Year 2

The English curriculum is built around the three interrelated strands of language, literature and literacy. Teaching and learning programs should balance and integrate all three strands. Together, the strands focus on developing students’ knowledge, understanding and skills in listening, reading, viewing, speaking, writing and creating. Learning in English builds on concepts, skills and processes developed in earlier years, and teachers will revisit and strengthen these as needed.

In Year 2, students communicate with peers, teachers, students from other classes and community members.

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 to entertain, as well as texts designed to inform and persuade. These encompass traditional oral texts, picture books, various types of print and digital stories, 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.

The range of literary texts for Foundation to Year 10 comprises Australian literature, including the oral narrative traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, as well as the contemporary literature of these two cultural groups, and classic and contemporary world literature, including texts from and about Asia.

Literary texts that support and extend Year 2 students as independent readers involve sequences of events that span several pages and present 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 include language features such as varied sentence structures, some unfamiliar vocabulary, a significant number of high-frequency sight words and words that need to be decoded phonically, and a range of punctuation conventions, as well as illustrations and diagrams that support and extend the printed text.

Students create a range of imaginative, informative and persuasive texts including imaginative retellings, reports, performances, poetry and expositions.

(source: www.australiancurriculum.edu.au)

Achievement Standard

Receptive modes (listening, reading and viewing)

By the end of Year 2, students understand how similar texts share characteristics by identifying text structures and language features used to describe characters and events, or to communicate factual information.

They read texts that contain varied sentence structures, some unfamiliar vocabulary, a significant number of high-frequency sight words and images that provide extra information. They monitor meaning and self-correct using knowledge of phonics, syntax, punctuation, semantics and context. They use knowledge of a wide variety of letter-sound relationships to read words of one or more syllables with fluency. They identify literal and implied meaning, main ideas and supporting detail. Students make connections between texts by comparing content. They listen for particular purposes. They listen for and manipulate sound combinations and rhythmic sound patterns.

Productive modes (speaking, writing and creating)

When discussing their ideas and experiences, students use everyday language features and topic-specific vocabulary. They explain their preferences for aspects of texts using other texts as comparisons. They create texts that show how images support the meaning of the text.

Students create texts, drawing on their own experiences, their imagination and information they have learnt. They use a variety of strategies to engage in group and class discussions and make presentations. They accurately spell words with regular spelling patterns and spell words with less common long vowel patterns. They use punctuation accurately, and write words and sentences legibly using unjoined upper- and lower-case letters.

(source: www.australiancurriculum.edu.au)