Complementing the year by year description of the curriculum, this advice describes the nature of learners and the curriculum across four year-groupings:

• Pre-primary – Year 2: typically students from 5 to 8 years of age
• Years 3–6: typically students from 8 to 12 years of age
• Years 7–10: typically students from 12 to 15 years of age
• Senior secondary years: typically students from 15 to 18 years of age

Pre-primary – Year 2

Students bring with them to school a wide range of experiences with language and texts. These experiences are included in the curriculum as valid ways of communicating and as rich resources for further learning about language, literature and literacy. From Pre-primary to Year 2, students engage with purposeful listening, reading, viewing, speaking and writing activities for different purposes and contexts.

The curriculum in these years aims to extend the abilities of students prior to school learning and to provide the Pre-primary needed for continued learning. The study of English from Pre-primary to Year 2 develops students' skills and disposition to expand their knowledge of language as well as strategies to assist that growth. It aims to do this through pleasurable and varied experiences of literature and through the beginnings of a repertoire of activities involving listening, viewing, reading, speaking and writing.

Years 3–6

Students practise, consolidate and extend what they have learned. They develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of grammar and language, and are increasingly able to articulate this knowledge. Gradually, more complex punctuation, clause and sentence structures, and textual purposes and patterns are introduced. This deeper understanding includes more explicit metalanguage, as students learn to classify words, sentence structures and texts. To consolidate both 'learning to read and write' and 'reading and writing to learn', students explore the language of different types of texts, including visual texts, advertising, digital/online and media texts.

Years 7–10

Students continue to practise, consolidate and extend what they have learned from previous years. They also extend their understanding of how language works, and learn to transfer this knowledge to different contexts. To achieve this, students develop an understanding of the requirements of different types of texts; they are introduced to increasingly sophisticated analyses of various kinds of literary, popular culture, and everyday texts, and they are given opportunities to engage with the technical aspects of texts, including those of their own choosing – and to explain why they made that choice.

The notion of valuing certain texts as 'literature' is introduced. Students learn how such texts can be discussed and analysed in relation to themes, ideas and historical and cultural contexts.

Students engage with a variety of genres and modes. They re-enact, represent and describe texts in order to display their understanding of narrative, theme, purpose, context and argument and to defend their ideas in written and oral modes. Students are given further opportunities to create increasingly sophisticated and multimodal texts in groups and individually.

Senior secondary years

The Western Australian Curriculum: English in the senior secondary years allows students to use, consolidate and expand on what they have learned, and provides a range of choices from more specialised courses to meet students' needs and interests. The three strands of Language, Literature and Literacy also underpin the senior secondary English courses.