View Learning Outcomes | Learning Outcomes and Indicators

Curriculum Focus

Communication

Students read, listen to and discuss reading texts at their interest and skill level for enjoyment and information. They talk about the characters and plot in stories and the information they find in factual texts. Students become more able to choose appropriate reading texts for enjoyment or for information. Teachers prepare students for the language demands of unfamiliar reading tasks, and to develop basic problem solving and research skills. Students respond to written text through speech and writing, art, drama and music. Teachers monitor students’ understandings of text through these responses and through reading conferences.

Aspects of language

Contextual understanding

Students are given the opportunity to listen to and read accessible texts written for a variety of purposes and audiences, for learning and for entertainment. Students become familiar with various types of texts, such as narratives or procedures, poems or dialogues. They identify different types of texts and how their linguistic structure and features differ according to purpose and audience. They become aware of how their own experiences and beliefs affect their response to texts. Students become familiar with texts from various cultures, such as folk tales or fables, and identify some of the features of similar text types.

Linguistic structures and features

Students share ideas and impressions of texts, focusing on the whole-text structure and the language features. They talk about content, illustrations and layout. Students participate in activities, such as story maps and shared book activities, in order to develop understanding of the cohesion of text, for example, the use of conjunctions and pronouns. Comparisons are made of simple factual texts to develop student awareness of different types of texts and the language appropriate to different text types. A metalanguage is developed to discuss features and organisation of texts, for example, headings, paragraphs. Students read more fluently as their understanding of English letter–sound relationships and sentence structure grows.

Strategies

Teachers assist students to locate appropriate books which are at their level of language and interest. Through exposure to a variety of text types students become more confident and familiar with different kinds of texts, choosing texts appropriately for difficulty level and for topic interest. Students participate in shared reading, individually reading aloud, and silent reading. They view texts, for example, videos in which the vocabulary and context have been introduced and discussed. Students attend to teacher modelling and demonstrations, to develop strategies such as skimming and scanning for locating information in texts. With the support of teacher prompts they increasingly integrate cue sources, such as their background knowledge, developing knowledge of sentence structure and letter sound relationships.