The updated syllabus is now beginning to be taught to Year 12 students and we thought we would break down the ins and outs of what will be covered, what essays should focus on and what markers and looking to see.

Let’s start with the common module.

The first thing to notice is the change of name from Area of Study to Common Module – not much to talk about here except for the different way it is being addressed.

The common module focuses on the way that texts represent, highlight and communicate different ideas about human experiences. Taking this a step further, it positions students to consider why human behaviours are inconsistent, what motivates individuals and then suggest reasons to explain and justify the occurrence of these events occur by making reference to their texts. Students are asked to analyse how texts represent these ideas, drawing examples from both their prescribed texts and personal learning texts and compare and contrast how both sets of texts explore similar and differing views and suggest why these changes may occur.  

As always, students must understand and engage with the form, structure, grammatical and linguistic features to provide specific examples of the way that the texts portray the above mentioned ideas. It is important to for students to remember that they should be selective with their choices of textual evidence as it is an opportunity to showcase your analytical abilities. Often a poor choice of textual evidence will result in a weak argument as the evidence does not support the key idea.

In order to excel with this module, student should aim to reconcile all elements of the rubric and integrate their response to provide a synthesized essay. This can be achieved by providing reasons why certain human experiences are shared by individuals and suggest how and why the composers have sought to provide reasons to explain such characteristics.

This may seem slightly abstract but we assure you with some practice and understanding of the concepts, the ideas will naturally flow. Get in touch with us if you would like to see how we can be of assistance.