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Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority

English

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Level 1

Level 1 Description

In Level 1, students communicate with peers, teachers, known adults and students from other classes.

Students engage with a variety of texts for enjoyment. They listen to, read, view and interpret spoken, written and multimodal texts designed to entertain and inform. These encompass traditional oral texts including Aboriginal stories, picture books, various types of stories, rhyming verse, poetry...

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Level 1 Content Descriptions

Reading and Viewing

Language Elaborations
Text structure and organisation
  1. Understand that the purposes texts serve shape their structure in predictable ways (VCELA176)
    1. discussing and comparing the purposes of familiar texts drawn from local contexts and interests
    2. becoming familiar with the typical stages of types of text including recount and procedure
    3. using different types of texts, for example procedures (including recipes), and discussing the text structure
  2. Understand concepts about print and screen, including how different types of texts are organised using page numbering, tables of content, headings and titles, navigation buttons, bars and links (VCELA177)
    1. learning about how books and digital texts are organised including page numbers, table of contents, headings, images with captions and the use of scrolling to access digital texts
Expressing and developing ideas
  1. Identify the parts of a simple sentence that represent ‘What’s happening?’, ‘Who or what is involved?’ and the surrounding circumstances (VCELA178)
    1. knowing that, in terms of meaning, a basic sentence or clause represents: a happening or a state (verb), who or what is involved (noun group/phrase), and the surrounding circumstances (adverb group/phrase)
    2. understanding that a simple sentence expresses a single idea, represented grammatically by a single independent clause (for example 'A kangaroo is a mammal. A mammal suckles its young')
  2. Explore differences in words that represent people, places and things (nouns, including pronouns), happenings and states (verbs), qualities (adjectives) and details such as when, where and how (adverbs) (VCELA179)
    1. talking about effective words that describe a place, person or event
    2. learning how a sentence can be made more vivid by adding adjectives, adverbs and unusual verbs
  3. Compare different kinds of images in narrative and informative texts and discuss how they contribute to meaning (VCELA180)
    1. talking about what is ‘real’ and what is imagined in texts, for example ‘This is the section about platypuses in the book about mammals’
Phonics and word knowledge
  1. Recognise short vowels, common long vowels and consonant digraphs, and consonant blends (VCELA181)
    1. saying words with the same onset as a given word (for example words that begin like 'd/og', 'bl/ue')
    2. saying words with the same rime as a given word (for example words that end like 'c/at', 'pl/ay')
  2. Understand how to spell one and two syllable words with common letter patterns (VCELA182)
    1. investigating one and two syllable words containing common consonant blends and vowel sounds, for example ‘tree’, ‘star’ and 'about', 'begin', identified in shared texts
    2. learning an increasing number of high-frequency sight words recognised in shared texts and in texts being read independently (for example 'one', 'have', 'them', 'about')
  3. Understand that a letter can represent more than one sound, and that a syllable must contain a vowel sound (VCELA183)
    1. recognising that letters can have more than one sound (for example ‘u’ in ‘cut’, ‘put’, ‘use’ and a in ‘cat’, ‘father’, ‘any’)
    2. recognising sounds that can be produced by different letters (for example the /s/ sound in ‘sat’, ‘cent’, ‘scene’)
Literacy Elaborations
Texts in context
  1. Respond to texts drawn from a range of cultures and experiences (VCELY185)
    1. exploring some of the meanings and teachings embedded in Dreaming stories
    2. using drawing and writing to depict and comment on people and places beyond their immediate experience
Interpreting, analysing, evaluating
  1. Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning about key events, ideas and information in texts that they listen to, view and read by drawing on growing knowledge of context, text structures and language features (VCELY186)
    1. using elements in books and screen texts, for example illustrations, diagrams, sound and movement, to support reading
    2. making connections between the text and students’ own experiences, and between information in print and images
    3. finding key information in a text
    4. making inferences about characters’ feelings and motives
    5. building knowledge about the topic of the text and learning new vocabulary before and during reading
    6. making predictions from the cover, from illustrations and at points in the text before reading on
    7. retelling the events or key information in the text orally, in writing and/or through digital or arts media
  2. Read texts with familiar features and structures using developing phrasing, fluency, phonic, semantic, contextual, and grammatical knowledge and emerging text processing strategies, including prediction, monitoring meaning and rereading (VCELY187)
    1. using contextual and semantic knowledge to make predictions about a text’s purpose and content
    2. combining knowledge of context, meaning, grammar and phonics to decode text
    3. recognising most high-frequency sight words when reading text
    4. self-correcting when reading does not make sense, using pictures, context, meaning, phonics and grammatical knowledge
    5. reading aloud with developing fluency and intonation
  3. Describe some differences between imaginative, informative and persuasive texts, and identify the audience of imaginative, informative and persuasive texts (VCELY188)
    1. comparing and discussing texts, identifying some features that distinguish those that ‘tell stories’ from those that ‘give opinions’
    2. selecting texts for a particular purpose or task, for example a website that will give information about whales, a book that will tell a story about a possum

Level 1 Achievement Standard

Reading and Viewing

By the end of Level 1, students understand the different purposes of texts. They make connections to personal experience when explaining characters and main events in short texts. They identify that texts serve different purposes and that this affects how they are organised. They are able to read aloud, with developing fluency, short texts with some unfamiliar vocabulary, simple and compound sentences and supportive images. When reading, they use knowledge of the relationships between sounds and letters, high-frequency words, sentence-boundary punctuation and directionality to make meaning. They recall key ideas and recognise literal and implied meaning in texts.

Writing

When writing, students provide details about ideas or events, and details about the participants in those events. They accurately spell words with regular spelling patterns and use their knowledge of blending and segmenting, and many simple and high-frequency words to write predictable words. They use capital letters and full stops appropriately.

Speaking and Listening

Students listen to others when taking part in conversations using appropriate interaction skills. They listen for and reproduce letter patterns and letter clusters. Students understand how characters in texts are developed and give reasons for personal preferences. They can describe characters, settings and events in different types of literature. They create texts that show understanding of the connection between writing, speech and images. They create short texts for a small range of purposes. They interact in pair, group and class discussions, taking turns when responding. They make short presentations on familiar topics.

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