ETAQ E- pistle 13-10
Posted by Garry Collins on June 15, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Draft Australian Curriculum in English for Years 11 & 12
For those in the Brisbane area a meeting to discuss ACARA’s draft Australian Curriculum in English for Years 11 & 12 will be held on the afternoon of Monday 28 June, the start of the first week of the winter vacation for EQ schools. This discussion will contribute to ETAQ’s formal response that will be submitted to ACARA.
The venue will be Meeting Room 1 in the Brisbane City Council library in Hamilton Road, Chermside.
The meeting is scheduled to run from 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm and a certificate for Continuing Professional Development will be available to attendees.
If you plan to participate please email me at gazco48@bigpond.net.au so that I know how many to expect.
If you’re not able to attend but would like to provide some input please email your comments to the email address above.
Some preliminary comments on the draft are shown below.
Suite of courses
Provided that the content of the four components is suitable, this suite of courses (English, Essential English, Literature, English as an Additional Language) appropriately provides for the range of needs and interests of the cohort of students currently completing high school.
On the ACARA website, it would be better to list English rather than Essential English first (ie on the left) so that it is immediately obvious that this is the mainstream course to be undertaken by most students.
The four courses proposed for the Australian Curriculum generally equate to existing QSA courses as follows:
English (ACARA) – English (QSA)
Essential English (ACARA) - English Communication (QSA)
Literature (ACARA) - English Extension (Literature) (QSA)
English as an Additional Language (ACARA) - English for ESL learners (QSA)
This is not to say that the content of the corresponding courses is completely equivalent.
Apart from the actual content, the QSA English Extension (Literature) course also differs from the proposed ACARA Literature option in that it is done only in Year 12 rather than as a full 2-year senior course. It may be that it will be easier for Queensland schools to program a 2-year Literature course than it currently is to create English Extension classes just for Year 12.
If the proportion of students selecting two English Courses (eg English and Literature) increases significantly under the Australian Curriculum, this will obviously have an effect on the overall balance of learning experiences that some students have in the senior years within the 6-subject program that has traditionally been the norm in Queensland. Whether this should be seen as a plus or a minus depends on the relative balance that it is thought should be struck between a broad education and specialization.
Organization
Strands It is good to see that the courses for Years 11 and 12 have not used the three strands of Language, Literature and Literacy as the main organizational structure. As we said in relation to the K-10 draft, these three elements can conveniently describe the scope or territory of subject English but are not the most helpful organizers for a curriculum document.
Unit structure The headings for the four semester units common to all four course options (1 Language, texts and contexts; 2 Representation; 3 Making connections; 4 Perspectives) indicate very worthwhile aspects of learning in English but are not the appropriate basis for four sequential units in a 2-year course. Instead, these four aspects should be present to some extent in all four semesters and should be applied to an appropriate degree to all texts studied. The notion of a common structure to facilitate movement between courses is a worthy one but the apparent solution of the same focus for each semester unit has produced a very significant other problem.
Level of difficulty The information under this heading for both English and Literature is that “Students who choose to undertake English or Literature should have knowledge and skills developed up to Year 10.” Presumably this means knowledge and skills developed via a successful completion of Year 10. Again presumably, students who had not achieved at least a C grade in Year 10 English should generally select Essential English rather than English or Literature. This should be made clearer.
Text requirements and selection
In Year 11 teachers/schools will choose texts for study but in Year 12 selections are to be made from a prescribed list. No rationale is provided for this arrangement but it is assumed that the prescribed list in Year 12 is to facilitate arrangements for the public examinations that prevail in most states. Since assessment arrangements are still to be the responsibility of the states and territories it is difficult to see why a prescribed list should be imposed on Queensland.
Many Queensland schools utilize hire schemes and have collections of class sets of texts. With the advent of a prescribed list for Year 12 a proportion of these class sets and the supporting resources that have been developed to teach them will no longer be able to be used. The transition to a prescribed list regime will involve a dollar cost and will need to be phased in.
The draft curriculum specifies that each text in the prescribed list will “be appropriate for students at this level of schooling and for both male and female students.” The list of illustrative examples provided for the English course includes Jane Austen’s novel “Pride and Prejudice”. There is no doubt that this is deservedly a classic novel and certainly it can work very well with girls but it is to be doubted that it would be a wise choice likely to engage the average male student of the large cohort that will select this option.