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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 5

Understanding and responding to texts A
Representation
  • Analyse how contextual, creative and unconscious influences shape the composition, understanding and interpretation of all representations

Code and convention
  • Use metalanguage effectively to analyse how meaning is constructed by linguistic and stylistic elements in texts

  • Analyse how language forms, features and structures, specific or conventional to a text’s medium, context, purpose and audience, shape meaning, and experiment with this understanding through written, spoken, visual and multimodal responses

  • Explain how texts use, adapt or subvert textual conventions across a range of modes and media to shape new meanings, and explore this in own texts

Connotation, imagery and symbol
  • Analyse how figurative language and devices can be used to represent complex ideas, thoughts and feelings to contribute to larger patterns of meaning in texts, and experiment with this in own texts

  • Analyse how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors use figurative language and devices to represent culture, identity and experience

Point of view
  • Examine elements of focalisation, such as omniscience, limitations, indirect speech, tone, reliability and multiple narrators, and how these interact to shape perceptions of meaning in texts, and apply this in own texts

  • Recognise the difference between the actual author and authorial voice in texts and use this understanding to create texts with other kinds of imagined authors

Characterisation
  • Analyse how engaging, dynamic and complex characters are constructed in texts using language features and structures, and use these features and structures in own texts

  • Explore how characters in texts can be lifelike constructions with whom audiences establish intellectual and emotional connections, and can be perceived to reflect, challenge or subvert particular values and attitudes

  • Analyse how characters can serve structural roles in narrative, such as foils and drivers of action and conflict, and manipulate these ideas when composing own texts

Narrative
  • Analyse how narrative conventions vary across genres, modes, media and contexts and how they can be used to represent ideas and values and shape responses, and apply this understanding in own texts

  • Explore how narratives can represent and shape personal and shared identities, values and experiences

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