Year 11 · Units 1 and 2
WACE English General, Year 11 (Units 1 and 2)
English General is built around the texts students will actually encounter day to day and at work — everyday and workplace documents, media texts, advertising — rather than the sustained literary analysis ATAR English is built around. Unit 1 establishes comprehension and creation of informative and persuasive texts; Unit 2 shifts to media specifically, including how advertising and news framing persuade and represent issues. It's a genuinely practical course, well suited to a student whose interests and post-school plans lean toward direct communication rather than literary criticism.
Unit 1
Comprehension and creation of everyday and workplace texts.
Finding the main idea and detail in a text
Identifying main ideas and supporting detail in a range of everyday texts.
Purpose, audience and context
Identifying purpose, audience and context in texts encountered in daily and working life.
Everyday and workplace texts
Recognising the conventions of common everyday and workplace text types.
Working out word meaning from context
Determining word meaning from context in a range of practical texts.
Visual and graphic texts
Interpreting visual and graphic texts such as signs, infographics and instructions.
Fact, opinion and bias
Distinguishing fact from opinion and identifying bias in everyday texts.
Where students get stuck: Assuming a confident or authoritative tone is the same as factual accuracy. Learning to separate how something is said from whether it's actually true is the core skill this topic is building.
Writing informative texts
Creating clear, well-organised informative texts for a real audience and purpose.
Writing persuasive texts
Creating persuasive texts using techniques appropriate to a real audience.
Planning, drafting and editing
Applying a full writing process — planning, drafting and editing — to produce a polished text.
Unit 2
Media literacy — how media texts inform, persuade and represent issues.
How media texts inform and persuade
Analysing how media texts are constructed to inform and persuade an audience.
Advertising and persuasive techniques
Analysing the specific persuasive techniques used in advertising.
Representation in texts
Analysing how media texts represent particular people, groups or issues.
Point of view and bias in the media
Identifying point of view and bias specifically within media reporting.
Comparing how texts cover the same topic
Comparing how two different media texts present the same topic or event.
Digital and multimodal texts
Interpreting digital and multimodal texts, including social media content.
Writing for a specific audience and purpose
Creating a text with deliberate control over how it addresses a specific audience and purpose.
Oral presentations
Planning and delivering an oral or multimodal presentation to a real audience.
How it is assessed
- Unit 1 and Unit 2 are entirely school-assessed — there is no external exam in Year 11.
- A satisfactory result in both units is required to move on to Unit 3 and Unit 4 in Year 12.
- General courses don't contribute to the ATAR, but a satisfactory result does count toward completing the WACE.
Common questions
- Has this syllabus changed recently?
- WACE senior secondary syllabuses are reviewed by SCSA on a rolling basis rather than all at once — there's no single blanket revision date the way there is for the P-10 curriculum. Check senior-secondary.scsa.wa.edu.au for the current syllabus version of this specific course before relying on unit content for assessment planning.
- Does English General limit university options later?
- It doesn't contribute to the ATAR, so a student who later needs an ATAR-contributing English result would need to have completed ATAR English instead or alongside it. It's the right choice for a student whose post-school plans are clear and don't depend on an ATAR pathway, not something to fall into without that being a considered decision.
- Is the media literacy content in Unit 2 just about spotting fake news?
- That's part of it, but it goes further — analysing how legitimate, non-deceptive media still frames and represents issues through genuine editorial choices (what's included, what's left out, which voices are centred) is the deeper skill, and it's more broadly useful than simply flagging obviously false content.
Related year levels
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Start learning for freeWritten from the current WACE course syllabus. Requirements change — check SCSA for the official syllabus.