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Year 9 is an important year for students of English. It is the first year of Stage 5. In this year, students move beyond the basics of reading skills and basic writing and move onto to analysing complex texts and developing complex, sustained extended essays.
Along with increasingly complex texts, students need to start thinking about and discussing higher order techniques. When responding, students will need to discuss their findings in greater detail with a focus on developing sustained, coherent responses.
We’ve put this Guide together to help students get ahead in Year 9 and cope with these challenges.
Hitting cruise control.
Year 9 students face many issues, but the root cause for all of them often comes back to the same thing.
The main issue that students face in Years 9 and 10 is a sense of complacency.
Year 9, and Stage 5, should be a time for the consolidation and mastery of existing skills.
Students often feel that Years 9 and 10 don’t count, and they stop pushing. It’s very easy, and common, for students to lose focus during Stage 5 and lose ground by assuming that English is just more of the same.
Instead, Year 9 is where students should developing their existing skill set and preparing for the challenges of senior English.
This Guide is a comprehensive overview of the skills that you will need to develop to ace Year 9.
In it we will cover the following topics:
As you can see, there are quite a few areas you need to develop in Year 9.
In Year 9, you can expect to engage with more complex texts. This will include longer novels, but also short stories that grapple with more complex moral questions or social issues.
The poetry you encounter will be more challenging and the visual texts, such as films, will require you to engage in deeper analysis.
The sorts of assessment tasks that students face during Stage 5 (Stage 5 refers to the way the NSW Education Standards Authority refers to the learning requirements of Years 9 and 10) demand that you take a big step up if you want to get the marks.
Finally, your responses will need to be longer, discuss things in greater depth, and discuss more complex ideas.
Let’s take a look at what this means for you.
To succeed in tackling these new challenges, you will need to develop and refine your English skills.
Let’s see what skills you need to develop.
From Year 9 onwards, you will need to identify, consider, and discuss higher order literary techniques.
You will need to identify when composers utilise things like sarcasm, parody, or symbolism. You will need to understand how these techniques create meaning and what the composers are trying to achieve by utilising them.
You will need to think about the author’s, and text’s, context and the impact this has on the text’s meaning. You will need to contemplate how your own context shapes the way you view a text.
This means asking yourself, “How has my experience shaped my perspective on this text?”
As you discuss more complex ideas, you will need to employ more complex grammatical structures to accommodate them.
It is important that you pay careful attention to your grammar in Year 9 so that you develop good habits and don’t entrench poor habits.
In addition, you need to start structuring your paragraphs carefully.
For example, to convey complex ideas and discuss the connections between, say, a text, its use of techniques, and its context, you will need to use transition phrases to yoke your ideas and discussion together.
As your discussion of texts and ideas becomes more complex, so will your responses become longer.
When you compose responses, you will be expected to produce formal informative and persuasive essays rather than short answers and paragraphs.
To do this effectively, you will need to develop skills with signposting – using thesis statements, topic sentences, linking statements, and keywords – to help your readers navigate the ideas you’re discussing.
Learning and developing your essay writing skills in Year 9 is a crucial step towards writing with clarity, insight, and concision in year 12.
If you are going to successfully develop the above skills, then you will need to ensure you have a comprehensive and effective study habit.
Knowledge and skills don’t just materialise, they are the result of consistent learning, application, and practice!
As you may be aware, English isn’t the only subject that increases in difficulty in Year 9. Most of your other subjects will, too.
However, the nature of English, reading and viewing long texts multiple times, requires a greater allocation of time. It is important that you schedule adequate study time and stick to it to develop good habits. English is only going to become more time intensive as you progress through school.
An important skill to develop and refine in year 9 is your note-taking. You need to be highly competent at identifying important information, recording it for later recall in study notes, and then using these notes to produce your responses or study for exams.
The Matrix MethodTM for acing English guides students through the skills they need to develop:
What will you put in your study notes? Your analysis of the texts you have set for study.
Let’s see how the demands of textual analysis will change in year 9.
Studying shouldn’t stop because you’re at home! With Matrix+, we provide you with clear and structured online lesson videos, quality resources, and forums to ask your Matrix teachers questions and for feedback.
Learn more about our Matrix+ Online English course now.
In Year 9 English, you may need to identify higher order literary techniques like symbolism, extended metaphor, satire, and parody.
You will need to be confident spotting:
In Year 9 English, you will need to take into account a text’s perspective and structure, as well as considering things like context and audience.
You will need to be confident identifying:
You will also need to think about how texts can lead to audiences to feel:
To give you an idea of what is in store, let’s take a quick look at the sorts of assessment tasks that you can face in Year 9:
As you can see, there is a wide variety of challenging tasks that you can be set. This will provide challenges, but also set you up for Years 11 and 12.
While we have tried to make this Guide as comprehensive as possible, the nature of Stage 5 English means that some skills will be taught in Year 9 and others in year 10.
To ensure that you’ve not missed any Stage 5 content, you should take the time to read through The Beginner’s Guide to Year 10 English once you’ve finished reading this one.
Now you know what is in store for you, we’ll start guiding you through the skills you need to ace year 9.
Because you can’t write insightful responses without insightful study notes, we’re going to show you how to make excellent notes!
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