View Learning Outcomes | Learning Outcomes and Indicators

Curriculum Focus

Communication

Teachers introduce students to a wide range of stimulating, simple fictional and factual texts, including picture story books and early reading materials, making careful selection to ensure that texts are appropriate to the students’ age and interest level. Texts used contain predictable, repetitive English which students can easily follow. These simple, repetitive, culturally appropriate and well-illustrated texts are used as the basis for early literacy activities, such as art and drama activities. Teachers model reading in shared reading activities where students can see how written text relates to spoken text. 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. Students also read everyday environmental and class texts, such as signs, labels and shared texts. Teachers guide students’ choices of texts for their own reading, 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

Students are becoming aware that written texts are structured in certain ways depending on their purpose and audience. By observing and talking about the print they see around them, the various kinds of texts become more familiar. Through working with a wide range of texts, students 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. When reading, browsing through or listening to accessible texts read aloud, students talk simply about who they are written for and what they are written about. By working with, and talking about the written messages they see around them, students become aware of environmental texts and the messages they convey, and teachers use these texts for beginning reading activities.

Linguistic structures and features

Teachers ensure that students are provided with 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 to enhance and make connections with students’ oral repertoires. Through activities such as shared book and language experience, students begin to understand how the writing system of English is structured. 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 students to begin to understand the sound–letter relationships of English. As students begin to recognise phrases, single words or letters in texts, teachers help them to focus on these by recording them on word lists, sound charts, or personal dictionaries, which students use for reference when reading and writing. Activities focus on features of print, for example, specific letters in a word/sentence, identifying initial letters of names, indicating the last word in a sentence.

Strategies

Teachers model and encourage strategies that will assist students to read, understand and to choose appropriate reading texts. In shared reading situations students imitate the teacher’s model on 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, for example, repetitive texts, picture story books or folk tales. Such well-loved 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 sentence patterns in the texts they are reading together, and encourage students to make similar observations. Teachers constantly revise and recycle texts in a range of activities.