Course guides › Grade 6 › English Home Language
Grade 6 English Home Language rounds off the Intermediate Phase. Learners read longer and more varied texts (novels, poems, plays, information texts, news and advertisements), write in many formats, give oral presentations, and use more complex grammar such as the passive voice, reported speech and complex sentences.
CAPS organises the subject into four skills that run through every two-week cycle: Listening and Speaking; Reading and Viewing; Writing and Presenting; and Language Structures and Conventions. Our Grade 6 course is being planned.
Course status: coming soon. We are still building the Grade 6 English Home Language (CAPS) course, so it can’t be bought yet. This guide explains what the CAPS curriculum covers this year, so you can use it now. The planned price is R100 per subject per year.
What’s covered: the four CAPS skills
Listening and Speaking
- Listening for information and for enjoyment
- Prepared and unprepared speeches; reading aloud
- Interviews, discussions and group work
Reading and Viewing
- Literary texts: novel or youth novel, short stories, poems, plays and folklore
- Information and visual texts: news articles, reports, advertisements, graphs, maps and cartoons
- Comprehension strategies: skimming, scanning, inference and summarising
Writing and Presenting
- Narrative and descriptive essays
- Transactional texts: friendly and formal letters, emails, diary entries, reports, reviews, instructions and invitations
- The writing process: plan, draft, edit, final copy
Language Structures and Conventions
- Nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions
- All main tenses, active and passive voice, direct and indirect speech
- Simple, compound and complex sentences; punctuation
- Figurative language, idioms, proverbs, synonyms and antonyms
Key ideas, with worked examples
Active and passive voice
In the active voice the subject does the action; in the passive voice the subject receives it.
Worked example. Active: The dog chased the cat. Passive: The cat was chased by the dog.
Writing a summary
Pick out the main points, leave out examples and repetition, and use your own words in full sentences.
Worked example. A 200-word article about a school clean-up can become: “Learners cleaned the river, collected 60 bags of litter and plan to return each term.”
Formal letter format
A formal letter has the sender’s address, the date, the receiver’s address, a greeting, a subject line, the body and a formal ending.
Worked example. Dear Sir or Madam … Yours faithfully. If you know the name: Dear Mrs Dlamini … Yours sincerely.
Common mistakes (and how to fix them)
- Mixing formal and informal language in a formal letter.
- Retelling the whole story instead of summarising.
- Subject–verb agreement slips: “The group of learners is…”, not “are”.
- Answering a visual-text question without looking at the picture or caption.
- Not editing: most marks lost in writing are spelling and punctuation slips.
Tips for parents
- Little and often. Fifteen minutes on most school days works better than a long session once a week.
- Keep a book on the go. Fifteen minutes of reading a day is the best preparation for comprehension.
- Ask for opinions with reasons: “Did you like the ending? Why?”
- Practise speeches at home: a two-minute talk to the family builds confidence.
- Read the newspaper together and spot the facts and the opinions.
Frequently asked questions
Will the course mark essays and speeches?
Writing and oral tasks will have planning frames in the coursebook and model answers with simple rubrics in the parent memo; quizzes check reading and language skills.
How much will the Grade 6 English Home Language course cost?
R100 per subject per year once it opens. Like our live courses, it will be one course for the whole year with Terms 1 to 4 inside it, so there’s nothing extra to pay per term.
When will the course be ready?
We’re building it now. The Grade 6 English Home Language card on our home page shows “Coming soon” until the course is ready, and then it changes to “Open course”.
Will it work on a phone, and will it use a lot of data?
Yes, it will work on a phone. Like our live Maths courses, it will open in a phone’s web browser or in the free Coursebox app for Android and iPhone. Lessons are pictures and short text with quizzes and no videos, so it uses little data.
Is there an Afrikaans version?
This is the English Home Language course, so it is in English. Afrikaans is a separate subject with its own course (Afrikaans First Additional Language).
Get ready for Grade 6 English Home Language
The Grade 6 English Home Language (CAPS) course is coming soon at R100 per subject per year. Bookmark this guide and use the term lists above to follow what your child is doing at school. See which Grade 6 subjects are open on the course cards.
Back to the Grade 6 course cards · All Grade 6 guides
Sources and review
This guide follows the DBE’s CAPS English Home Language Grades 4–6 document. Term placement will be checked against the 2023/24 Grade 6 Annual Teaching Plan. Last reviewed: 31 October 2026. AI Buddies is an independent project and is not endorsed by the Department of Basic Education.