Year 12 · Units 3 and 4
WACE English General, Year 12 (Units 3 and 4)
Unit 3 and 4 English General extends Year 11's practical focus into longer, more sustained texts and a sharper critical edge on media representation and reliability. Unit 4 turns toward texts genuinely useful beyond school — community, workplace and further-study contexts — and closes with reflecting on and improving a student's own writing, treating revision as a real, transferable skill rather than an assessment formality.
Unit 3
Persuasive technique and workplace-relevant comprehension, at greater length.
How texts influence an audience
Analysing the range of techniques texts use to influence an audience's thinking or behaviour.
Persuasive techniques in texts
Analysing persuasive technique at a more sustained, detailed level than Year 11.
Point of view, perspective and values
Analysing how point of view, perspective and values are embedded in a text.
Community and workplace texts
Comprehending texts genuinely encountered in community and workplace settings.
Writing an extended persuasive text
Creating a longer, more sustained persuasive text than Year 11 required.
Writing informative and explanatory texts
Creating clear, well-structured informative and explanatory texts.
Planning and structuring a longer text
Planning and structuring a longer piece of writing so it stays coherent from start to finish.
Where students get stuck: Starting to write before planning a longer text's overall structure. A text that runs long without a plan tends to drift, and the fix is a genuine structural outline before drafting starts, not more editing afterward.
Unit 4
Media representation and creating texts genuinely useful beyond school.
Representation in media and popular culture
Analysing representation across media and popular culture texts.
Comparing representations across texts
Comparing how different texts represent the same group, issue or idea.
Evaluating reliability and effectiveness
Evaluating how reliable and how effective a text actually is, not just describing its features.
Writing for community, work or further study
Creating texts genuinely suited to community, workplace or further-study purposes.
Multimodal and oral presentations
Planning and delivering a sustained multimodal or oral presentation.
Reflecting on and improving your own writing
Critically reflecting on a student's own writing and using that reflection to genuinely improve it.
How it is assessed
- Unit 3 and Unit 4 combine school assessment with an external assessment component set by SCSA.
- General courses don't contribute to the ATAR — the result counts toward completing the WACE.
- Reporting is against the WACE unit grade for each unit.
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.
- How is Unit 3 and 4 different in character from Unit 1 and 2?
- The text types stay similar — everyday, workplace and media texts rather than literary ones — but the length and sustained quality expected increases considerably. A student comfortable with Year 11's shorter tasks should expect Year 12 to ask for the same skills over a longer, more demanding piece of writing.
- Does this course prepare a student for workplace writing after school?
- Genuinely, yes — Unit 4 in particular is explicitly built around texts for community, workplace and further-study contexts, which makes it one of the more directly transferable English courses on offer, independent of its WACE contribution.
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.