Year 4 English: Every Australian Curriculum Code, Explained

Year 4 English in the Australian Curriculum is 28 content descriptions, AC9E4LA01 through AC9E4LY11. It is the same number as Year 3, and almost nothing about it is the same.

Year 4 is the year everything gets joined. Clauses get joined to each other and made unequal (AC9E4LA06, the complex sentence). Paragraphs get joined (AC9E4LA04, text connectives). Speech gets joined to narration (AC9E4LA07 and AC9E4LA12, quoted and reported speech and the punctuation that signals it). Even the spelling strand joins up: Year 3 kept phonology and morphology in separate codes, and AC9E4LY09 puts them in one. Year 3 built the parts. Year 4 connects them. This is a working guide to all 28 descriptions: what each strand asks for, the three codes that decide Year 5, a term-by-term order, and six checks worth running before the December report.

What changes this year

Three shifts, plus one deadline that is invisible unless you read forward.

The sentence becomes unequal. Year 2 joined two independent clauses with and. Year 3 defined the clause. AC9E4LA06 says a complex sentence contains one independent clause and at least one dependent clause, typically joined by a subordinating conjunction, to create relationships such as time and causality. The phrase doing the work is to create relationships. Subordination is not a way of making sentences longer, it is how a writer says which of two ideas is the main one. AC9E4LY06 then requires complex sentences in actual writing, so the Language code has a Literacy code holding it to account.

Paragraphs stop being containers and start being a sequence. AC9E3LA04 was paragraphs. The same slot in Year 4, AC9E4LA04, is text connectives, including temporal and conditional words, and topic word associations, used to sequence and connect ideas. Year 3 grouped ideas into paragraphs; Year 4 joins the paragraphs to each other. A child who never got the containers has nothing to connect, which is why AC9E3LA04 is the single most consequential prerequisite in the year.

Punctuation is now dialogue, and only dialogue. AC9E4LA12 covers quotation marks and the conventions for capitals, commas and boundary punctuation in dialogue. AC9E4LA07 covers the choice between quoted (direct) and reported (indirect) speech. Together they are the whole of Year 4 punctuation. Note what is not here: there is no Year 4 apostrophe code at all. Apostrophes appear in Year 3 at AC9E3LA11 and do not appear again until AC9E5LA09, which asks for apostrophes where there is multiple possession. Unfinished Year 3 apostrophe work gets a full year of silence and then a harder question.

The deadline: AC9E4LY08 is the last handwriting descriptor in the curriculum. Write words using clearly formed joined letters, with developing fluency and automaticity. There is no Year 5 handwriting code, no Year 6 one, and nothing in secondary. Year 2 was legibility, Year 3 was formation, Year 4 is automaticity, and after that the curriculum assumes it. A child whose handwriting still costs them attention at the end of Year 4 will carry that cost into every extended piece of writing for the rest of school, with no descriptor anywhere that says to fix it.

The year at a glance

Language gained a code on Year 3 and Literacy lost one. Both movements come from the same place: the Year 3 spelling block of four codes becomes three, because phonology and morphology are merged into AC9E4LY09, and the space goes to grammar.

Reading the codes

The pattern is AC9 + E + year + strand + number, so AC9E4LA06 is Year 4, Language, sixth description. LA is Language, LE is Literature, LY is Literacy.

Do not map a Year 3 program onto Year 4 by incrementing the year digit. Only three Language codes keep their number and their thread across the two years, and two of the most important pairs are mismatched: AC9E3LA04 (paragraphs) becomes AC9E4LA04 (text connectives), which is a genuine line of descent but not the same content, and AC9E3LA08 (tense) becomes AC9E4LA09. AC9E3LA07, the verb-processes code that made the whole Year 3 grammar thread teachable, has no Year 4 successor at all. It is assumed from here on, which is worth knowing before you discover in March that half the class cannot find a verb.

Strand by strand

Language (AC9E4LA01 to AC9E4LA12)

Twelve descriptions, in four groups.

The stance group is AC9E4LA01 and AC9E4LA02: language used to develop relationships in formal and informal situations, and identifying the subjective language of opinion and feeling against the objective language of factual reporting. AC9E4LA02 is the Year 4 version of the modality work from Year 3, and it is a bigger step than it reads. Year 3 asked how forceful a statement is; Year 4 asks what kind of statement it is. The pairing shows up again in AC9E4LY07, which asks for oral presentations using subjective and objective language, so this is a code with an assessment vehicle attached.

The text-structure group is AC9E4LA03, AC9E4LA04, AC9E4LA05 and AC9E4LA10: how texts across the curriculum are organised into characteristic stages depending on purpose; text connectives and topic word associations; navigation features of online texts including headlines, drop-down menus, links, graphics and layout; and the effect of framing, placement of elements and salience in still and moving images. AC9E4LA10 is a real step up from the Year 3 image code, which only asked how images extend meaning. Salience is a compositional idea, and the cheapest way in is a single photograph and the question of what your eye hits first and why.

The grammar group is AC9E4LA06, AC9E4LA07, AC9E4LA08 and AC9E4LA09: the complex sentence; quoted and reported speech; adverb groups, phrases and prepositional phrases providing circumstantial detail about an activity; and past, present and future tense and their impact on meaning in a sentence.

AC9E4LA08 is the partner code most planners miss. It is easy to read as terminology and it is actually the code that makes complex sentences survivable. Circumstantial detail (when, where, how, why, with what) is the content that a dependent clause carries, and a child who has practised adding it as a phrase (after the storm, on the way home) has already done the semantic half of subordination before meeting the grammar half. Teaching AC9E4LA08 first and AC9E4LA06 second turns the complex sentence into an upgrade of something familiar rather than a new topic.

Note also that AC9E4LA09 upgrades tense from Year 3’s anchoring to impact on meaning. Year 3 asked for consistency; Year 4 asks what the choice does. That upgrade is load-bearing for reported speech, where converting direct to indirect usually requires the tense to shift back.

Vocabulary and punctuation are AC9E4LA11 and AC9E4LA12: expanding vocabulary through synonyms and antonyms and words encountered in a range of sources, and dialogue punctuation. AC9E4LA11 is the code most often taught as a thesaurus exercise, which produces writing full of words the child cannot use. Pair each synonym with the sentence it belongs in and the code does what it is for.

Literature (AC9E4LE01 to AC9E4LE05)

Five descriptions, and the change from Year 3 is that literature moves from effect to construction.

AC9E4LE03 is the pivot: how authors and illustrators make stories engaging by the way they develop character, setting and plot tensions. Year 3 explored how settings and events create mood, which is what a text produces in a reader. Year 4 asks how the writer built the thing that produced it. Plot tension is the new idea and it is the most useful single concept in Year 4 Literature, because it is the only one that explains why a story with a beginning, middle and end can still be boring.

AC9E4LE02 asks students to describe the effects of text structures and language features when responding to and sharing opinions, which is where the strand meets AC9E4LA02: an opinion about a text is subjective language about an objective feature, and Year 4 is the first year students are expected to keep those two apart.

AC9E4LE04 examines literary devices and deliberate word play to shape meaning. Deliberate is the operative word, and it is the difference between spotting a pun and understanding that someone chose it.

AC9E4LE05 is the strand’s output: creating and editing literary texts by developing storylines, characters and settings. Read it next to AC9E4LE03. The strand studies how tension is built and then asks students to build it, which makes those two codes one unit rather than two.

AC9E4LE01 carries the First Nations requirement, extended this year to recognising similar storylines, ideas and relationships in different contexts, which asks for comparison across texts rather than response to one.

Literacy (AC9E4LY01 to AC9E4LY11)

Eleven descriptions, in three groups.

The comprehension and oral group is AC9E4LY01, AC9E4LY02, AC9E4LY03 and AC9E4LY05: comparing texts from different times with similar purposes to identify differences in how they depict events; listening for key points to carry out tasks and contribute to discussions, acknowledging another opinion and linking a response to the topic; identifying the characteristic features of imaginative, informative and persuasive texts; and comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning, expand topic knowledge and evaluate texts. Year 3 said begin to evaluate. Year 4 drops the hedge, and the difference is assessable.

The production group is AC9E4LY06, AC9E4LY07 and AC9E4LY08. AC9E4LY06 is the assessment vehicle for the year: plan, create, edit and publish written and multimodal imaginative, informative and persuasive texts, using visual features, relevant linked ideas, complex sentences, appropriate tense, synonyms and antonyms, correct spelling of multisyllabic words and simple punctuation. Count the codes named inside it: AC9E4LA04, AC9E4LA06, AC9E4LA09, AC9E4LA11 and AC9E4LY10 are all in there. The four-verb process does not change from Year 3, which is the point: if it was established properly last year, Year 4 is about what goes inside it. AC9E4LY07 is the spoken twin and the only place subjective and objective language is explicitly required in production. AC9E4LY08 is handwriting, and it is the last one.

The spelling group is AC9E4LY09, AC9E4LY10 and AC9E4LY11, and the contraction from four codes to three is the story. AC9E4LY09 merges what Year 3 kept separate: phonological and morphological knowledge, applied together, to read and write multisyllabic words with more complex letter combinations, a variety of vowel sounds and known prefixes and suffixes. AC9E4LY10 adds double letters, spelling generalisations, morphological word families, common prefixes and suffixes, and word origins. AC9E4LY11 handles high-frequency words and homophones, and adds using context to identify the correct spelling.

Word origins is the genuinely new content. It arrives without ceremony inside AC9E4LY10 and it is the beginning of etymology as a spelling strategy, which is what makes the Year 5 and Year 6 specialist vocabulary codes possible. Five minutes on why science, scissors and scene share a spelling is worth more than a week of listing them as exceptions.

The three codes that decide Year 5

AC9E4LA06: a complex sentence is not a long sentence

The misconception: that complex means complicated, so a long sentence with several commas qualifies. AC9E4LA06 is structural: one independent clause and at least one dependent clause, joined by a subordinating conjunction to create a relationship such as time or causality. Length has nothing to do with it. Because it rained, we left is a complex sentence of five words.

What you will see: three shapes, needing different responses. The first is a compound sentence submitted as a complex one, because the child has been taught that joining words make sentences complex and and is a joining word. The second is the fragment: Because it was raining. written as a whole sentence, which is a child who has learned the subordinating conjunction and not the requirement for an independent clause to attach it to. The third is the one that looks like success: a page of correctly formed complex sentences all built with because, which meets the letter of the code and none of its point, since one conjunction gives you one relationship.

The fix: teach the relationship before the label, and teach AC9E4LA08 first. Start from circumstantial detail as a phrase (after the storm), then show the same meaning as a clause (after the storm passed), which makes subordination an upgrade of something the child can already do. Then use the flip test to check: a genuine dependent clause can move to the front or the back of the sentence and the sentence still works. We left because it rained and Because it rained, we left both stand; the compound we left and it rained does not survive the flip, which is how a child can tell the two apart without needing the terminology. Finally, ration because. Give four conjunctions a term, one relationship each: because for cause, although for contrast, while for simultaneity, after for sequence.

AC9E4LA04: connectives are not a word list

The misconception: that text connectives are transition words to sprinkle at the start of paragraphs, so the code is met by Firstly, Secondly and Finally. Read the full descriptor: temporal and conditional words, and topic word associations, used to sequence and connect ideas. The second half is doing at least as much work as the first, and it is almost never taught.

Topic word associations are the chain of related vocabulary that runs through a text and holds it together: volcano, eruption, magma, lava, crater. That chain is what makes consecutive paragraphs feel like one text. Connective words on top of a text with no chain are scaffolding bolted to a building that is not there.

What you will see: the deletion test gives you the diagnosis in thirty seconds. Cross out every firstly, next and finally in the child’s piece and read what is left. If it still holds together, the connectives were doing real work. If it falls apart into unrelated paragraphs, they were holding up a text that was never connected, and the problem is the topic word chain rather than the connectives. The other tell is a child whose every paragraph begins with a connective, which is the code being met as a formatting rule.

The fix: teach the chain first and with a highlighter. Take a well-written information text, highlight every word belonging to the topic, and let the child see the chain running down the page and the way the writer varies it rather than repeating one word. Then require a topic word list before writing, alongside the three-line paragraph plan from Year 3. Conditional connectives (if, unless, provided that) are worth a lesson of their own, because they are the half of this code that does the most for persuasive writing and the half that never appears in a Firstly-Secondly-Finally program.

AC9E4LA07 and AC9E4LA12: dialogue is two codes, not one

The misconception: that dialogue is a punctuation topic, so AC9E4LA12 is the lesson and AC9E4LA07 is background. AC9E4LA12 is the convention: quotation marks, and capitals, commas and boundary punctuation. AC9E4LA07 is the decision: whether to quote the speech directly or report it indirectly. Teaching the convention alone gives you perfectly punctuated dialogue that does nothing to the story.

What you will see: the ping-pong page. Two characters alternating for half a page, every line punctuated correctly, every tag said, and nothing happening. That is AC9E4LA12 met and AC9E4LA07 untouched, because the child has no reason to choose direct speech and so uses it for everything. The reverse error is reported speech written with quotation marks around it (She said that “she was tired”), which tells you the two forms have not been distinguished at all. A third tell sits in tense: He said “I am tired” converted to He said he is tired, with no backshift, which is AC9E4LA09 surfacing inside a punctuation task.

The fix: teach the conversion, not the marks. Give a line of direct speech and require the reported version, then the reverse. Converting forces all three codes at once: the punctuation has to change (AC9E4LA12), the pronouns have to change, and the tense usually has to shift back (AC9E4LA09). Nothing else in Year 4 exercises three codes in one thirty-second task. Then make the choice meaningful by giving the rule that direct speech is for the moments that matter: convert a page of ping-pong dialogue into two lines of direct speech and three sentences of reported summary, and let the child see the scene improve. That single revision teaches AC9E4LA07 better than any amount of explanation, and it connects straight to the plot tension work in AC9E4LE03.

What students need to arrive with

The prerequisites are all in the Year 3 English code set, and four of them carry the year.

• AC9E3LA04 (paragraphs grouping related information). AC9E4LA04 connects paragraphs to each other. This is the one that cannot be worked around: there is nothing to sequence if the ideas were never grouped, and a child producing arbitrary four-line chunks will appear to fail the connectives code when the real gap is a year older.
• AC9E3LA06 (the clause as a unit containing a subject and a verb that agree). AC9E4LA06 makes one clause dependent on another and never defines a clause. Without Year 3, Year 4 is subordinating an invisible unit.
• AC9E3LA08 (verbs anchored in time through tense). Reported speech requires moving a verb back in time on purpose. A child with tense drift will not manage a deliberate tense shift.
• AC9E3LY10 (base words, prefixes, suffixes and the generalisations for adding a suffix). AC9E4LY09 merges phonology and morphology and assumes the morphology half is available.

Check all four in February, and check AC9E3LA07 as well even though it has no Year 4 successor. It is the code that lets a child find the verb, and Year 4 grammar assumes it silently from the first week.

What this year sets up

• AC9E4LA06 becomes AC9E5LA05: the structure of a complex sentence as a main clause plus at least one dependent clause, and how writers use that structure for effect. Year 4 builds it, Year 5 uses it deliberately.
• AC9E4LA04 becomes AC9E5LA04, which is a much larger jump than the numbering suggests: cohesion through using the starting point of a sentence or paragraph to give prominence to the message and guide the reader. Year 4 connects ideas with words; Year 5 connects them with position.
• AC9E4LA08 becomes AC9E5LA06 (expanding noun groups for fuller description) and AC9E5LA09 (commas to indicate prepositional phrases). The phrase work splits into a meaning half and a punctuation half.
• Apostrophes return at AC9E5LA09, and they return at multiple possession. There is no Year 4 apostrophe code, so anything unfinished from AC9E3LA11 sits untouched for a year and then reappears at a higher bar.
• AC9E4LA11 becomes AC9E5LA08: vocabulary for greater precision of meaning, including specialist and technical terms, plus the history of words. The word origins clause inside AC9E4LY10 is what makes that possible.
• AC9E4LE04 becomes AC9E5LE04, which names figurative language for the first time: simile, metaphor and personification, plus sound devices. Year 4’s deliberate word play is the runway.
• AC9E4LY06 becomes AC9E5LY06, which adds text connectives, expanded noun groups, specialist vocabulary and dialogue punctuation to the same four-verb process. Dialogue punctuation being named again in Year 5 is the curriculum acknowledging that AC9E4LA12 usually does not stick the first time.
• AC9E4LY08 becomes nothing. There is no handwriting descriptor after Year 4 in the entire F–10 English curriculum.

A term-by-term order

1. Term 1: phrases before clauses. AC9E4LA08 first, as circumstantial detail added in phrases, because it is the semantic half of subordination and a child can do it immediately. Then AC9E4LA06 introduced as an upgrade of that phrase into a clause, with the flip test, and rationed to four conjunctions with one relationship each. AC9E4LY09 on multisyllabic words with phonology and morphology used together from Week 1. AC9E4LY08 handwriting daily and short, this term above all, because this is the last year the curriculum asks for it. AC9E4LY02 and AC9E4LA01 inside routines.
2. Term 2: connecting the paragraphs. AC9E4LA04 taught in two halves, the topic word chain first with a highlighter on someone else’s text, then temporal and conditional connectives on top, with the deletion test used as the check. AC9E4LY06 with complex sentences and linked ideas named as the writing targets on the same lesson line. AC9E4LA09 tense moved from consistency to effect. AC9E4LY10 spelling with word origins introduced as a strategy rather than as trivia. Add AC9E4LA03 and AC9E4LY03.
3. Term 3: dialogue, and tension. AC9E4LA07 and AC9E4LA12 taught together as conversion drills, direct to reported and back, thirty seconds each, several times a week. AC9E4LE03 on plot tension alongside them, so the dialogue has somewhere to matter, and AC9E4LE05 building a scene that uses both. AC9E4LA02 subjective and objective language introduced here, because reported speech is where the difference becomes concrete. Add AC9E4LE04 and AC9E4LY05 with the evaluation clause as a fixed post-reading question.
4. Term 4: publishing, images and precision. AC9E4LY06 taken through to publish with a real audience. AC9E4LY07 presentations, which is the only place subjective and objective language is required in production, so run it after Term 3. AC9E4LA10 framing, placement and salience on a single photograph, then a short film clip. AC9E4LA11 synonyms and antonyms taught with each word attached to the sentence it belongs in. AC9E4LY01 comparing texts from different times. AC9E4LY11 homophones with context as the disambiguator.

The non-obvious choice is putting AC9E4LA08 before AC9E4LA06 and giving it real teaching time. The adverbial and prepositional phrase code looks like terminology and gets treated as a week of labelling, and it is the fastest available route into the complex sentence, because it lets a child add when and where and why to a sentence before anyone uses the word subordinate. The second non-obvious choice is treating handwriting as a Term 1 priority in Year 4 rather than a habit. It is the last year the curriculum names it.

Six checks before Year 5

• “Write me one sentence about the weather using although.” A fragment (Although it was raining.) or a compound sentence with although swapped for but means AC9E4LA06 is a vocabulary rule rather than a structure. Reteach with the flip test, and check they can do it with a conjunction other than because.
• Cross out every connective in their last piece and read it back to them. If it falls apart, the topic word chain half of AC9E4LA04 was never taught. Reteach with the highlighter on a published text before asking for one of their own.
• “He said, ‘I am tired.’ Now tell me that without using his exact words.” No tense shift, or quotation marks kept on the reported version, means AC9E4LA07 and AC9E4LA12 have been taught as one punctuation rule. Reteach as conversion drills in both directions.
• Give them a paragraph of factual writing and ask which sentence is the writer’s opinion. Hesitation, or picking a sentence because it sounds strong, means AC9E4LA02 has not landed. Reteach by sorting sentences into two columns before asking them to write any.
• Watch them write for two minutes and look at the hand, not the page. A tight grip, frequent pauses mid-word, or visible effort means the automaticity clause of AC9E4LY08 has not been met, and this is the last year a descriptor asks for it. Reteach with short daily practice rather than long occasional sessions.
• Dictate disappointed and ask how they worked it out. The doubling in the middle is the AC9E4LY10 test, and the explanation is the AC9E4LY09 test: an answer built from dis plus appoint plus ed shows morphology in use, and sounding it out letter by letter shows it is not.

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. “Writing” tells a reviewer nothing; “AC9E4LA07, converting direct to reported speech in a narrative scene, 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. Victorian readers want the VC2 codes instead, and the differences between the two frameworks are larger in English than in maths; NSW readers should start with Stage 2 English, since Year 4 sits inside Stage 2 alongside Year 3 and eleven outcomes cover what these 28 descriptions do. The Year 3 foundation for all of this is the Year 3 English code set, and the companion guide to every Year 4 Maths code covers the other half of the year.

Year 4 is the year writing stops being about getting words down and starts being about controlling them, and control is the hardest thing to ask of a nine-year-old who does not care about the subject. Nobody builds plot tension into a story they are bored by. Using an interest as the way in costs nothing in curriculum terms, because AC9E4LA06 is met identically whether the complex sentence is about the water cycle or about a video game. Sprout Lessons builds an interactive lesson from any of these 28 codes, pitched at Year 4 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.

FAQ