Year 7 English

Reading and Responding to Narratives

Explore narrative text types (novels, short stories, graphic novels) and their conventions. Analyse plot structure, character, setting, and point of view. Read Australian and First Nations narratives, form evidence-based opinions, and practise comprehension strategies for engaging with unfamiliar texts.

Literary Language and Devices

Investigate how literary devices — simile, metaphor, personification, dialogue, imagery, and sound techniques — are used to create character, emotion, and layers of meaning. Analyse Australian poetry and short fiction to identify how techniques contribute to aesthetic and social value.

Grammar and Language Conventions

Study sentence types (simple, compound, complex, compound-complex) and text cohesion devices. Explore verb groups, tense consistency, advanced punctuation (colons, brackets), Greek and Latin word roots, and spelling strategies — building precision and clarity in written expression.

Writing for Different Purposes

Investigate how text structures and language features vary for informative, persuasive, and analytical purposes. Build specialist vocabulary, understand organisational structures (taxonomy, cause-effect, chronology), and practise the full writing process: plan, draft, edit, and publish for real audiences.

Visual and Media Literacy

Decode the grammar of visual texts — vectors, gaze, camera angle, and social distance. Analyse advertisements, news photography, and social media images. Examine how digital technology and algorithms have reshaped reading, creating, and responding to texts in the contemporary media landscape.

Film, Viewing and Responding

Study film language (shot types, editing, sound, mise-en-scène) and how moving images function like written language to construct meaning and position audiences. Analyse Australian films, evaluate texts using appropriate metalanguage, and discuss the aesthetic and social value of multimodal texts.

Speaking, Listening and Presenting

Develop interaction skills for discussion and debate — listening actively, building on ideas, challenging respectfully. Evaluate spoken texts (podcasts, speeches) for language and structure. Plan, rehearse, and deliver formal presentations using features of voice (volume, tone, pitch, pace) and multimodal elements.

Creative Writing and Poetry

Apply the full toolkit of comprehension strategies (visualising, predicting, inferring, connecting, monitoring, summarising) to complex literary texts. Create, revise, and publish original literary texts — short stories and poems — that deliberately experiment with the language features and literary devices studied across the year.

Chapter Guides