English

This unit covers the Oral Communication strand of English, Grade 10, Academic (ENG2D), from The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 9 and 10: English (2007). It teaches every specific expectation in the strand's three parts:

• 1. Listening to Understand (1.1 to 1.9): setting a purpose and goal for listening, active listening in discussions, reading circles and guest talks, comprehension strategies and Cornell notes for complex oral texts, interpreting with evidence from words, voice and visuals, extending understanding through connections and drama, analysing how oral texts work, listening critically for perspective, bias, values, identity and power, and evaluating presentation strategies.
• 2. Speaking to Communicate (2.1 to 2.7): speaking for different purposes and audiences, interpersonal strategies and negotiating consensus with cultural sensitivity, clear and coherent structure (including Monroe's motivated sequence), diction and stylistic devices, vocal strategies and non-verbal cues, and audio-visual aids.
• 3. Reflecting on Oral Communication Skills and Strategies (3.1 and 3.2): metacognition, evidence-based goals, and how reading, writing, viewing and representing strengthen oral communication.

Each lesson starts from what was taught in Grade 9 English (ENL1W), teaches the Grade 10 skill with worked examples, diagrams and a hands-on activity, and ends with practice at three levels and a quiz. Many examples use Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a play often studied in Grade 10, and the skills connect directly to the Reading, Writing and Media Studies units of this course and to oral work in Grade 11 English.

This unit covers the Reading and Literature Studies strand of ENG2D (English, Grade 10, Academic), all four overall expectations and every specific expectation from 1.1 to 4.2.

You will read short stories, poems from the 1600s to the 1900s (Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Dickinson, E. Pauline Johnson, Robert Frost and John McCrae), informational articles, news reports, ads and graphic texts, and a complete Shakespeare tragedy, Macbeth, which is in the public domain and free to read online.

• Reading for Meaning (1): purposes and strategies, main ideas, inferences, connections, analysis, evaluation and critical literacy.
• Understanding Form and Style (2): text forms such as the sonnet, rondeau and opinion piece; verse and prose in Shakespeare; text features; and elements of style including imagery, symbol, allusion and sentence variety.
• Reading With Fluency (3): idioms, euphemisms, dialect, word parts, foreign phrases, precise words and etymology.
• Reflecting on Skills and Strategies (4): metacognition and how listening, speaking, writing, viewing and representing make you a stronger reader.

These skills prepare you for the reading section of the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (usually written in Grade 10) and for Grade 11 English (ENG3U), where you will analyse longer and more complex literature.

This unit teaches the whole Writing strand of Grade 10 Academic English (ENG2D) as a writing process you can use in any course.

Plan: decode writing tasks (topic, purpose, audience, form), generate and focus ideas, research and select reliable information, integrate and cite sources in MLA style, and organize and review your content so it is relevant, accurate and complete.

Draft: write a full literary essay with an analytical thesis, close-reading paragraphs and an alternative reading; a persuasive opinion essay like the one on the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT), which most students write in Grade 10; and other forms, including news reports, reviews, business letters, short fiction and graphic texts.

Craft and revise: develop a distinctive voice, choose precise and evocative diction, build your vocabulary, vary your sentences and transitions, examine how your own beliefs, values and experiences show in your writing, and revise from the big picture down.

Edit, publish and reflect: use grammar, punctuation and Canadian spelling correctly, proofread in passes, present finished work in MLA format and other layouts, and reflect on your strategies and growth in a writing portfolio.

Remember from Grade 9: in the Grade 9 English (ENL1W) Composition unit you learned the rhetorical situation, research and MLA citation, literary analysis with PEEL paragraphs, argumentative essays, revision with ARMS and publishing. Grade 10 builds on all of it with more demanding prompts, deeper analysis and more independent revision. Model texts, people and sources in examples were written for this site and are invented unless stated. Facts about the OSSLT come from EQAO's published materials (2026); check with your school for current details.

Curriculum expectations covered: Writing 1.1 to 1.5, 2.1 to 2.7, 3.1 to 3.7 and 4.1 to 4.3 (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 9 and 10: English, 2007 (revised), English, Grade 10, Academic (ENG2D), Writing strand). Oral Communication, Reading and Literature Studies, and Media Studies are taught in their own units.

In this unit you will become a sharper reader and a more deliberate creator of media. You will start with the key concepts of media literacy (beginning with all media are constructions) and the media triangle of text, audience and production. You will explain how media texts are built to suit purposes and audiences, interpret overt and implied messages using denotation and connotation, and evaluate whether texts achieve their purpose using ethos, pathos, logos and kairos. You will explain why the same text prompts different responses (preferred, negotiated and oppositional readings), identify perspectives and biases and comment on questions of beliefs, values, identity and power, and look behind the scenes at how production, marketing and distribution shape the media industry, including the CRTC's Canadian-content rules and the MAPL system.

Next you will compare media forms by their general and specific characteristics, decode technical, symbolic and written codes (camera movement, mise-en-scène, editing, diegetic sound), analyze persuasive techniques from bandwagon to weasel words and dark patterns, and study news as a form, with news values, the inverted pyramid and framing.

Finally you will create: write a planning brief, choose and justify a form, plan conventions and techniques with wireframes and storyboards, produce, test and revise media texts responsibly, and reflect on your strategies and on how listening, speaking, reading and writing support media literacy. The running creative example is the one the curriculum suggests: a web page presenting a personal anthology of poetry to your peers.

Every lesson has examples written for this site (all ads, products, news stories and media texts are invented unless named), a worked example, diagrams, a hands-on activity, four sets of practice questions and a quiz. It builds on Grade 9 (ENL1W), where you learned media forms, conventions and techniques, audiences and production.

Curriculum expectations covered: 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 4.1, 4.2 (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 9 and 10: English, 2007, English, Grade 10, Academic (ENG2D), Media Studies strand).