Our Teaching Approach: From Year 3 to VCE
How we teach English to Victorian students in Australia, from Year 3 through to VCE.
English requires vastly different skills to come together, such as reading with attention, thinking critically, and, more importantly, forming your own interpretation of what stories and authors mean. Writing well is incredibly difficult – you need to form a clear idea in your head, find the exact words to express it, and for those words to be arranged in such a way where the reader can follow your thinking. And underneath all of this, you need the confidence to back your own thinking, to trust that what you have to say is worth saying – even when there's no single right answer.
In maths, you can follow a formula to reach a single true answer. In English, understanding and progress can be harder to pinpoint. Take reading comprehension for example – a multiple choice question may offer four options that are all technically true, but only one is the best answer. Getting to the best answer depends on reading between the lines – what the author is indirectly saying.
Year 3 – Year 6
Building up English basics is the slower, less glamorous work we do every week with our younger students: expanding their library of words, practising spelling so words come as muscle memory, and teaching the grammar that will allow them to express sentences correctly for the rest of their life. In reading comprehension, students start reasoning, explaining why certain characters made certain choices. They go from simply answering "the boy ran away", to being able to explain what made him feel like he had to.
In writing, they start to take inspiration from the world around them and use deliberate language choices to describe moments in a story. The sun stops 'setting' and starts 'bleeding orange'; the tree stops 'moving' and starts 'dancing in the wind'. They learn to 'show, don't tell' to readers, and begin to understand that a story they wouldn't want to watch on screen, is probably not one worth writing!
And perhaps our favourite sign at this stage: they finish a book or a movie, and want to keep talking about it. They reflect on it and have something to say… an opinion, a question, something they can't quite let go of yet. When students start understanding language and stories enough to be deeply moved, when they have an impulse to reflect upon the ideas within the story, when they trust that what they have to say matters – this is the heart of English learning, on which everything is built upon.
They reflect on it and have something to say… an opinion, a question, something they can't quite let go of yet.
Year 7 – Year 9
Students move on from understanding a text to asking why an author made certain choices in their language and characters. To point to those choices, students learn the language for how meaning itself is made, hidden between the lines. In writing, this is namely identifying language techniques – such as metaphor, symbols, tone, narration, structure and more. In film, students learn about film elements – such as cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing and sound. Being able to name these author/director choices is exactly the metalanguage foundation that is needed for every single assessment in VCE English.
In text analysis – for example, in Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell – rather than just accepting the story as animals taking over a farm, students ask: why did Orwell choose a pig to represent Napoleon's character, and not a human dictator? What does the animals' inability to read and remember the commandments say about how power grows? From asking these questions, students begin to form an argument – an interpretation of what the author is saying through the text. Students may argue that Orwell is warning us what happens when ordinary people stop questioning authority, and point to specific language choices or symbols in the text to back it up.
For creative writing, students start to understand that what makes a story excellent is more than just an interesting sequence of dramatic events – it's the inner mind of its characters: what they want, what they're afraid of, what they choose to do when it matters, and why it matters. For example, students move on from writing about 'winning a race', to 'what it cost them to win, and whether, standing at the finish line, they still want what they thought they wanted'.
For persuasive writing, students learn that the strongest arguments are the deeply known and researched ones. On a topic like animal testing, they move past only seeing the cruelty inflicted on animals to holding two truths at once: that it does cause real suffering, and that it has advanced humanity in ways we could never reach by experimenting on humans instead. From that research, and their own personal experience, they then form a stance and build their case and supporting arguments.
…what it cost them to win, and whether, standing at the finish line, they still want what they thought they wanted.
Year 10 – Year 12
Students look deeper into how an author builds meaning through historical context, character development, metalanguage, narration style, structure, and more.
In The Memory Police (1994) by Yōko Ogawa, objects on a mysterious island begin to disappear one by one – perfume, roses, birds, even novels – and the inhabitants simply forget they ever existed. In text response writing, students study how Ogawa constructs this world: the narrator, in spite of everything disappearing around her, keeps writing, even when novels themselves have been 'disappeared' from the island. From that detail, students learn to interpret: that writing is an act of resistance – that to keep telling a story the world wants to forget, is a last act in surviving the collective erasure of identity and meaning itself.
Before students watch a film such as Sunset Boulevard (1950) by Billy Wilder for film response writing, they study the era and world it was born from – because every scene has another layer of depth and meaning once understanding what the film stands for and against. Students learn how the actress Gloria Swanson, who plays the outdated silent film star Norma in the film, was herself one of the brightest stars of the silent film industry, and how quickly she was forgotten when sound arrived. They then watch the scene of Norma viewing her old silent film footage and see something deeper… a real, forgotten Gloria crying out her final farewell on screen.
In Crafting Texts, students write their own creative piece in response to one of four VCE frameworks – Country, Personal Journeys, Play, or Protest. Students learn to deepen their ideas with culture and personal experiences: such as moving on from 'how play changes as we grow up' to 'how play is one of the ways we grieve and heal, helping us hold on to the irreplaceable things we have lost'. This is where students have free rein to write and build meaning the same way the authors they study do.
For argument analysis, students learn about current real-world issues, and analyse how authors and speakers use language to persuade. For instance, they learn to analyse a newspaper article on 'AI adoption in the workplace', naming how the writer's language builds credibility and positions its audience, and how that ultimately sculpts their opinion. Beyond identifying individual language choices, students begin seeing how these choices accumulate and work together within the article.
Last but not least, we follow current and ongoing debates in the Australian media and help each student find an issue worth studying for their persuasive oral speech. We then teach them how to research the issue and evidence accurately before the writing even begins. Some examples of recent issues include: medical misogyny in Australian healthcare, whether AI should be used to create art, whether an artist's crimes should be separated from their creative work, and more. Ideally, students walk in already well-researched and having written speeches on a range of issues, before the unit even begins at school.
...writing is an act of resistance – that to keep telling a story the world wants to forget, is a last act in surviving the collective erasure of identity and meaning itself.
Every student's journey is different. Some growth arrives quickly, other growth takes months of dedicated, patient work. But when it comes, it changes the way they think about stories, language, and the very world they are trying to make sense of.
If you'd like to talk about where your child is in their English — or simply see what a lesson with us looks like — we'd love to hear from you. You're always welcome to book a trial lesson.