Year 2 English: Every Australian Curriculum Code, Explained

Year 2 English in the Australian Curriculum is 27 content descriptions, AC9E2LA01 through AC9E2LY12. It is three fewer than Year 1, and every one of the three that disappeared came out of the phonics block.

That is the whole story of Year 2. The curriculum is not saying the code work got smaller. It is saying the oral half should be finishing, so the remaining codes can carry a harder job: moving spelling off sound and onto meaning. This is a working guide to all 27 descriptions: what each strand is asking for, the three codes that decide whether Year 3 paragraphs are possible, a term-by-term order, and six five-minute checks worth running before the December report.

What changes this year

Three shifts, and they are not the ones most Year 2 programs are built around.

The phonics set stops being closed. Year 1 taught a small, finite list: five or six digraphs, each with one spelling. AC9E2LY10 replaces that with vowel digraphs, less common long vowel patterns, consonant clusters and silent letters. The difference is not difficulty, it is structure. In Year 1 a sound had a spelling. In Year 2 a sound has several, and nothing in the sound tells you which one to use. A strategy that worked all of last year stops working in February.

Meaning takes over from sound. AC9E2LY11 asks for spelling patterns and morphemes to read and write words whose spelling is not completely predictable from their sounds, and AC9E2LY12 asks students to build morphemic word families using prefixes and suffixes. This is the first year where the honest answer to “why is it spelled like that?” is about where the word came from or what it is made of, not about what it sounds like. Year 2 is the handover point between the two engines of spelling, and a program that treats AC9E2LY12 as a Term 4 extension has effectively skipped it.

The sentence gets a second clause. AC9E2LA06 introduces the compound sentence: two or more independent clauses, usually joined by a coordinating conjunction. Children have been writing with and since Foundation. Year 2 is the first time anyone tells them what is on either side of it.

The year at a glance

Compare the Literacy count with Year 1’s fifteen. AC9E1LY09 and AC9E1LY10 (segmenting, then oral manipulation) have collapsed into the single AC9E2LY09, and AC9E1LY11 and AC9E1LY12 (the print code and the one-letter-many-sounds rule) have collapsed into AC9E2LY10. Two pairs becoming two codes is the curriculum saying the oral groundwork should be behind you, not that it stopped mattering.

Reading the codes

The pattern is AC9 + E + year + strand + number, so AC9E2LY10 is Year 2, Literacy, tenth description. LA is Language, LE is Literature, LY is Literacy. Numbering runs roughly parallel year to year within a strand, but Year 2 is the one place in primary English where it breaks: because Literacy lost three codes, AC9E1LY13 does not line up with AC9E2LY13, and there is no AC9E2LY13 at all. If you are converting a Year 1 program by incrementing the digit, this is where it silently misfires.

Strand by strand

Language (AC9E2LA01 to AC9E2LA10)

Ten descriptions, and they split into an interpersonal pair, a text-and-image group and a grammar group.

The interpersonal pair is AC9E2LA01 and AC9E2LA02: investigating how interpersonal language choices vary depending on context, including the different roles taken on in interactions; and exploring how language can be used for appreciating texts and providing reasons for preferences. The word roles in AC9E2LA01 is doing more work than it looks. Year 1 asked how language is used to request or command; Year 2 asks children to notice that the same child speaks differently as group leader, as audience member and as the person who disagrees. It lives in classroom routines, but it needs naming out loud or it does not get noticed.

The text-and-image group is AC9E2LA03, AC9E2LA05 and AC9E2LA08: how texts across the curriculum are organised differently and use language features depending on purposes; navigating print and screen texts using chapters, tables of contents, indexes, side-bar menus, drop-down menus or links; and understanding that images add to or multiply the meanings of a text. AC9E2LA05 is the one that needs planning rather than absorption, because side-bar and drop-down menus do not turn up during shared reading of a picture book. Ten minutes on a real website, with the navigation named as you go, covers it properly.

The grammar group is AC9E2LA04, AC9E2LA06, AC9E2LA07, AC9E2LA09 and AC9E2LA10. AC9E2LA06 is the load-bearing code of the year: connections between ideas made using a compound sentence with two or more independent clauses, usually linked by a coordinating conjunction. AC9E2LA07 grows the pieces on either side, with nouns extended into noun groups using articles and adjectives, and verbs expressed as verb groups. AC9E2LA09 is experimenting with and beginning to make conscious choices of vocabulary to suit the topic, and AC9E2LA10 adds capitals in titles and commas in lists.

AC9E2LA04 is the sleeper. It asks students to understand how texts are made cohesive by using personal and possessive pronouns and by omitting words that can be inferred. It is the only code in Year 2 that operates between sentences rather than inside one, which makes it the first genuine step towards the Year 3 paragraph, and it is the code most often left off a Year 2 program entirely. The reason it gets skipped is that it looks like grammar revision. It is not. Ellipsis (leaving out words the reader can infer) is a text-level skill that nothing else in Year 2 teaches.

Literature (AC9E2LE01 to AC9E2LE05)

Five descriptions, and the shift from Year 1 is a shift in what students are asked to connect. Year 1 discussed plot, character and setting as separate things to name. AC9E2LE01 asks how characters and settings are connected, and AC9E2LE03 asks how language is used to present those features in different ways across a range of texts. The move is from labelling to relating.

AC9E2LE02 adds the evaluative half: identifying features of literary texts, such as characters and settings, and giving reasons for personal preferences. Note the phrasing. It is not asking which book they liked, it is asking them to attach a reason to a feature, which is the same move AC9E2LA02 makes from the Language side. Teach the two together and you get one lesson instead of two.

AC9E2LE04, identifying, reproducing and experimenting with rhythmic sound and word patterns in poems, chants, rhymes or songs, is the third year in a row this code does double duty. It is filed under Literature and it is functionally phonological practice. In Year 2 it is worth keeping specifically because AC9E2LY09 needs oral material and a daily chant supplies it at no extra cost.

AC9E2LE05 is the strand’s output: creating and editing literary texts by adapting structures and language features of familiar literary texts through drawing, writing, performance and digital tools. The editing word is new here, and performance and drawing are still explicitly enough, so a child whose transcription is slow can meet AC9E2LE05 at full difficulty without writing much.

AC9E2LE01 carries the First Nations requirement, written as an ongoing condition on the texts you choose across the year, not a unit to run in Week 6.

Literacy (AC9E2LY01 to AC9E2LY12)

Twelve descriptions, in three groups.

The comprehension and oral group is AC9E2LY01, AC9E2LY02, AC9E2LY03, AC9E2LY05 and AC9E2LY07: identifying how similar topics and information are presented in different types of texts; interaction skills including actively listening, receiving instructions, extending own ideas and responding to opinions; identifying the purpose and audience of imaginative, informative and persuasive texts; comprehension strategies (visualising, predicting, connecting, summarising, monitoring and questioning) for literal and inferred meaning; and creating, rehearsing and delivering short oral or multimodal presentations while varying tone, volume and pace. None of these depend on the child’s own decoding, because they work on texts read to the child. Run them at full difficulty from Week 1.

The production group is AC9E2LY06 and AC9E2LY08. AC9E2LY06 is the longest description in the year and worth reading slowly: creating and editing short imaginative, informative and persuasive written and/or multimodal texts for familiar audiences, using text structure appropriate to purpose, simple and compound sentences, noun groups and verb groups, topic-specific vocabulary, simple punctuation and common two-syllable words. That single code names four other codes as requirements, which makes it the natural assessment vehicle for the year. AC9E2LY08 is handwriting, still unjoined upper- and lower-case, with fluency rather than formation as the target.

The code-breaking group is four descriptions and they run in a strict order:

1. AC9E2LY09, oral: manipulating more complex sounds in spoken words, using blending, segmenting, phoneme deletion and phoneme substitution to read and write words.
2. AC9E2LY10, print: phoneme–grapheme matches including vowel digraphs, less common long vowel patterns, consonant clusters and silent letters, for words of one or more syllables including compound words.
3. AC9E2LY11, the handover: spelling patterns and morphemes for words whose spelling is not completely predictable from their sounds, including high-frequency words.
4. AC9E2LY12, morphology proper: building morphemic word families using prefixes and suffixes.

AC9E2LY04, reading texts with phrasing and fluency using phonic and word knowledge while monitoring meaning by re-reading and self-correcting, sits on top of that stack rather than inside it. The new words compared with Year 1 are re-reading and self-correcting. Fluency stops being a by-product of decoding and becomes a named behaviour with a repair strategy attached.

The three codes that decide Year 3

AC9E2LY10: the set is open now

The misconception: that long vowel patterns are just more digraphs, so the Year 1 method (learn the pair, use the pair) carries over. It does not. sh has one spelling; the long /ai/ sound has at least ai, ay, a_e, eigh and ei. The child’s problem has changed from “what does this say?” to “which one of these do I use?”, and nothing in the sound answers that.

What you will see: reading is fine and spelling collapses. The child reads train, play and cake correctly and then writes trane, plai and caik. Every one of those is phonically defensible, which is the tell: this is not a child who has not learned the patterns, it is a child who has learned them all as interchangeable. The silent letter half produces the other signal: nite for night, rong for wrong, num for numb.

The fix: teach position, not just pattern. ay at the end of a word or syllable, ai in the middle; oy at the end, oi in the middle. Two rules cover an enormous proportion of the errors and they are the sort of thing a Year 2 child can hold. Then sort rather than list: give twenty words with the same sound and have the child group them by spelling and say where in the word each one sits. For silent letters, stop calling them silent and start calling them the part that tells you what the word means, which hands the problem to AC9E2LY11 and AC9E2LY12 where it belongs.

AC9E2LA06: what is actually on either side of “and”

The misconception: that any sentence containing and is a compound sentence, so the code is already met by most of the class in February. AC9E2LA06 specifies two or more independent clauses, and most of what a Year 2 child writes with and is not that.

What you will see: two shapes, and they need opposite responses. The first is “I went to the shop and bought some milk.” That is one clause with two verbs, not a compound sentence, and the child who writes it has not met AC9E2LA06 no matter how many times they use and. The second is “We went to the beach and it was hot and my brother got sand in his hat and then we went home and it was fun.” Those are independent clauses, so the code is technically met, and the writing is still a chain. Marking both the same way is the error.

The fix: the cover test, taught as a physical action. Put a finger over the and. Read what is on the left: is it a sentence on its own? Read what is on the right: is it a sentence on its own? Two yeses means it is compound. For the first shape, that test gives “bought some milk”, which the child can hear is not a sentence, and the repair is to add the missing subject. For the second shape, the code is met and the target moves to AC9E2LA04: swap a repeated noun for a pronoun, and cut the clause that adds nothing. Two clauses joined deliberately beats five joined by habit, and saying that out loud is worth more than any amount of red pen.

AC9E2LY12: where spelling stops being about sound

The misconception: that prefixes and suffixes are vocabulary enrichment, a good Term 4 topic if there is time. AC9E2LY12 is the code that makes the whole of Year 3 and Year 4 spelling possible, because from AC9E3LY10 onwards the curriculum expects morphology to be the primary tool, and it never returns to teach it from scratch.

What you will see: the child spells jumped as jumpt and played as plaid. Both are correct phonics and both are wrong, and no amount of sounding out will fix either, because the ed ending is spelled for its meaning (this already happened) and not for its sound, which is /t/, /d/ or /id/ depending on the word. The second signal is on reading: shown unhappy or replay, the child decodes it letter by letter and arrives at a word they cannot define, when the two chunks would have given them the meaning for free.

The fix: three or four minutes, twice a week, building one family at a time from a base word the child already owns. Play gives plays, played, playing, player, replay, playful. Write the base in a different colour every time so the child sees it survive intact. Then make the rule explicit: the base word does not change its spelling just because the ending changes the sound. That one sentence is the entire bridge from AC9E2LY10 to AC9E2LY11, and it is the reason jumped does not end in t.

What students need to arrive with

The prerequisites are all in the Year 1 English code set, and four of them matter more than the rest.

• AC9E1LY12 (a letter can represent more than one sound; a syllable must contain a vowel sound). AC9E2LY10 assumes the grapheme, not the letter, is the unit the child is looking at. A child still reading ship as four sounds cannot be taught less common long vowel patterns, because they are the layer above the one they need.
• AC9E1LY10 (orally manipulating phonemes by addition, deletion and substitution). AC9E2LY09 opens on more complex sounds and assumes all four operations are available. This is the cheapest gap to close and the most expensive to leave, because spelling by analogy is impossible without it.
• AC9E1LA06 (the simple sentence as a single independent clause). AC9E2LA06 does not define the clause, it multiplies it. If Year 1 never landed, Year 2 is teaching children to join two things they cannot identify.
• AC9E1LY15 (grammatical morphemes to create word families). AC9E2LY12 is the same thread one year on. A child who has never seen a base word stay intact under a suffix will treat every inflected form as a new word to memorise.

Run these checks in February. All four are cheap to close in Term 1 and expensive to close in Term 4, and the phonics one gets worse rather than staying still, because the child keeps reading and keeps building the wrong model.

What this year sets up

• AC9E2LA06 becomes AC9E3LA06, where the clause is defined properly as a unit of grammar containing a subject and a verb that need to agree. Year 2 puts two clauses next to each other; Year 3 looks inside one.
• AC9E2LA04, cohesion by pronouns and ellipsis, becomes AC9E3LA04: paragraphs as a key organisational feature grouping related information. This is the single most important line of descent in primary English, and it is why AC9E2LA04 is not optional. Our deep dive on how sentences become paragraphs covers what that looks like in practice.
• AC9E2LY10 and AC9E2LY11 become AC9E3LY09 and AC9E3LY11, which move to multisyllabic words with more complex letter patterns and to less common letter patterns for spelling. The word multisyllabic is the change: Year 2 handled words of one or more syllables, Year 3 assumes several as the norm.
• AC9E2LY12 becomes AC9E3LY10, which adds generalisations for adding a suffix to a base word. That is the rule layer on top of the families built in Year 2, and it only makes sense to a child who has the families.
• AC9E2LY06 becomes AC9E3LY06: plan, create, edit and publish, with ideas grouped in simple paragraphs. Two new verbs and a new organisational unit in one code.
• AC9E2LY08 becomes AC9E3LY08, joined letters. Handwriting changes model in Year 3, so leaving Year 2 with unjoined letters still effortful makes that transition much harder than it needs to be.

A term-by-term order

1. Term 1: finish the oral work, open the vowel patterns. AC9E2LY09 daily and oral, with deletion and substitution in medial position as the target, because that is what Year 1 usually leaves unfinished. AC9E2LY10 starting on vowel digraphs only, taught by position (ai in the middle, ay at the end) rather than as a list. AC9E2LA06 taught explicitly with the cover test, and AC9E2LA10 following it. AC9E2LY02 and AC9E2LA01 inside routines, AC9E2LE04 as a daily chant, AC9E2LY08 handwriting for fluency.
2. Term 2: the open set, and compound sentences in writing. AC9E2LY10 extended to less common long vowel patterns and consonant clusters, with sorting by spelling and position as the main activity. AC9E2LY06 with compound sentences named as the target, using the noun groups and verb groups of AC9E2LA07 as the material. AC9E2LY04 with re-reading and self-correcting taught as an explicit repair move rather than praised when it happens by accident. Add AC9E2LA03 and AC9E2LE02.
3. Term 3: morphology takes over. AC9E2LY11 and AC9E2LY12 as the main spelling engine, one word family at a time, with the base word colour-coded. Silent letters from AC9E2LY10 revisited here rather than in Term 2, because they make sense as meaning (sign and signal) and not as sound. AC9E2LA04 taught deliberately, with pronoun tracking across two sentences. AC9E2LY05 comprehension pushed harder now that decoding costs the child less. Add AC9E2LA05 on screen navigation and AC9E2LA08 on images.
4. Term 4: purpose, audience and performance. AC9E2LY01 and AC9E2LY03 on how the same topic changes shape across imaginative, informative and persuasive texts. AC9E2LY07 short presentations with tone, volume and pace as named variables. AC9E2LE05 creating and editing by adapting a familiar text, AC9E2LE01 and AC9E2LE03 on characters and settings, AC9E2LA09 conscious vocabulary choice, and AC9E2LA02 giving reasons for preferences. Finish with a single piece that carries the whole of AC9E2LY06 as the year’s evidence.

The non-obvious choice is holding silent letters until Term 3. They sit inside AC9E2LY10, which is a Term 1 and 2 code, so the natural place to teach them is with the rest of the phonics. Do that and they are twenty arbitrary facts. Teach them in Term 3 alongside AC9E2LY12, where sign keeps its g because of signal and bomb keeps its b because of bombard, and most of them become explainable.

Six checks before Year 3

• Dictate train, play and cake. Phonically plausible but wrong spellings mean AC9E2LY10 needs reteaching by position, not by repetition. Same sound, different jobs, and the child needs to know which spelling sits where in a word.
• Dictate jumped and played. jumpt or plaid points at AC9E2LY12, not at spelling generally. Reteach the base word surviving the suffix before touching anything else.
• “Say splash without the /p/.” This is AC9E2LY09 at its hardest. Failure here explains most Year 2 spelling errors and takes about three minutes a day for a fortnight to fix.
• Ask them to write one sentence joining two ideas. If they produce “I went to the park and played”, the gap is AC9E2LA06, not writing. Reteach the cover test and have them supply the missing subject.
• Read them: “The dog chased the cat. It ran under the fence.” Ask who ran. Hesitation or a wrong answer means AC9E2LA04 has not been taught, and that is the code Year 3 paragraphs are built on. Reteach by tracking one pronoun back to its noun with a finger.
• Hand back a piece of their own writing and ask them to improve one sentence. If they only correct spelling, the editing half of AC9E2LY06 has been read as proofreading. Reteach with one named target per pass: today we are joining two short sentences into one.

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. “Spelling” tells a reviewer nothing; “AC9E2LY12, building word families from play, 14 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 2 English in the Victorian Curriculum, and in NSW the equivalent content sits inside Stage 1 English, which covers Years 1 and 2 as one stage. The companion guide to every Year 2 Maths code covers the other half of the year.

Year 2 is the year where the interesting content and the necessary drill pull hardest against each other. Building word families from play is not going to hold a seven-year-old for four minutes twice a week on its own, and using an interest as the way in costs nothing in curriculum terms: the morphology is identical whether the base word is play or dragon. Sprout Lessons builds an interactive lesson from any of these 27 codes, pitched at Year 2 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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