Year 12 OP Assessment Booklet 2019

YEAR 12 ENGLISH (OP) COURSE OUTLINE

SEMESTER

UNIT

FOCUS

1. Poetry in Context

One

Having studied a selection of Australian poems in Year 11, the aim of this unit is to extend students further by exposing them to more challenging and complex poems from a variety of cultures and time periods. One of the primary aims of this unit is to demonstrate how poetry from any given era reflects the socio-cultural context in which it was constructed. The assessment task associated with this unit requires students to record a segment suitable for radio in which they discuss the literary merit of a poem taken from a specific literary period. This unit encourages students to consider current socio-cultural issues and how these are reported in the media. Students will examine a number of articles dealing with a variety of social issues. Among other things, they will be asked to consider the ways writers position readers in regard to specific issues and the importance of social commentary in democratic societies. The assessment task for this unit requires students to write a feature article on a relevant socio-cultural issue. Having studied a number of short stories by Australian writers in Year 11, this Year 12 unit provides students with the opportunity to examine short stories written outside the Australian context. This is a very hands-on unit and students will engage in a range of writing activities. The assessment task for this unit requires students to produce a short story under supervised conditions. In this unit, students will engage in an in-depth study of Othello. The aim of the unit is for students to be able to experience the play through both performance and literary analysis. Two assessment pieces come from this unit. The first is an oral presentation. The second is an analytical exposition written in response to an unseen question on the text. As this is the final unit of the course, the aim is to offer students a complex and engaging text that challenges and confronts the reader on a variety of levels. This unit will require students to engage in a significant amount of independent learning and they will be responsible for making their own notes on all aspects of the text. The assessment task requires them to respond, impromptu, to a series of searching academic questions about the text in a viva voce examination.

2. Social Commentary

3. The Short Story Revisited

4 & 5. Shakespeare

Two

6. Confronting Texts

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