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NSW Curriculum
NSW Education Standards Authority

11–12English Advanced 11–12 Syllabus (2024)

Implementation from 2026
Expand for detailed implementation advice

Content

Year 12

Textual conversations

Students explore the ways in which the comparative study of texts can reveal resonances and dissonances within and between texts. Students identify, interpret, analyse and evaluate the textual features, Loading , Loading , Loading  and purposes of TWO prescribed texts. By comparing TWO texts, students understand how authors are influenced by other texts, contexts and values, and how these shape meaning. Through their comparative study, they explore common or disparate issues, values, assumptions or Loading , and the ways these are depicted. By Loading  imaginatively, interpretively and critically to the comparative study, students explore and evaluate individual and common textual features, concepts, ideas and values.

Understanding
  • The relationship between reader, author, text and context

  • Text structures, including Loading , Loading , Loading , Loading  and stylistic elements, and the ways they shape meaning

  • The influence of context and values on the perspectives and ideas in texts

  • Theme, Loading  and Loading  elements, and the ways they are used to represent personal and public worlds and influence responses

  • The influence of historical and Loading  context across a pair of texts

  • The ways a comparative study creates a new understanding and appreciation of each text

Responding
  • Loading  texts that explore text structures, language features and stylistic elements from different contexts to deepen understanding of how meaning is made

  • Compare and evaluate textual form and language features in a pair of texts

  • Compose Loading  Loading  texts that affirm and challenge ideas, values and perspectives in a pair of texts

  • Use the Loading  of critical and creative expression to refine arguments and craft sustained Loading 

  • Apply appropriate language and terminology used for making connections, interpreting texts and shaping meaning

Prescriptions (2027–2030)

These prescriptions must not be taught until Term 4, 2026. They will be examined in the HSC from 2027.

For prescriptions examined in the current HSC year, see HSC English prescriptions 2019–2026 [PDF 560.06 KB].

Prose fiction and poetry
  • Baynton, Barbara, Bush Studies (prose fiction)Text Publishing, 2012, ISBN: 9781922079497
    AND
    Cobby Eckermann, Ali, Inside My Mother (poetry)Giramondo Publishing, 2015, ISBN: 9781922146885‘Clay’, ‘Inside My Mother’, ‘Warriors at Salt Creek’, ‘Unearth’, ‘Eyes’, ‘Key’, ‘Jacob’, ‘Nurture’
  • Blake, William, The Complete Poems (poetry)Penguin UK, 1977, ISBN: 9780140422153‘To Morning’; (Songs of Experience) ‘The Sick Rose’, ‘The Tyger’, ‘The Human Abstract’, ‘A Poison Tree’; ‘Proverbs of Hell’ (Plates 7–11); ‘The [First] Book of Urizen, Chap: 1’ (Plate 3)
    AND
    Tokarczuk, Olga, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (prose fiction)Text Publishing, 2018, ISBN: 9781925773088
Poetry and film
  • Keats, John, The Complete Poems (poetry)Penguin Classics, 1977, ISBN: 9780140422108‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, ‘Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art’
    AND
    Campion, Jane, Bright Star (film)2009
Poetry and drama
  • Shakespeare, William, Hamlet (drama)Cambridge University Press, 2014, ISBN: 9781107615489
    AND
    Dickinson, Emily, The Complete Poems (poetry)Faber Poetry, 2017, ISBN: 9780571336173167 ‘To learn the Transport by the Pain’, 280 ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’, 384 ‘No Rack can torture me’, 435 ‘Much Madness is divinest Sense’, 449 ‘I died for Beauty – but was scarce’, 670 ‘One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted’, 712 ‘Because I could not stop for Death’, 1206 ‘The show is not the show’
Drama and nonfiction
  • Shakespeare, William, Julius Caesar (drama)Cambridge University Press, 2014, ISBN: 9781107615519
    AND
    Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince (translated by Tim Parks) (nonfiction)Penguin, 2011, ISBN: 9780141442259
Prose fiction and film
  • Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway (prose fiction)Penguin, 2019, ISBN: 9780241371947
    AND
    Daldry, Stephen, The Hours (film)2002

Where a prescribed text is listed as a series of poems or short stories, all listed selections constitute the prescribed text.

Specific editions of the texts set for study are listed here. If the specified edition is out of print or widely unavailable, schools may use any suitable edition of the text selected. Where a text is quoted in an examination question, it will be from the listed edition.

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