Skip to content

A NSW Government website

Welcome to the NSW Curriculum website

NSW Curriculum
NSW Education Standards Authority

K–10English K–10 Syllabus

Record of changes
Implementation for K–2 from 2023 and 3–10 from 2024
Expand for detailed implementation advice

Content

Stage 2

Reading comprehension
Reading for interest and wide purposes
  • Identify different purposes and strategies for reading

  • Select and read texts of personal interest and to gather information for learning

  • Build topic knowledge, including key vocabulary, and activate background knowledge prior to and during reading

  • Identify similarities and compare differences within and between texts by making text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections

  • Locate, select and retrieve relevant information from a print or digital text and consider accuracy of information presented

  • Determine the relevance of a text for a specific purpose

Comprehending text structures and features
  • Identify different structures and features of persuasive, informative and imaginative texts

  • Identify and describe how text structure, features and language work together to achieve a text’s purpose

  • Describe how multimodal features enhance meaning and contribute to salience in texts

  • Understand that dialogue is a common feature of imaginative texts, signalled by quotation marks or speech bubbles to indicate interactions between characters

  • Identify the difference between quoted speech and reported speech

  • Understand that literal information can be sourced directly from a text and that inferences can be made by using multiple sources of information

Comprehending language
  • Use morphemic knowledge to read and understand the meaning of words

  • Adjust own mental model as reading presents new words and understanding

  • Use key words from a text to visualise events, characters and settings when making inferences and confirming predictions

  • Identify the adverbs, nouns and verbs that influence own emotional response to characters

  • Identify different types of verbs that control meaning

  • Identify word patterns, including repetition, that create cohesion or effect

  • Understand that word contractions are a feature of informal language and that apostrophes of contraction are used to signal missing letters

  • Identify different types of connectives used by the author that support inference

  • Use knowledge of homonyms to understand metaphor and to support inference

  • Link the meanings of words and phrases across consecutive sentences to support local inferencing

  • Clarify and link the meanings of key words across a text to support global inferencing

  • Identify and describe the difference between subjective and objective language in texts

  • Understand past, present and future tense and their impact on text meaning

Monitoring comprehension
  • Identify how their background knowledge is used to actively build and adjust a mental model prior to and during reading

  • Identify where meaning breaks down when reading

  • Identify and use strategies to repair reading when meaning breaks down

  • Ask questions to clarify meaning and promote deeper understanding of a text

  • Make gist statements and record them to monitor understanding

  • Use information from paragraphs or chapters to group related ideas and support summarisation of the whole text

  • Reflect on reading experiences and identify texts of personal significance and pleasure

  • Reflect on own understanding of texts and monitor own goals for reading

Related files