Year 1 English: Every Australian Curriculum Code, Explained

Year 1 English in the Australian Curriculum is 30 content descriptions, AC9E1LA01 through AC9E1LY15. It is the largest code set in the primary English sequence, and it contains the single most disruptive instruction in the whole of F–6 English: AC9E1LY12, which tells you that a letter can represent more than one sound.

Foundation spent a year installing one letter, one sound. Year 1 takes it back. Everything that goes wrong in Year 1 reading goes wrong at that seam. This is a working guide to all 30 codes: what each strand is asking for, the three descriptions that decide whether Year 2 goes well, a term-by-term order that puts digraphs before long vowels for a reason, and six five-minute checks worth running before the December report.

What changes this year

Three things break at once, and they break in the same term.

The code stops being one-to-one. AC9E1LY11 adds consonant blends, digraphs and common long vowels; AC9E1LY12 states outright that a letter can represent more than one sound and that a syllable must contain a vowel sound. A child who learned that s says /s/ and h says /h/ now has to accept that sh says something neither of them says. That is not more of the same skill. It is a different model of how print works.

Words get longer than one syllable. AC9E1LY11 asks for one- and two-syllable words, and AC9E1LY13 for spelling them with common letter patterns. Foundation blending strategies (stretch the whole word, say it fast) stop working at two syllables, because there is too much to hold.

Writing becomes the child’s own. Foundation writing was shared, with the teacher holding the pen for most of it. AC9E1LY06 asks students to create and re-read to edit short texts using grammatically correct simple sentences, sentence boundary punctuation and correct spelling of some one- and two-syllable words. The re-reading clause is the new part, and it is the one most often skipped.

The year at a glance

The shape is the same as Foundation, but the difficulty is not evenly spread. Seven Literacy codes (AC9E1LY09 to AC9E1LY15) carry the code-breaking work, and one Language code, AC9E1LA06, carries the writing work. Those eight decide the year.

Reading the codes

From Year 1 onwards the pattern is regular: AC9 + E + year + strand + number. AC9E1LY04 is Year 1, Literacy, fourth description. LA is Language, LE is Literature, LY is Literacy. If you have come from Foundation, note that the year moves out of the strand block: the Foundation equivalent was AC9EFLY04, with F where the 1 now sits. The numbering is deliberately parallel, so AC9EFLY11 and AC9E1LY11 are the same thread one year apart, which makes vertical planning unusually easy in English.

Strand by strand

Language (AC9E1LA01 to AC9E1LA10)

Ten descriptions, and they split into an oral group, a text-structure group and a grammar group.

The oral group is AC9E1LA01 and AC9E1LA02: understanding how language, facial expressions and gestures are used when asking for and providing information, making offers, exclaiming, requesting and giving commands; and exploring language to provide reasons for likes, dislikes and preferences. Both live inside classroom routines rather than lessons. AC9E1LA02 is worth noticing, because “I like it because…” is the oral seed of every persuasive text the child will write between here and Year 6.

The text-structure group is AC9E1LA03, AC9E1LA04, AC9E1LA05 and AC9E1LA08: how texts are organised according to purpose (recount, narrate, express opinion, inform, report, explain); how repetition, rhyme and rhythm create cohesion in simple poems, chants and songs; how print and screen texts use page numbers, contents, headings, navigation buttons, swipe screens, links and images; and comparing how images in different types of texts contribute to meaning. AC9E1LA05 is the one to plan deliberately, because the screen half of it does not happen by accident during shared reading of picture books.

The grammar group is AC9E1LA06, AC9E1LA07, AC9E1LA09 and AC9E1LA10. AC9E1LA06 is the load-bearing code of the whole year: understanding that a simple sentence consists of a single independent clause representing a single event or idea. AC9E1LA07 names the word classes by what they do, not by definition: words can represent people, places and things (nouns, including pronouns), happenings and states (verbs), qualities (adjectives) and details such as when, where and how (adverbs). AC9E1LA09 is learning area vocabulary, which means the science and maths words count as English evidence. AC9E1LA10 is punctuation: full stops, question marks, exclamation marks, and capitals for familiar proper nouns.

Teach AC9E1LA06 before AC9E1LA10 and the full stop becomes a rule with a reason. Teach them in the other order and it becomes decoration that lands where the line runs out.

Literature (AC9E1LE01 to AC9E1LE05)

Five descriptions again, and the verbs have shifted from Foundation. Foundation said share, respond, recognise. Year 1 says discuss, listen and discuss, orally retell or adapt. The move is from reacting to a text towards giving an account of it.

AC9E1LE03 is the naming code: plot, character and setting are features of stories. Foundation asked children to identify events and characters; Year 1 gives those things their proper names and adds setting. It is a small change on paper and a large one in practice, because setting is the feature Year 1 students consistently omit from their own writing.

AC9E1LE04, listening to and discussing poems, chants, rhymes and songs and imitating and inventing sound patterns including alliteration and rhyme, is doing double duty exactly as its Foundation predecessor did. It is filed under Literature and it is functionally phonological awareness practice. A daily chant costs three minutes and counts against AC9E1LE04 and feeds AC9E1LY09 at the same time.

AC9E1LE05 is the strand’s output: orally retell or adapt a familiar story using plot and characters, language features including vocabulary, and structure, through role-play, writing, drawing or digital tools. Note that oral retelling is explicitly enough. A child whose transcription is still slow can meet AC9E1LE05 at full difficulty by talking, and separating that from AC9E1LY06 is one of the most useful planning moves in Year 1.

AC9E1LE01 carries the First Nations requirement, written as an ongoing condition on the texts you choose across the year rather than as a unit to run in one week.

Literacy (AC9E1LY01 to AC9E1LY15)

Fifteen descriptions, read as three groups.

The comprehension and oral group is AC9E1LY01, AC9E1LY02, AC9E1LY03, AC9E1LY05 and AC9E1LY07: discussing texts and identifying features that indicate purpose; interaction skills including turn-taking and active listening; describing similarities and differences between imaginative, informative and persuasive texts; comprehension strategies (visualising, predicting, connecting, summarising, questioning); and creating and delivering short oral or multimodal presentations with an opening, middle and concluding statement. None of these are gated behind decoding, because all of them work on texts read to the child. Run them at full difficulty from week one, regardless of where the child’s reading is.

The production group is AC9E1LY06 and AC9E1LY08: creating and re-reading to edit short written or multimodal texts using grammatically correct simple sentences, some topic-specific vocabulary, sentence boundary punctuation and correct spelling of some one- and two-syllable words; and writing words using unjoined lower-case and upper-case letters. AC9E1LY08 is handwriting, and in Year 1 it is mostly about fluency and case, not formation.

The code-breaking group is seven descriptions, and unlike Foundation they do not run in a single strict line. Two threads run in parallel:

1. The oral thread. AC9E1LY09 (segment words into separate phonemes including consonant blends or clusters at the beginnings and ends of words), then AC9E1LY10 (orally manipulate phonemes by addition, deletion and substitution of initial, medial and final phonemes to generate new words).
2. The print thread. AC9E1LY11 (short vowels, common long vowels, consonant blends and digraphs, blended to read one- and two-syllable words), then AC9E1LY12 (a letter can represent more than one sound; a syllable must contain a vowel sound), then AC9E1LY13 (spelling one- and two-syllable words with common letter patterns) and AC9E1LY14 (an increasing number of high-frequency words).

AC9E1LY15, using grammatical morphemes to create word families, sits across both. It is the first code in the sequence where meaning rather than sound tells you the spelling, and it is the beginning of the thread that eventually explains why jumped ends in ed when it sounds like /t/.

AC9E1LY04, reading decodable and authentic texts using developing phonic knowledge, phrasing and fluency while monitoring meaning, sits on top of the stack rather than inside it. Its two halves pull in opposite directions: decodable texts practise the code, authentic texts practise meaning, and a child given only one of the two ends up either fluent and uncomprehending or comprehending and guessing.

The three codes that decide Year 2

AC9E1LY12: one letter, more than one sound

The misconception: that digraphs are just extra letter-sound pairs to add to the Foundation list. They are not. They require the child to stop treating a letter as the unit and start treating a grapheme as the unit, and that is a change in what they are looking at.

What you will see: the child reads ship as /s/ /h/ /i/ /p/ and then says “sip” or gives up. The letter sounds are correct. The chunking is wrong. A second signal, on the vowel half: shown rain the child says /r/ /a/ /i/ /n/ and produces a two-syllable non-word. A third, on the syllable clause: asked to spell table the child writes tabl, because they heard no vowel in the second syllable and AC9E1LY12’s rule that every syllable contains a vowel sound has not landed.

The fix: mark the grapheme physically before reading the word. Draw a line under sh, or slide a finger under it as one movement rather than two. Teach digraphs as a small closed set (sh, ch, th, ng, ck) to automaticity before opening the long vowel patterns, because long vowels are where a single sound has several spellings and that is a harder problem again. And when a child writes tabl, do not correct the spelling. Ask how many syllables, then ask which vowel is in the second one. The rule is the reteach, not the word.

AC9E1LY10: manipulation is not a warm-up

The misconception: that phoneme manipulation is a game for the first five minutes of a phonics lesson, valuable but optional, and that the real work is on the page. AC9E1LY10 is the code that makes spelling by analogy possible, and a child who cannot do it orally has to memorise every word individually.

What you will see: ask the child to say stop without the /t/ and they say stop back, or produce “sop-t”. Deletion of a medial phoneme in a blend is the hardest of the three operations named in the code and the most diagnostic. On the substitution half: ask them to change the /a/ in cat to /o/ and they say “cat-o” or reach for a pencil. Reaching for a pencil is the tell. The code says orally, and a child who needs to see it cannot yet do it.

The fix: three to four minutes daily, no letters visible, one operation until it is automatic rather than cycling through all three. Order matters: addition first (say at, now add /s/ at the front), then substitution, then deletion, and initial position before final before medial. Words from AC9E1LY09 with consonant blends are the target, because those are the ones that will appear in AC9E1LY11 print work.

AC9E1LY06: the re-read clause

Creating and re-reading to edit short written or multimodal texts, using grammatically correct simple sentences, sentence boundary punctuation and correct spelling of some one- and two-syllable words. Its partner is AC9E1LA06, the simple sentence as a single independent clause, and planners routinely take the Literacy code and leave the Language one behind.

The misconception: that editing is proofreading, and therefore a job for whoever marks the book. AC9E1LY06 puts the re-reading inside the writing task and assigns it to the child. What it is really teaching is that text is provisional.

What you will see: “I went to the park and it was fun and my dog came and we had ice cream and”. One clause chained to the next by and, no boundary anywhere. This passes a Foundation standard and fails AC9E1LA06, because none of it is a single independent clause representing a single event. The other common shape is the opposite: three correct sentences with a full stop after each, all about different things, which fails nothing in Year 1 but is the direct cause of the Year 3 paragraph problem.

The fix: a fixed two-pass routine. First pass, read your writing aloud and put your finger down every time you run out of breath. Every finger-down is a sentence boundary. Second pass, one target only, and name it before they start: today we are checking capitals, or today we are checking that every sentence has a doing word. One target per pass is the whole technique, because a Year 1 child asked to check everything checks nothing. Our deep dive on how sentences become paragraphs by Year 3 shows what this thread turns into two years later.

What students need to arrive with

The prerequisites are all in the Foundation English code set, and four of them matter more than the rest.

• AC9EFLY10 (blending and segmenting single-syllable words, and manipulating phonemes). AC9E1LY09 opens on consonant blends, which is a harder segmenting problem than anything in Foundation. A child who could not segment ship in December cannot segment strap in February.
• AC9EFLY12 (writing and blending CVC words). AC9E1LY11 assumes CVC is automatic and spends the year on what sits above it. This is the single most common gap, and it is invisible in whole-class teaching because the child can still copy and still guess.
• AC9EFLY11 (all upper- and lower-case letters and their most common sound). Fewer than about twenty secure sounds in February means AC9E1LY11 will not land, and daily review of the known set beats introducing digraphs on an unstable base.
• AC9EFLA05 (sentences as key units for expressing ideas). AC9E1LA06 does not introduce the sentence, it defines it. If the concept is not there, Year 1 is teaching the definition of something the child has never noticed.

Run the readiness checks in Term 1, not Term 4. All four gaps are cheap to close in February and expensive in November.

What this year sets up

• AC9E1LY09 and AC9E1LY10 collapse into a single Year 2 code, AC9E2LY09, which manipulates more complex sounds and uses blending, segmenting, phoneme deletion and phoneme substitution to read and write words. Two codes becoming one is the curriculum saying the oral work should be finished, not that it got easier.
• AC9E1LY11 and AC9E1LY12 become AC9E2LY10: vowel digraphs, less common long vowel patterns, consonant clusters and silent letters. The closed set of Year 1 digraphs becomes an open set of patterns.
• AC9E1LY13 and AC9E1LY15 become AC9E2LY11 and AC9E2LY12, where spelling patterns and morphemes handle words that are not predictable from sound, and prefixes and suffixes build word families. This is where the morphology thread takes over from the phonics thread as the main engine of spelling.
• AC9E1LA06 becomes AC9E2LA06: the compound sentence, two or more independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction. Year 2 formalises the and the child has been using all through Year 1. That only works if Year 1 established what the clauses on either side of it are.
• AC9E1LA07 becomes AC9E2LA07, where nouns extend into noun groups with articles and adjectives and verbs become verb groups.
• AC9E1LY04 becomes AC9E2LY04, which adds re-reading and self-correcting. Fluency stops being a by-product and becomes a named skill.

The steep jump is the phonics one, again. Year 2 opens on less common long vowel patterns and silent letters and never returns to digraphs, so a child who arrives without AC9E1LY12 spends the year being taught the layer above the one they need.

A term-by-term order

1. Term 1: blends, and the sentence. AC9E1LY09 daily on consonant blends at the beginnings and ends of words, oral only. AC9E1LY11 starting with blends in print, which extends Foundation rather than contradicting it. AC9E1LA06 taught explicitly as one idea, one clause, with AC9E1LA10 following it. AC9E1LY02 and AC9E1LA01 to AC9E1LA02 inside routines, AC9E1LE02 and AC9E1LE04 through a daily rhyme, and AC9E1LY08 handwriting for fluency.
2. Term 2: digraphs, and independent writing. AC9E1LY12 as a small closed set (sh, ch, th, ng, ck) to automaticity before any long vowel work. AC9E1LY10 manipulation daily, starting with addition. AC9E1LY06 with the two-pass re-read routine established now, while texts are short enough to re-read. AC9E1LY13 and AC9E1LY14 as the writing half of the same lessons. Add AC9E1LA03 and AC9E1LE03.
3. Term 3: long vowels and two syllables. AC9E1LY11 extended to common long vowels and two-syllable words, with the syllable clause of AC9E1LY12 taught as the tool for splitting them. AC9E1LY10 into deletion and substitution. AC9E1LY04 on decodable and authentic texts in parallel. AC9E1LY05 comprehension strategies pushed harder now that decoding is taking less of the child. Add AC9E1LA05 and AC9E1LA08 on print, screen and image.
4. Term 4: morphology, and text types. AC9E1LY15 grammatical morphemes and word families, which is the bridge into Year 2. AC9E1LY01 and AC9E1LY03 on imaginative, informative and persuasive texts. AC9E1LY07 short oral presentations with an opening, middle and concluding statement. AC9E1LE05 retelling and adapting, AC9E1LA07 word classes by function, and AC9E1LA09 learning area vocabulary pulled from whatever science and maths are running.

The non-obvious choice is holding long vowels until Term 3. Digraphs and long vowels are both “more than one letter, one sound”, so they look like the same lesson, but digraphs are a closed set with one spelling each and long vowels are an open set with several. Teaching them together produces a child who knows that ai says /ai/ and has no idea when to use it rather than a_e. Get the closed set automatic first.

Six checks before Year 2

• “Say the sounds in strap.” Four or fewer sounds, or the blend treated as one unit, means AC9E1LY09 needs oral reteaching on clusters specifically.
• “Say stop without the /t/.” This is AC9E1LY10 at its hardest and the clearest single predictor of Year 2 spelling. Reteach deletion in initial position first, then final, then medial.
• Show the written word chip, picture covered. Four separate letter sounds means AC9E1LY12 has not landed. Reteach by marking the digraph before reading, not by repeating the word.
• Ask them to spell rabbit. A missing second-syllable vowel, or a collapse to one syllable, points at the syllable clause of AC9E1LY12 rather than at spelling. Reteach by clapping syllables and asking which vowel is in each.
• Dictate “The dog ran to the shop.” then ask them to write one sentence about their weekend. If the dictated sentence is punctuated and the free one is a chain of and, the gap is AC9E1LA06, not AC9E1LY06. Reteach the clause, not the full stop.
• Hand back their own writing from yesterday and ask them to find one thing to fix. “Nothing” means the re-read clause of AC9E1LY06 has never been practised. Install the two-pass routine with one named target.

Six checks, five minutes, one child at a time. Each failure names a specific piece of a specific term to repeat rather than a general sense that a child is behind.

Recording the alignment

For a class program or a homeschool registration portfolio, record the code on the activity as you go. “Phonics” tells a reviewer nothing; “AC9E1LY12, reading and writing words with sh, ch, th, 12 May” answers the question before it is asked. Our guides to which curriculum your state uses and state-by-state registration requirements cover which code set applies to you and what reviewers ask for. The Victorian equivalent of this year is Level 1 English in the Victorian Curriculum, and the NSW equivalent is Stage 1 English, which covers Years 1 and 2 together. The companion guide to every Year 1 Maths code covers the other half of the year.

Year 1 is also the year where engagement and the code pull against each other hardest. The oral manipulation work in AC9E1LY10 is three minutes of the least interesting instruction in primary school, and it is non-negotiable. It goes down considerably better on words a child cares about, and using an interest as the way in costs nothing in curriculum terms. Sprout Lessons builds an interactive lesson from any of these 30 codes, pitched at Year 1 and wrapped in whatever the child is currently obsessed with, with the AC9 code recorded in the footer. Try it free.

Australian Curriculum content descriptions are © ACARA and licensed under CC BY 4.0. Quoted here unmodified. ACARA does not endorse this product. Always verify against the current content descriptions and achievement standards at australiancurriculum.edu.au.

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