Times are changing for senior assessment here in Queensland, and senior English has been radically re-written.
To catch you up if you’re just tuning in to this, some notable changes for English in QLD are:
- Reduction of summative assessment in Year 12 from 6 tasks to 4 tasks.
- The 4 tasks in Year 12 are all worth 25% each, and one of them is an external exam.
- There are five courses in the English suite: English, EAL, Essential English (replacing ‘English Communication’), and Literature (a new course in QLD). The fifth course English and Literature Extension, as well as the ‘applied’ subject Essential English, are still in draft.
- The external exam for English and Literature courses will be a single ‘analytical essay’ responding to unseen questions on their chosen text.
- Abolition of the existing Queensland Core Skills Test (the current method for scaling and moderating in-school subject rankings).
- We’re getting a prescribed text list (this is big news)!
The status and relationship of the five English courses is seen in Figure 1 of the English syllabus:
QCAA English pathways map – syllabus screenshot p2
There are a couple of things I think the Queensland design has captured that make it an improvement on the HSC design I am familiar with from NSW.
For starters, the external exam is only one essay (not 2 x 2 hour papers), and it’s only worth 25% of the final grade. My hope is that reducing the weight of the external exam will see Queensland take up fewer exam-driven practices and less anxiety for students.
The next area that is a win is the retention of our work-and-community English course – now called Essential English – as an ‘applied’ course. Unfortunately the equivalent ‘English Studies’ course in NSW has been made ATAR eligible, which based on historical trends will see an over-enrolment in that course.
But wow there are some things that I miss about HSC English.
- I miss the way each module has a clear direction for the work – it’s a close study, a conceptual study, or a comparative study etc.
- I miss being able to choose what my internal assessments will be and how much weight they’ll have.
- I miss the terminology of ‘related texts’ and the sense that something has to be studied in a certain amount of depth to count as a core/prescribed text.
- I miss Macbeth and To Kill A Mockingbird being mostly left alone for junior English.
- I miss ‘persuasive’ being uncoupled from ‘speech’.
- I miss mandatory inclusion of multimodal assessment.
Watching both states redevelop senior English at the same time has been eye-opening. Lots of comparison work to come.
Kelli McGraw 