Year 6 English: Every Australian Curriculum Code, Explained

Year 6 English in the Australian Curriculum is 23 content descriptions, AC9E6LA01 through AC9E6LY09. It is the last year of primary English, and it behaves like it: two of the hardest grammatical ideas in the whole of F–10 arrive in the same year, and the last phonics descriptor in the curriculum expires at the end of it.

Year 5 was the year everything got justified. Year 6 is the year the student turns around and looks at the person who wrote the text. AC9E6LA02 asks them to identify bias, which is the first code in English that treats a text as something with an interest in the reader rather than as a source of information. Underneath that, the grammar gets genuinely hard: embedded clauses at AC9E6LA05, elaborated tenses at AC9E6LA06 after a year in which tense was not mentioned at all, and a cohesion code at AC9E6LA04 that asks for exactly the thing five years of teaching have told students to avoid. This is a working guide to all 23 descriptions: what each strand asks for, the three codes that decide Year 7, a term-by-term order, and six checks worth running before the December report.

What changes this year

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

Bias arrives. AC9E6LA02 asks students to “understand the uses of objective and subjective language, and identify bias”. Year 4 asked them to tell objective language from subjective language, which is a sorting job. Year 5 asked them to support their own claims properly. Year 6 asks them to notice when someone else has not, and bias is a word the curriculum has never used before this code. It is not a bigger version of subjective language. Subjective language is visible in a sentence; bias is a pattern across a whole text, and it is usually made of what is missing.

Cohesion asks for repetition on purpose. AC9E5LA04 was about where in a sentence you put things. AC9E6LA04 is “understand that cohesion can be created by the intentional use of repetition, and the use of word associations”. That is a direct reversal of the advice most students have been given since Year 2, which is to find another word for it. The code is right and the earlier advice was a simplification, but the collision is real and it has to be taught rather than assumed.

The grammar gets hard in two places at once. AC9E6LA05 introduces embedded clauses, which sit inside a noun group rather than hanging off the main clause, and which are the most difficult structure named anywhere in primary English. AC9E6LA06 brings tense back after a year of complete silence, and brings it back as elaborated tenses: the perfect and continuous forms, not the past, present and future of Year 4. Both arrive in the same year and both depend on the same prerequisite, which is the expanded noun group and verb group work of Year 5.

The deadline: AC9E6LY08 is the last phonics descriptor in the curriculum. Use phonic knowledge of common and less common grapheme–phoneme relationships to read and write increasingly complex words. There is no phonics content description anywhere in English after Year 6. Year 7 has a single spelling code, AC9E7LY08, and it is about rules and word origins. Year 6 also has the last pair of spelling codes: two here, one from Year 7 onward. Anything a student still cannot decode in December of Year 6 becomes an intervention rather than a lesson.

The year at a glance

Literacy drops from ten codes to nine. Language and Literature are unchanged in size, which makes Year 6 the smallest English year in primary and the least useful place to judge a year by its code count.

Reading the codes, and what left

The pattern is AC9 + E + year + strand + number, so AC9E6LA05 is Year 6, Language, fifth description. LA is Language, LE is Literature, LY is Literacy.

Three Year 5 codes have no direct Year 6 successor, and two of them matter.

• Derivational morphology loses its own code. AC9E5LY10 covered less common plurals and how a suffix changes the meaning or grammatical form of a word. There is no Year 6 equivalent. The work is folded into AC9E6LY09 alongside Latin and Greek roots, which is a harder frame for the same idea and a much better one, but it means the suffix work will be skipped by any program that reads AC9E6LY09 as a word-origins code.
• Point of view disappears as a named idea. AC9E5LE03 was about how point of view influences a reader’s interpretation. AC9E6LE03 replaces it with an author’s individual style. They are related, and they are not the same: style is what a writer does repeatedly, point of view is whose eyes you are behind. Perspective returns by name at AC9E7LA07, so Year 6 is the gap year for it, and AC9E6LA02 is the code doing the closest work.
• Skimming and scanning stop being named. AC9E5LY04 named skimming, scanning and confirming. AC9E6LY04 is about selecting and navigating texts while evaluating structural features such as a table of contents, glossary, chapters, headings and subheadings. The Year 6 version is a judgement code rather than a technique code: not how do I find it, but is this book organised in a way that will let me.

One code also changes subject entirely. AC9E5LA07 was the sequence of images in print, digital and film texts, which is the grammar of comics and storyboards. AC9E6LA07 is figures, tables, diagrams, maps and graphs. That is a jump from narrative visuals to information graphics, and it is the one English code in the year that reads like a numeracy descriptor. It pairs with the maths data strand rather than with anything else in English, and it is routinely met by nobody because it does not look like either subject’s job.

Strand by strand

Language (AC9E6LA01 to AC9E6LA09)

Nine descriptions, in four groups.

The stance group is AC9E6LA01 and AC9E6LA02: how language varies as levels of formality and social distance increase, and objective and subjective language plus bias. AC9E6LA02 gets full treatment below. AC9E6LA01 adds social distance to Year 5’s social roles, and the addition is worth naming for students, because distance and formality are not the same variable: a note to a much-loved grandparent is close and formal, an email to a classmate you have never met is distant and casual.

The text-structure group is AC9E6LA03 and AC9E6LA04: how texts across the curriculum are organised into characteristic stages and phases, and how authors adapt those structures, plus cohesion through intentional repetition. The across-the-curriculum framing in AC9E6LA03 is new and it is a licence rather than a burden: the science report, the history explanation and the maths problem are all English texts with analysable structures, and this is the code that says so. The second clause matters more: recognising how authors adapt text structures. Year 5 taught the shapes. Year 6 teaches that the shapes get bent, which is what stops a student marking every real text as wrong for failing to match a template.

The grammar group is AC9E6LA05, AC9E6LA06 and AC9E6LA09: embedded clauses expanding the variety of complex sentences, verbs and elaborated tenses and adverb groups, and commas.

AC9E6LA06 is the code the year is most likely to skip. Tense was last mentioned at AC9E4LA09, two years earlier, as past, present and future. It returns as elaborated tenses, which means the perfect and continuous forms: had been walking, will have finished, has been trying. Those forms carry time relationships that simple tenses cannot express, and they are the reason a Year 6 recount can say that one thing had already happened when another one started. The code also names careful verb choice and adverb groups, so it is the verb-side twin of Year 5’s noun group work at AC9E5LA06, and it is the prerequisite for the tense consistency Year 7 asks for at AC9E7LA06. Skipping it means arriving in Year 7 at a code about consistency of tense without ever having met most of the tenses.

AC9E6LA09 is commas only. Note what is not in it: apostrophes. AC9E5LA09 was the last apostrophe descriptor in English F–10, and the full argument for treating it as a deadline is in our guide to the Year 5 English code set. The Year 6 comma job worth planning is the second one, separating a dependent clause from an independent clause, because that is AC9E6LA05 wearing a punctuation hat and the two should be taught in the same fortnight.

Vocabulary and visuals are AC9E6LA07 and AC9E6LA08. AC9E6LA08 moves figurative language out of Literature and into Language: identifying authors’ use of vivid, emotive vocabulary including metaphor, simile, personification, idiom, imagery and hyperbole. Year 5 met those terms at AC9E5LE04 as literary effect. Year 6 meets them again as word choice, and the word emotive is the hinge that connects them to bias at AC9E6LA02. Read the two codes together and figurative language stops being decoration and becomes the mechanism by which a text works on a reader.

Literature (AC9E6LE01 to AC9E6LE05)

Five descriptions, and the change from Year 5 is that literature becomes comparative.

AC9E6LE02 asks students to identify similarities and differences in literary texts on similar topics, themes or plots. That requires two texts, which sounds obvious and is the single commonest reason this code goes unmet: a program built around one class novel a term has nothing to compare. Pair a novel with a picture book, a poem, a film or a myth on the same plot shape and the code is met almost incidentally.

AC9E6LE03 is the new idea: identifying and explaining the characteristics that define an author’s individual style. Style is a pattern, so it also needs more than one text, but this time by the same writer. It is the most enjoyable code in the year and the easiest to make real, because students recognise a voice long before they can describe one.

AC9E6LE04 narrows Year 5’s sound and imagery work to poetry specifically. AC9E6LE05 is the strand’s output: creating and editing literary texts that adapt plot structure, characters, settings or ideas from texts students have experienced, experimenting with literary devices. Adapt is a step up from Year 5’s experimenting, and it is what makes the comparison work at AC9E6LE02 pay off: a student who has seen the same plot in two forms can move one deliberately. AC9E6LE01 carries the First Nations requirement and, at Year 6, asks for responses drawn from historical, social or cultural contexts rather than only identification of them.

Literacy (AC9E6LY01 to AC9E6LY09)

Nine descriptions, in three groups.

The comprehension and oral group is AC9E6LY01 to AC9E6LY05: examining texts including media texts that represent ideas and events and identifying how they reflect their context; interaction skills and awareness of formality when paraphrasing, questioning, clarifying and interrogating ideas, developing and supporting arguments, and sharing and evaluating information and opinions; analysing how text structures and language features work together to meet a purpose and to engage and influence audiences; selecting, navigating and reading texts while evaluating structural features; and comprehension strategies used to build literal and inferred meaning and to connect and compare content from a variety of sources.

Two words carry this group. Interrogating in AC9E6LY02 is the oral half of AC9E6LA02: asking a text or a speaker the questions that expose what they are doing. And influence audiences in AC9E6LY03 is the point at which analysis stops being about whether a text is clear and starts being about what it wants. Both are the same year-long argument arriving in a different strand.

The production group is AC9E6LY06 and AC9E6LY07. AC9E6LY06 is the assessment vehicle for the year: plan, create, edit and publish written and multimodal texts across the three purposes, using paragraphs, a variety of complex sentences, expanded verb groups, tense, topic-specific and vivid vocabulary, punctuation, spelling and visual features. Count what is named inside it: expanded verb groups and tense from AC9E6LA06, a variety of complex sentences from AC9E6LA05, vivid vocabulary from AC9E6LA08. The Language strand is not separate work, it is the specification for this code. AC9E6LY07 is the spoken twin, and it is the one that asks for ideas organised to develop a theme, which is a longer arc than Year 5’s sequenced ideas.

The spelling group is AC9E6LY08 and AC9E6LY09: phonic knowledge of common and less common grapheme–phoneme relationships used to read and write increasingly complex words, and using known words, word origins including some Latin and Greek roots, base words, prefixes, suffixes, letter patterns and spelling generalisations to spell new words including technical ones.

AC9E6LY08 is the last phonics code in the curriculum, and AC9E6LY09 is where the year’s vocabulary work actually lives. Latin and Greek roots are what make technical vocabulary learnable in families rather than one word at a time, and the payoff is not in English at all: it is in the science, geography and history vocabulary a Year 7 student meets at four times the Year 6 rate. Teach the twenty highest-yield roots and the return is measured in hundreds of words.

The three codes that decide Year 7

AC9E6LA02: bias is a pattern, not a word

The misconception: that bias is strong or emotional language, so a text is biased when it contains words like disgraceful or wonderful, and neutral when it does not. That is subjective language, which the descriptor names separately and which Year 4 already covered. Bias is what a text has selected: which facts are in, which are out, who gets quoted, what order things are in, and what is presented as background rather than as a claim. A perfectly calm, entirely factual text can be heavily biased, and those are the ones worth teaching on.

What you will see: three shapes. The first is the highlighter response, where the student marks every adjective and calls the job done. The second is biased used as a synonym for wrong or unfair, so the finding of bias ends the analysis instead of starting it: if the text is biased there is nothing more to say about it. The third, and the one that matters most, is the student who can find bias in an advertisement and cannot find it in a textbook, a news report or their own writing, because they have learned bias as a genre marker rather than as a property of texts.

The fix: teach bias as three questions asked of the text rather than as a quality found in it. Who is speaking here and who is not. What would somebody who disagreed say, and is any of it in this text. What is being treated as obvious. The second question is the engine, because it makes absence visible, and absence is where bias actually lives. Then run the pairing that makes it undeniable: two reports of the same event from different sources, read for what each one leaves out rather than for what each one says. Two accounts of the same playground incident written by the two children involved works just as well and costs nothing. Finish by turning the analysis on their own writing, since the persuasive work of Year 5 at AC9E5LA02 produced texts that are, correctly, biased, and a student who can say why their own piece is one-sided has understood the code rather than learned to accuse other people of it.

AC9E6LA05: an embedded clause is not just another complex sentence

The misconception: that this is Year 5’s complex sentence again, so the code is met by any sentence with a subordinate clause in it. AC9E5LA05 was a main clause plus a dependent clause, which is a clause hanging off the sentence, usually at the front or the back and usually introduced by because, when or although. An embedded clause goes inside a noun group and describes the noun: the dog that had been barking all night finally slept. Take the embedded clause out and the dog finally slept is still a complete sentence with the same structure. That is the whole difference, and it is a structural difference rather than a stylistic one.

What you will see: more becauses. Asked for a sentence with an embedded clause, students produce longer complex sentences of the kind they already write, because the instruction sounded like a request for more length. The second tell is punctuation: an embedded clause is either bracketed by a pair of commas or by none at all, and students who have not seen the structure put a single comma in the middle of a noun group and cut it in half. The third is the reverse failure, a student who can identify embedded clauses in a text and never writes one, which is the usual outcome of teaching the structure through underlining exercises.

The fix: teach it as noun group expansion, not as sentence construction, which connects it directly to Year 5’s AC9E5LA06 and makes it a continuation rather than a new idea. Start with a bare noun group and expand it in stages: the dog, then the old dog, then the old dog from next door, then the old dog that had been barking all night. The last step is the embedded clause, and the student has just built one without meeting a definition. Then run the deletion test in both directions, because it is the test that tells the two clause types apart: remove the clause and ask whether the sentence still stands (embedded) or collapses (dependent, hanging off the main clause). Teach the comma pair in the same fortnight, since AC9E6LA09 is asking for exactly this punctuation job. And require one in a piece of writing rather than in an exercise, because the purpose of the structure is to say more about a thing without starting a new sentence, and that purpose is invisible outside a real paragraph.

AC9E6LA04: the code that contradicts five years of advice

The misconception: not the students’, this time. Students have been told since Year 2 not to repeat the same word, to use a thesaurus, to find another way to say it. AC9E6LA04 asks for cohesion created by the intentional use of repetition, and the two instructions look like a straight contradiction. They are not, but the reconciliation has to be taught explicitly, because the students who follow instructions best will resist this code the hardest.

What you will see: elegant variation, which is the technical name for the problem. A paragraph about frogs in which the frogs become the amphibians, then these creatures, then the green hoppers, and a reader who is no longer certain whether all four are the same animal. Cohesion has been destroyed in the name of vocabulary, and the child has done exactly what they were taught. The second tell is a text with no repeated words and no word associations either, where every sentence introduces a new lexical field, which reads as a list of facts about unrelated things.

The fix: give the rule its real form, which is short. Repeat the noun that carries the topic; vary everything else. The topic noun is the thread the reader follows, and swapping it out drops the thread. Verbs, adjectives and sentence openings are where the variety belongs. Demonstrate it by taking a well-written information paragraph, counting how many times the topic noun appears, and putting that number on the board, because it is always higher than students expect. Then teach the second half of the code, word associations, as the legitimate alternative to synonym-swapping: frogs, tadpoles, spawn, pond, croak are not synonyms and they hold a paragraph together more strongly than any of them would, because they build a field rather than a chain of substitutions. This code is also the deliberate version of the accidental sameness Year 5 warned about at AC9E5LA04, so teach the two together: position tells the reader what a sentence is about, repetition tells them it is still about the same thing.

What students need to arrive with

The prerequisites are all in the Year 5 English code set, and four of them carry the year.

• AC9E5LA06 (expanding noun groups). This is the prerequisite for AC9E6LA05, not AC9E5LA05, because an embedded clause is a noun group expansion. A student who cannot expand a noun group in named directions has nothing to embed a clause into.
• AC9E5LA05 (the complex sentence used for effect). AC9E6LA05 expands the variety of complex sentences, which assumes one kind is already reliable.
• AC9E5LA04 (cohesion through the starting point of a sentence). AC9E6LA04 adds the second mechanism. A student who never built the positional habit will hear “intentional repetition” as permission rather than as technique.
• AC9E5LA02 (moving beyond bare assertions using differing opinions and authoritative sources). Bias at AC9E6LA02 is this code turned around and pointed at somebody else’s text. A student who has never had to support a claim has no standard to notice a missing one against.
• AC9E4LA09 (past, present and future tense). Yes, Year 4: there is no Year 5 tense code, so this is a two-year-old prerequisite and it is the one most likely to have faded. Check it in February, because AC9E6LA06 goes straight to the perfect and continuous forms.

What this year sets up

Year 7 is 24 codes and the Literature strand grows from five to seven, which is the largest structural change in secondary English.

• AC9E6LA02 becomes AC9E7LA02: recognising the language used to evaluate texts, and how an evaluation can be substantiated by reference to the text and to other sources. Year 6 notices bias; Year 7 has to prove a judgement.
• AC9E6LA04 becomes AC9E7LA04, and cohesion jumps scale again, from within-text devices to whole-text signposting: overviews, opening paragraphs and concluding paragraphs. Three years, three levels: sentence position, lexical repetition, document architecture.
• AC9E6LA05 becomes AC9E7LA05, complex and compound-complex sentences used to elaborate, extend and explain. Embedded clauses themselves do not return by name until AC9E8LA05, so Year 6 is the only place in primary or early secondary where the structure is taught directly.
• AC9E6LA06 becomes AC9E7LA06: consistency of tense through verbs and verb groups. Year 6 supplies the tenses, Year 7 polices them. A Year 6 program that skipped elaborated tenses leaves a Year 7 student being marked for consistency in forms they were never taught.
• AC9E6LA07 becomes AC9E7LA07: vectors, angle and social distance in visual texts, used to create a perspective. Note that perspective returns here as a visual idea, two years after point of view left at AC9E5LE03.
• AC9E6LY08 becomes nothing. AC9E7LY08 is a single spelling code about rules and word origins. Year 6 is the last year with two spelling descriptions and the last with any phonics content at all.

A term-by-term order

1. Term 1: verbs, tenses and verb groups. AC9E6LA06 first and properly, three or four weeks, because tense has had a two-year gap and because it is the verb-side twin of last year’s noun group work. Teach the elaborated forms through time relationships in recounts rather than through conjugation tables. AC9E6LY08 and AC9E6LY09 spelling from Week 1, with the Latin and Greek roots block started early so it has all year to compound. AC9E6LY02 interaction skills and AC9E6LA01 formality and social distance inside routines.
2. Term 2: embedded clauses and deliberate repetition. AC9E6LA05 taught as noun group expansion, with the deletion test used to separate embedded from dependent clauses, and AC9E6LA09 commas taught in the same fortnight because they are the same job. Then AC9E6LA04, opened by naming the contradiction with earlier advice and resolved as repeat the topic noun, vary everything else, with the word associations half taught as fields rather than synonyms. Run both against AC9E6LY06 drafts rather than as exercises. Add AC9E6LA03 stages, phases and adaptation, using texts from science and history to earn the across-the-curriculum clause.
3. Term 3: bias. AC9E6LA02 as the term’s spine, taught as the three questions and run on paired accounts of the same event before anything published. AC9E6LY01 media texts and the context they were made in alongside it, and AC9E6LA08 vivid and emotive vocabulary in the same weeks, because emotive word choice is the mechanism the bias analysis keeps finding. AC9E6LY03 analysing how structures and features work together to influence an audience, and AC9E6LY04 evaluating a text’s structural features before committing to reading it. Turn the analysis on their own persuasive writing at the end of the term.
4. Term 4: literature, and publishing. AC9E6LE02 and AC9E6LE03 together, since both need more than one text: a pair on the same plot for comparison, a pair by the same author for style. AC9E6LE04 sound and imagery in poetry, read aloud. AC9E6LE05 adapting a studied text deliberately, which is the payoff for the comparison work. AC9E6LA07 figures, tables, diagrams, maps and graphs, taught on the class’s own science or geography material rather than on an English text. AC9E6LY06 taken through to publish and AC9E6LY07 presentations organised around a theme. AC9E6LY05 connecting and comparing content across sources as the research habit for all of it.

The non-obvious choice is spending Term 1 on verbs. AC9E6LA06 reads like revision and it is the code with the longest gap behind it in the whole year, and everything in Term 2 and Term 4 is built on verb groups: the embedded clause work needs a stable main clause to embed into, and AC9E6LY06 names expanded verb groups and tense by name. The second non-obvious choice is holding bias to Term 3 rather than opening the year with it. Bias is the most interesting code in Year 6 and it needs the vocabulary work of AC9E6LA08 and the structure work of AC9E6LA03 underneath it, or it collapses into highlighting adjectives.

Six checks before Year 7

• Give them a calm, factual, one-sided report and ask whether it is biased. “No, there are no opinion words” means AC9E6LA02 has been met as subjective language. Reteach with the three questions, and with the second one first: what would somebody who disagreed say, and is any of it here.
• “Write me a sentence about a dog with an embedded clause in it.” A sentence with because in it means AC9E6LA05 has been met as a complex sentence. Reteach as noun group expansion and confirm with the deletion test.
• Count how many times the topic noun appears in one of their information paragraphs. Once, with three synonyms after it, means AC9E6LA04 has lost to five years of thesaurus advice. Reteach as repeat the noun, vary everything else, with a published paragraph counted alongside.
• “Tell me what had already happened before the story started.” An answer entirely in simple past means the elaborated forms of AC9E6LA06 are missing. Reteach through time relationships in a recount rather than through named tenses.
• Hand them a graph from their science book and ask what it tells them that the paragraph does not. A reading of the numbers with no comparison, or “it shows the results”, means AC9E6LA07 has not been taught by either subject. Reteach on the class’s own data.
• “What does bio mean, and give me four words that use it.” One word or none means AC9E6LY09 has been met as spelling generalisations without the word origins half. Reteach as a roots block, and prioritise it, because Year 7 subject vocabulary arrives at several times the Year 6 rate.

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 text analysis” tells a reviewer nothing; “AC9E6LA02, paired reports of the same event, absence analysis, 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 6 English in the Victorian Curriculum, where the same content is spread across 25 codes, and NSW readers want the nine Stage 3 English outcomes, which cover Years 5 and 6 together. The Year 5 foundation for all of this is the Year 5 English code set, and the companion guide to every Year 6 Maths code covers the other half of the year.

Year 6 is the year a student learns that texts are written by people who want something, and the fastest way to make that land is a text about something they already have opinions on. An eleven-year-old will interrogate a review of a game they play and will nod politely at a report about a topic handed to them. Using an interest as the way in costs nothing in curriculum terms, because AC9E6LA02 is met identically whether the biased text is about a mining project or about a football transfer. Sprout Lessons builds an interactive lesson from any of these 23 codes, pitched at Year 6 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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