentations and contributes actively to class and group discussions, varying language according to context.

Writing

• Uses language features to create coherence and add detail to their texts.
• Understands how to express an opinion based on information in a text.
• Creates texts that show understanding of how images and detail can be used to extend key ideas.
• Creates structured texts to explain ideas for different audiences.
• Demonstrates understanding of grammar, selects vocabulary from a range of resources and uses accurate spelling and punctuation, editing their work to improve meaning.