Year 5 English: Every Australian Curriculum Code, Explained

Year 5 English in the Australian Curriculum is 24 content descriptions, AC9E5LA01 through AC9E5LY10. Year 4 had 28. Four codes disappear, and which four they are tells you more about the year than any of the ones that remain.

Year 4 was the year everything got joined. Year 5 is the year everything gets justified. The headline code is AC9E5LA02, which asks students to move beyond making bare assertions by taking account of differing ideas or opinions and authoritative sources. That is the arrival of evidence, and it changes what a piece of writing is for. Alongside it, cohesion stops being a matter of connective words and becomes a matter of where in a sentence you put things (AC9E5LA04), and figurative language is named in the curriculum for the first time (AC9E5LE04). This is a working guide to all 24 descriptions: what each strand asks for, the three codes that decide Year 6, 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.

Assertion is no longer enough. AC9E5LA02 asks students to “understand how to move beyond making bare assertions by taking account of differing ideas or opinions and authoritative sources”. Year 4 asked students to tell subjective language from objective language, which is a sorting job done to somebody else’s text. Year 5 asks them to change what they write because of it. Two mechanisms are named, and they are different: acknowledging a competing view, and citing an authority. A Year 5 child who can do neither is writing the same persuasive text they wrote in Year 3, with longer words.

Cohesion moves from words to position. AC9E4LA04 was text connectives and topic word associations. AC9E5LA04 is “understand how texts can be made cohesive by using the starting point of a sentence or paragraph to give prominence to the message and to guide the reader through the text”. Nothing is added to the sentence. What changes is the order of what is already in it. This is the most abstract grammatical idea in primary English, it is not the same thing as a topic sentence, and it is the one most often skipped because it is hard to turn into a worksheet.

Figurative language arrives by name. AC9E5LE04 examines the effects of imagery, including simile, metaphor and personification, and sound devices in narratives, poetry and songs. The words simile, metaphor and personification do not appear anywhere in the English curriculum before this code. Year 4’s deliberate word play was the runway. The trap is that these three terms are the easiest thing in Year 5 to test and the hardest thing to teach, so the code very often gets met as vocabulary.

The deadline: AC9E5LA09 is the last apostrophe descriptor in the curriculum. Use commas to indicate prepositional phrases, and apostrophes where there is multiple possession. Apostrophes appear at AC9E3LA11 and then here, and nowhere else in English F–10. Year 4 had no apostrophe code at all, so unfinished Year 3 work has already sat untouched for twelve months, and this is the last time a descriptor will ask about it. After Year 5 the curriculum simply assumes it: AC9E6LA09 is commas only.

The year at a glance

Language dropped from twelve codes to nine and Literacy from eleven to ten. Nothing was compressed to make room: the content genuinely left.

Reading the codes, and what left

The pattern is AC9 + E + year + strand + number, so AC9E5LA04 is Year 5, Language, fourth description. LA is Language, LE is Literature, LY is Literacy.

Do not map a Year 4 program onto Year 5 by incrementing the year digit. Four Language codes have no Year 5 successor at all, and three of them matter.

• Tense is gone. AC9E4LA09 was past, present and future tense and its impact on meaning. There is no Year 5 tense code and no mention of tense inside AC9E5LY06. It returns at AC9E6LA06 as elaborated tenses, which is a considerably harder idea. Year 5 is a gap year for tense, and tense drift in extended writing will not be flagged by any descriptor.
• Quoted and reported speech is gone as a code. AC9E4LA07 has no successor. Dialogue punctuation survives only as a clause inside AC9E5LY06, which is the curriculum quietly admitting that AC9E4LA12 does not stick the first time.
• Navigation features are gone. AC9E4LA05 covered headlines, menus, links and layout in online texts. The nearest Year 5 relative is AC9E5LY04, which is a reading strategy code rather than a text-features one.
• Adverb groups become noun groups. AC9E4LA08 covered adverb groups, phrases and prepositional phrases for circumstantial detail. Year 5 splits it: AC9E5LA06 takes the meaning half and moves it to noun groups, and AC9E5LA09 takes the punctuation half as commas around prepositional phrases. Noun groups themselves were last named at AC9E2LA07, three years earlier, which is a long time for a Year 5 class to be expected to remember what one is.

Strand by strand

Language (AC9E5LA01 to AC9E5LA09)

Nine descriptions, in four groups.

The stance group is AC9E5LA01 and AC9E5LA02: language selected for social contexts to signal social roles and relationships, and moving beyond bare assertions. AC9E5LA02 gets full treatment below. AC9E5LA01 is worth more than it looks, because it is the code that makes register teachable: the same request written to a friend, a teacher and a council is three texts, and the difference between them is not politeness but role.

The text-structure group is AC9E5LA03 and AC9E5LA04: how spoken, written and multimodal texts use language features and are organised into characteristic stages and phases depending on purpose, and cohesion through the starting point of a sentence or paragraph. Note the addition of phases to Year 4’s stages. A stage is a large block with a job (orientation, complication, resolution); a phase is a move inside a stage. It is the vocabulary that lets a student say what is happening in the middle of a long section, and it is the reason AC9E5LA03 supports the analysis half of AC9E5LY03.

The grammar group is AC9E5LA05, AC9E5LA06 and AC9E5LA09: the complex sentence as a main clause plus at least one dependent clause and how writers use that structure for effect; expanding noun groups in a variety of ways to give a fuller description of a person, place, thing or idea; and commas for prepositional phrases plus apostrophes for multiple possession.

AC9E5LA06 is the partner code most planners miss. It reads like description practice and it is the engine behind three other codes. A precise noun group is how specialist vocabulary gets used in a sentence (AC9E5LA08), how a literary text builds an image before any simile is applied (AC9E5LE04), and what AC9E5LY06 means when it asks for expanded noun groups by name in the writing code. It is also the only place in Year 5 where the grammar and the description overlap: expanding the dog into the old greyhound from next door is a grammatical operation and a writing improvement at the same time, which is rare enough to be worth building a term around.

AC9E5LA09 is two unrelated punctuation jobs in one descriptor, and the apostrophe half deserves its own lessons. The misconception is durable and it is taught rather than careless: plural possession gets taught as a position (“the apostrophe goes after the s”), which works for every regular plural and fails on every irregular one, producing childrens’ and mens’. Teach it as a two-step question instead: write the owner, add the apostrophe, then add an s only if there is not one there already. And never teach it in the same fortnight as contractions, which share the mark and share nothing else. This is the last chance the curriculum gives you.

Vocabulary and images are AC9E5LA07 and AC9E5LA08: how the sequence of images in print, digital and film texts affects meaning, and how vocabulary expresses greater precision of meaning, including specialist and technical terms, plus the history of words. AC9E5LA07 is a genuine step from Year 4, which was about composition inside a single image; Year 5 is about order across several, which is the grammar of comics, storyboards and film. AC9E5LA08 picks up the word origins clause that appeared quietly inside AC9E4LY10 and makes etymology explicit.

Literature (AC9E5LE01 to AC9E5LE05)

Five descriptions, and the change from Year 4 is that literature acquires a metalanguage and a viewpoint.

AC9E5LE03 is the new idea: recognising that the point of view in a literary text influences how readers interpret and respond to events and characters. Year 4 asked how a writer built tension. Year 5 asks whose eyes the reader is looking through and what that does. It is the first code in the curriculum that treats a text as a partial account of something rather than as the account, and it is the direct ancestor of the bias work at AC9E6LA02.

AC9E5LE02 requires students to present an opinion on a literary text using specific terms about literary devices, text structures and language features, and to reflect on the viewpoints of others. The words specific terms are the requirement. Year 4 described effects; Year 5 expects the technical name attached. Read it next to AC9E5LA02, because the two codes are the same demand in two strands: an opinion that survives contact with someone else’s.

AC9E5LE04 supplies the terms, and it is treated in full below.

AC9E5LE05 is the strand’s output: creating and editing literary texts, experimenting with figurative language, storylines, characters and settings from texts students have experienced. Experimenting is the operative word and it is a lower bar than using well, deliberately: a Year 5 metaphor that does not quite land still meets the code, and marking it as a failure is the fastest way to produce students who only ever write literally.

AC9E5LE01 carries the First Nations requirement, extended this year to identifying aspects of texts that represent historical, social and cultural contexts, which is a shift from responding to a text towards reading it as evidence of a time and place.

Literacy (AC9E5LY01 to AC9E5LY10)

Ten descriptions, in three groups.

The comprehension and oral group is AC9E5LY01 to AC9E5LY05: describing the ways a text reflects the time and place it was created in; interaction skills including paraphrasing and questioning to clarify meaning, make connections to experience, and present and justify an opinion; explaining the characteristic features used in imaginative, informative and persuasive texts; navigating and reading texts for specific purposes using skimming, scanning and confirming; and comprehension strategies used to build literal and inferred meaning and to evaluate information and ideas.

AC9E5LY04 is the code nobody plans for. Skimming and scanning look like study skills rather than English, and the third verb is the one that makes it a comprehension code: confirming. Skim to find the likely place, scan for the specific word, then read properly to confirm you were right. Taught as the full three-step cycle it is the single most useful research habit a Year 5 student can own, and taught as the first two steps alone it produces confident students who answer from headings.

The production group is AC9E5LY06 and AC9E5LY07. AC9E5LY06 is the assessment vehicle for the year: plan, create, edit and publish written and multimodal texts across the three purposes, using visual features, text structure appropriate to topic and purpose, text connectives, expanded noun groups, specialist and technical vocabulary, and punctuation including dialogue punctuation. Count the codes named inside it: AC9E5LA04, AC9E5LA06 and AC9E5LA08 are all there, plus Year 4’s connectives and dialogue punctuation. AC9E5LY07 is the spoken twin, and it is the only Year 5 code that requires complex sentences by name, so the grammar work at AC9E5LA05 has its accountability in the oral code rather than the written one.

The spelling group is AC9E5LY08, AC9E5LY09 and AC9E5LY10: phonic, morphemic and vocabulary knowledge used to read and spell words that share common letter patterns but have different pronunciations; building and spelling new words from known words, base words, prefixes, suffixes, word origins, letter patterns and spelling generalisations; and exploring less common plurals and understanding how a suffix changes the meaning or grammatical form of a word.

That last clause in AC9E5LY10 is the new content and it is bigger than it looks. A suffix that changes grammatical form is derivational morphology: happy to happiness turns an adjective into a noun, agree to agreement turns a verb into one. This is what makes the specialist vocabulary of AC9E5LA08 learnable in families rather than one word at a time, and it is the beginning of the academic vocabulary that secondary school runs on.

The three codes that decide Year 6

AC9E5LA02: a bare assertion with a reason attached is still a bare assertion

The misconception: that the code is met by adding a because. It is not. The descriptor names two specific moves, taking account of differing ideas or opinions, and using authoritative sources, and a reason is neither of them. Dogs are better pets because they are friendly has a reason and no evidence, and it takes no account of anyone who disagrees. It is the same assertion with a subordinate clause.

What you will see: three shapes. The first is the reason-stuffed paragraph above, which is the most common and the hardest to argue with, because the child has done what they were told. The second is the fake authority: scientists say, studies show, everyone knows, with no source that could be checked. The third, and the one that reads as strength, is the child who acknowledges the other side and then does nothing with it: Some people think cats are better. But dogs are better. That is a concession with no rebuttal, and it is worse than no concession at all because it hands the argument away.

The fix: teach the two mechanisms separately and give each a sentence frame that forces the missing half. For sources, the frame is According to plus a name plus what they said, and the rule is that the name has to be something a reader could go and look at. Start with sources the class made: according to our survey of 24 students is an authoritative source, it is checkable, and it teaches the concept without a library. For differing opinions, the frame is three parts rather than two: some people say X, because Y, but Z. The but Z is the part children leave off, and requiring it turns a concession into an argument. Run both as thirty-second oral drills before any of it goes on paper, because the shape is what is being taught and writing it down slows the repetitions down to a quarter of the rate.

AC9E5LA04: cohesion is about what you put first, not what you add

The misconception: that this is topic sentences, so it is already covered. Topic sentences are about which sentence goes at the start of a paragraph. AC9E5LA04 is about what goes at the start of each sentence, and about what a reader does with that position. Whatever is at the front of a sentence is what the sentence is announcing itself to be about, and a paragraph in which every sentence starts with a different thing is a paragraph that keeps changing the subject even when the content is consistent.

What you will see: writing that is grammatically correct, fully connected with connectives, and still exhausting to read. Look at the first three or four words of every sentence in a paragraph and write them in a list. If the list has no pattern, that is the problem, and no amount of adding furthermore will fix it. The other tell is the opposite: every sentence starting with the same noun, which is cohesion achieved by repetition and is what Year 6 will ask for deliberately at AC9E6LA04, but at Year 5 usually means the student has one strategy.

The fix: teach it with the front-of-sentence list, on someone else’s writing first. Take two paragraphs on the same topic, one from a well-written information book and one from a student, list the first few words of each sentence in both, and put the lists side by side. The published one will show a chain: each sentence starts with something the previous sentence introduced. That chain is the entire code, and a Year 5 student can see it in one lesson when they cannot follow a definition of it in five.

Then teach the two moves that use it. First, sentence reordering: give a sentence with a prepositional phrase at the end (The volcano erupted after two hundred years of silence) and ask for the version that starts with the phrase, then ask which one belongs in which paragraph. Second, the paragraph-opening move: the first few words of a paragraph should pick up something from the end of the last one. Both are revision operations, so run them against AC9E5LY06 drafts rather than as standalone exercises, and pair the work with the Year 4 connectives code, since a student who never built a topic word chain has nothing to put at the front of the sentence.

AC9E5LE04: naming a simile is not examining its effect

The misconception: that the code is a vocabulary list, so it is met when a student can pick the simile out of a paragraph. Read the verb: examine the effects of imagery. The identification is the prerequisite, not the task, and it is the only part of this code that is easy to test, which is exactly why programs stop there.

What you will see: the definitional answer. Asked what the simile does, the student explains what a simile is: “it’s comparing the sea to glass using like”. That is the definition restated, and it earns marks in a lot of classrooms. The second tell is the effect stated in one adjective, usually descriptive or interesting, which is a placeholder for an answer rather than an answer. The third appears in their own writing: similes generated to satisfy a requirement, arriving three to a paragraph and comparing things to whatever is nearby. Sound devices, meanwhile, are usually untouched, because they are in the descriptor and never in the test.

The fix: run the substitution test, which converts effect from an opinion into an observation. Take the line, replace the image with a plain version, read both aloud, and ask what is lost. The sea was like glass against the sea was very flat: the plain version loses the stillness, the hardness and the sense that something could break. The student does not need to know the word connotation to notice that, and once they have noticed it twice they stop giving definitions as answers.

Then reverse the direction for their own writing. Do not ask for a simile. Ask for the feeling the moment should give a reader, then ask what else in the world gives that feeling, and let the comparison come out of the answer. That order produces one good image instead of three decorative ones, and it is the difference between AC9E5LE04 met and AC9E5LE04 performed. For sound devices, read aloud and always: alliteration and assonance are invisible on a page and obvious in the ear, and the whole code becomes reachable once the poetry is heard rather than annotated.

What students need to arrive with

The prerequisites are all in the Year 4 English code set, and four of them carry the year.

• AC9E4LA04 (text connectives and topic word associations). AC9E5LA04 works on where things go in a sentence, and there is nothing to position if the topic word chain was never built. The connectives half is a bonus; the chain half is the prerequisite.
• AC9E4LA06 (the complex sentence: one independent clause plus at least one dependent clause). AC9E5LA05 is the same structure used for effect. A student still producing fragments or compound sentences labelled as complex cannot be asked to deploy the structure deliberately.
• AC9E4LA08 (adverb groups, phrases and prepositional phrases). This splits two ways in Year 5, into noun groups at AC9E5LA06 and comma placement at AC9E5LA09. A student who cannot see a prepositional phrase as a unit will punctuate it at random.
• AC9E3LA11 (apostrophes for contractions and for singular and plural possession). Yes, Year 3: there is no Year 4 apostrophe code, so this is a two-year-old prerequisite and it is the one most likely to be missing. Check it in February, because AC9E5LA09 is the last chance.

Check AC9E2LA07 as well if noun groups look shaky. It is three years old and it is the only prior mention of the term in the curriculum.

What this year sets up

• AC9E5LA02 becomes AC9E6LA02: objective and subjective language, and identifying bias. Year 5 asks students to source their own claims; Year 6 asks them to notice when someone else has not.
• AC9E5LA04 becomes AC9E6LA04: cohesion created by the intentional use of repetition and of word associations. Year 6 turns the accidental sameness Year 5 warns about into a deliberate device, which only works if Year 5’s positional work landed first.
• AC9E5LA05 becomes AC9E6LA05: embedded clauses expanding the variety of complex sentences to elaborate, extend and explain. Embedding sits inside the noun group rather than hanging off the clause, so AC9E5LA06 is as much a prerequisite for it as AC9E5LA05 is.
• AC9E5LA06 becomes AC9E6LA06, which moves the same expansion work to verbs, elaborated tenses and adverb groups. Tense returns here, after a year off, and it returns harder.
• AC9E5LA08 becomes AC9E6LA08: vivid, emotive vocabulary including metaphors, similes, personification, idioms, imagery and hyperbole. Note that the Year 5 Literature content reappears in Year 6 as a Language code, which means figurative language is re-encountered as a matter of word choice rather than of literary effect.
• AC9E5LE03 becomes AC9E6LE01 and AC9E6LE03: responses drawn from historical, social or cultural contexts, and the characteristics that define an author’s individual style. Point of view is what makes style visible.
• Apostrophes become nothing. AC9E6LA09 is the comma for lists, for separating a dependent clause from an independent one, and in dialogue. There is no apostrophe descriptor after Year 5 anywhere in English F–10.

A term-by-term order

1. Term 1: noun groups, then the complex sentence for effect. AC9E5LA06 first and properly, three or four weeks of expanding and contracting noun groups, because it is the engine behind the vocabulary, literature and writing codes and because it was last named three years ago. Then AC9E5LA05, the complex sentence used deliberately, with the emphasis on choice rather than construction. AC9E5LY08 and AC9E5LY09 spelling from Week 1. AC9E5LY02 interaction skills and AC9E5LA01 register inside routines.
2. Term 2: cohesion by position, and precision. AC9E5LA04 taught with the front-of-sentence list on published writing before student writing, then as two revision moves: sentence reordering, and the paragraph opening that picks up the previous paragraph’s ending. AC9E5LY06 drafts as the vehicle, so the analysis is done on something the class wrote. AC9E5LA08 vocabulary for precision with the history of words attached, and AC9E5LY10 suffixes that change grammatical form taught in the same fortnight, because they are the same idea from two directions. Add AC9E5LA03 stages and phases and AC9E5LY03.
3. Term 3: evidence, and point of view. AC9E5LA02 as the term’s spine, the two mechanisms taught separately, with oral drills before written work and a class-generated source before an external one. AC9E5LE03 point of view alongside it, because a text with a viewpoint is the clearest possible demonstration of why a claim needs backing. AC9E5LY04 skimming, scanning and confirming, taught as a three-step cycle, since this is the term students will actually need to find something. AC9E5LY05 with the evaluation clause as a fixed post-reading question, and AC9E5LE02 requiring the technical term in every opinion.
4. Term 4: imagery, publishing and the last apostrophes. AC9E5LE04 with the substitution test, read aloud, and with the feeling-before-the-image order for their own writing. AC9E5LE05 creating and experimenting, marked for attempt rather than for polish. AC9E5LY06 taken through to publish with a real audience, and AC9E5LY07 presentations, which is where complex sentences are required by name. AC9E5LA07 image sequence, on a comic or a storyboard before a film clip. AC9E5LA09 given its own fortnight, apostrophes taught as the two-step question and never in the same lesson as contractions, because this is the last apostrophe descriptor in the curriculum. AC9E5LY01 context.

The non-obvious choice is spending Term 1 on noun groups. AC9E5LA06 reads like a description exercise and gets a week, and it is the code the rest of the year quietly depends on: it is named inside AC9E5LY06, it is how specialist vocabulary from AC9E5LA08 gets into a sentence, and it is what an image in AC9E5LE04 is built out of before any comparison is applied. The second non-obvious choice is holding AC9E5LA09 to Term 4 and giving it a fortnight rather than a lesson. It is two unrelated jobs in one descriptor, and the apostrophe half has had a year of silence behind it and nothing at all ahead.

Six checks before Year 6

• “Convince me that homework should be shorter, and use somebody else’s view in your answer.” A concession with no rebuttal (“some people disagree, but I think this”) or an uncheckable authority (“studies show”) means AC9E5LA02 has been met as a formula. Reteach the three-part frame with the but Z required, and use a source the class generated.
• Write down the first four words of every sentence in one of their paragraphs and show them the list. No pattern at all, or the same noun eight times, means AC9E5LA04 has not landed. Reteach with the side-by-side list against a published paragraph.
• “The sea was like glass. What does that do that the sea was very flat does not?” An answer that explains what a simile is means AC9E5LE04 is vocabulary. Reteach with the substitution test, read aloud, twice.
• “Expand the dog as far as you can without starting a new sentence.” Two adjectives and a stop means AC9E5LA06 is Year 2 noun groups. Reteach by expanding in named directions: which one, what kind, whose, from where.
• Dictate “the children’s coats” and “the girls’ coats”. Childrens’ means the after-the-s rule has been taught as a position rather than as a question, which is the multiple possession half of AC9E5LA09. Reteach as write the owner, add the apostrophe, add an s only if there is not one already. This is the last year a descriptor asks.
• “Find me the paragraph about migration in this book, and tell me how you found it.” Reading from page one, or answering from a heading without opening the section, means AC9E5LY04 is missing its third step. Reteach the cycle as skim, scan, confirm, and require the confirming sentence to be read aloud.

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. “Persuasive writing” tells a reviewer nothing; “AC9E5LA02, three-part concession frame with a class-generated source, 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, so start with Level 5 English in the Victorian Curriculum, where the same content is spread across 26 codes and editing has a descriptor of its own, and the differences between the two frameworks are larger in English than in maths. The Year 4 foundation for all of this is the Year 4 English code set, and the companion guide to every Year 5 Maths code covers the other half of the year.

Year 5 is the year a student is asked to defend what they wrote, and defending something is impossible if you did not want to say it in the first place. A ten-year-old will find a source for an argument they care about and will not find one for a topic handed to them. Using an interest as the way in costs nothing in curriculum terms, because AC9E5LA02 is met identically whether the claim being supported is about renewable energy or about which game console is better. Sprout Lessons builds an interactive lesson from any of these 24 codes, pitched at Year 5 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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