View Learning Outcomes | Learning Outcomes and Indicators

Curriculum Focus

Communication

Teachers ensure that students have success in their introduction to writing in English. Students use their limited resources to engage in many different writing activities as part of everyday classroom activities. Students write their own simple informational texts and record basic observations in written and graphic formats. They write about themselves, their activities and their personal interests and opinions. They write their own simple imaginative texts, and they innovate creatively on the writing of others. They base the structure and vocabulary of these texts on oral and written texts modelled in class. Teachers model writing often to students through whole class shared writing and other activities, talking about the texts as they are written.

Aspects of language

Contextual understanding

Students write their own simple texts for many different purposes, based around classroom activities, using some of the basic features that distinguish published texts, for example, simple contents page, cover and title for a class-shared book. As students’ English repertoires expand they become increasingly able to fulfil simple writing tasks for an expanding range of basic purposes, such as informing, recording information or instructing. Teachers model a consistent approach to writing for different purposes, modelling text structure and features, such as the use of imperatives in a procedural text. Students base the writing of some of their own simple texts on models they are shown in class, or on models found when reading.

Linguistic structures and features

Through their writing, students are showing new and original ways of using their knowledge of writing in English and their still limited repertoires of English vocabulary and understanding of grammatical features. They understand that text meaning is enhanced through the way texts are presented, and they present their texts in ways that are increasingly appropriate to their understanding of the task. Students take part in jointly constructing texts with the teacher and are shown the way in which both sentence-level and whole-text level decisions need to be taken to produce a text that fulfils the given writing task. As students write texts for many different purposes they begin to observe the kinds of structures that occur in different kinds of writing.

Strategies

Teachers model many of the strategies that will help students to represent their thoughts, experiences and ideas through written English. They help students to develop systematic strategies to support their writing, such as keeping spelling books where useful words are recorded alphabetically, or in themes. Students experiment with spelling new words, using their growing knowledge of English spelling patterns. Many strategies for experimenting with the writing of texts may be new to students, and teachers allow them time to incorporate such strategies into their own way of working. Students begin to understand that writing a finished text is a process that may involve planning, some rewriting or editing to improve accuracy of grammatical features, content, meaning or spelling, depending on the purpose and audience.