Year 10 English – Term 1 (WA Curriculum): The Power of Language - How Words Shape Society and Meaning

What this unit covers

In Term 1, Year 10 English in the WA Curriculum centres on the unit “The Power of Language - How Words Shape Society and Meaning”.

Students explore how language choices create meaning, reveal values, and can empower or disempower individuals and groups in society.

Lesson sequence (30 lessons)

The unit breaks down into the following lesson-by-lesson sequence — each title below is a teachable lesson, in order:

1. Introduction to Language Power: How Words Include and Exclude
2. Analysing Gendered Language in Professional Terms
3. Deconstructing Evaluative Language: What Our Word Choices Reveal
4. Age Descriptors and Hidden Values: Elder vs Geriatric
5. Text Structures in News Media: Identifying Purpose and Effect
6. Visual and Audio Features in Current Affairs Programs
7. Paragraph Structure for Cohesion: Moving Beyond Basic Patterns
8. Integrating Images and Text in Feature Articles
9. Sentence Variety: Using Coordinating Conjunctions for Style
10. Crafting Complex Sentences for Academic Writing
11. Understanding Syntax: How Word Order Creates Meaning
12. Building Logical Relations Through Subordinate Clauses
13. Visual Features in Multimodal Texts: Analysing Representations
14. Light, Dark and Symbolism in Television Drama
15. Expanding Academic Vocabulary for Precision
16. Technical Terms in Poetry Analysis: Enjambment and Caesura
17. Experimental Punctuation: Authors Breaking the Rules
18. Ellipses and Character Voice: Creating Uncertainty
19. Language That Empowers: Writing an Open Letter
20. Evaluating Implicit Values in Political Speeches
21. News Program Analysis: Structure, Language and Bias
22. Graphic Novels: How Text and Image Work Together
23. Advanced Sentence Structures for Effect
24. Syntax Analysis: Cause, Result and Condition in Complex Texts
25. Multimodal Representations: Colour, Font and Layout Choices
26. Building Academic Voice Through Precise Vocabulary
27. Punctuation for Emotion: Beyond Standard Rules
28. Language and Social Justice: Identifying Disempowering Terms
29. Creating Cohesive Arguments Through Varied Paragraph Structure
30. Synthesising Language Analysis Skills: Complete Text Evaluation

Curriculum codes in this unit

Content codes:

Reading the codes: WA codes (the ones starting with WA) pack the year level, learning area, strand and content number into one string, while the national Australian Curriculum v9 uses a different anatomy that starts with AC9 — same content family, different labels. Our complete WA Curriculum guide decodes both, character by character.

Planning notes for Term 1

WA terms run roughly 9–11 weeks, and in 2026 Term 1 runs from Monday 2 February to Thursday 2 April — 9 weeks for WA public schools. With 30 lessons in this unit, that leaves breathing room for assessment, moderation and the weeks that disappear to carnivals, camps and public holidays — plan the assessable work to land two to three weeks before the end of term rather than in the final week.