View Learning Outcomes | Learning Outcomes and Indicators

Curriculum Focus

Communication

Teachers introduce students to a wide range of carefully chosen and stimulating fictional and factual texts, including picture story books and early reading materials. These simple, repetitive, and well-illustrated texts are used as the basis for early literacy activities, such as art and drama activities. Teachers read often to students, ensuring they experience the excitement and satisfaction of understanding stories and books in English, as they develop understanding about the reading process. Students begin to talk simply about the texts they are reading and hearing read aloud. They retell simple stories and incidents which occur in texts they have encountered in class or at home. Students also read everyday class and environmental texts, such as signs, labels and shared texts. The texts that students work with in class are chosen to match their learning needs and their stage of oral English development. Teachers guide students’ own choices of texts, ensuring that a wide range of accessible texts is available in the classroom, including if possible, texts in the students’ first language.

Aspects of language

Contextual understanding

As students are introduced to a wide range of texts, they begin to learn that written texts are organised differently and use different language according to purpose and audience. With teacher assistance, students talk simply about who texts are written for and what they are written about. Students also become aware that some texts are factual and others fictional or imaginative, and they are encouraged to distinguish and talk simply about the ‘real’ and the ‘not real’ in texts. Through talking simply about the kinds of texts different people read, students begin to learn that texts are structured to meet the needs of the reader. By working with the written messages they see around them, students also become aware of environmental texts and the messages they convey.

Linguistic structures and features

Teachers ensure that students are provided with culturally inclusive, simple, supportive texts where the meaning is well supported by illustrations and layout. They ensure that texts use English in a natural way that will help students to make connections between their oral repertoires and print. Through language experience activities and shared book reading, students begin to understand how the writing system of English is structured, and how texts are presented when in book form. Activities such as alphabet games, phonemic awareness activities, or word and sentence matching, focus students onto the word and letter level of texts, and help them begin to learn the sound–letter relationships of English. As students recognise phrases/formulas, single words or letters in texts, teachers help them to focus on these by recording their observations on word lists, sound charts, or personal dictionaries, which students can use for reference.

Strategies

Teachers model and encourage strategies that will assist students to read, understand and to choose appropriate reading texts. In shared or guided reading activities students imitate the teacher’s model of how to use text cues to gain meaning from texts. Teachers talk with students about illustrations, diagrams and photographs, and model the way these provide contextual clues to meaning. They often read the students’ favorite texts to them. Such well-known texts are used as the basis for activities, such as role-play or choral reading, that assist students to access these texts for themselves. Teachers use intonation to emphasise key words, key phrases or repetition when reading to students. They talk often to students about sound and letter or sentence patterns in the texts they are reading together, and encourage students to make similar observations.