The purpose of the literacy learning progressions
The purpose of this resource, Literacy Learning Progressions: Meeting the Reading and Writing Demands of the Curriculum, is to provide teachers with a professional tool that shows them what knowledge and skills their students need in order to meet the reading and writing demands of the New Zealand Curriculum. The literacy learning progressions describe the knowledge and skills that students need to have developed at specific points in their schooling if they are to engage with the texts and tasks of the curriculum and make the expected progress.
The literacy learning progressions make explicit the literacy expertise that students need in order to meet the demands of the curriculum. Teachers should use the progressions as a reference point when gathering information about their students’ literacy strengths and needs, using a variety of reliable formal and informal assessment tools and procedures, in order to plan effective literacy learning programmes. The progressions themselves are neither an assessment tool nor a teaching programme.(1)
Students need to engage with texts and develop literacy expertise in order to develop the key competencies described on pages 12–13 of The New Zealand Curriculum, especially “Thinking” and “Using language, symbols, and texts”. Literacy expertise underpins development of the key competencies and, in turn, the key competencies contribute to literacy development. This expertise and these competencies are needed for students’ work in English, where much of their literacy learning takes place, and also in all the other learning areas of the curriculum.
As language is central to learning and English is the medium for most learning in the New Zealand Curriculum, the importance of literacy in English cannot be overstated.
The New Zealand Curriculum, page 16
Literacy acquisition and development
Literacy is the ability to understand, respond to, and use those forms of language that are required by society and valued by individuals and communities.
Effective Literacy Practice in Years 5 to 8, page 18
Many factors are involved in students’ literacy acquisition and development, and these are specifically reflected in the progressions. The progressions are based on a particular conceptual model, which is briefly outlined below. Other key factors discussed below include:
- the cumulative nature of literacy learning;
- the continuing importance of oral language and vocabulary development;
- fluency;
- the need for students to have the literacy expertise to engage with the increasingly complex texts and tasks of the curriculum;
- motivation and engagement;
- the importance of developing metacognition.
This section also includes a specific note on spelling.
The underlying model on which the progressions are based
The scope and content of the literacy learning progressions are based on the understanding that, in broad terms, literacy acquisition has three main aspects. (2)
Literacy learners need to learn the code of written language. This learning includes phonological awareness, knowledge of the alphabetic principle and of grapheme–phoneme (letter–sound) correspondence, and automatic recognition or spelling of familiar words.
Literacy learners need to learn to make meaning of texts. This learning includes the use of background knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, knowledge of how language and texts are structured, knowledge about literacy, and strategies to get and/or convey meaning.
Literacy learners need to think critically. This includes analysing and responding to texts and bringing a critical awareness to reading and writing.
The cumulative nature of literacy learning
Literacy learning is cumulative and builds on existing expertise. Certain literacy knowledge and skills are prerequisites for further literacy learning. Prerequisite skills have been described as “constrained skills”, for example, naming the letters of the alphabet and identifying their associated sounds.
… some reading skills … are constrained to small sets of knowledge that are mastered in relatively brief periods of development. In contrast, other skills such as vocabulary [learning], are unconstrained by the knowledge to be acquired or the duration of learning.
Paris, 2005, page 185
“Unconstrained” knowledge and skills, such as those used for comprehension, are more dynamic and continue to develop over a lifetime.
As students master the “constrained” skills involved in decoding, their reading becomes more fluent, which frees them to use more of their cognitive resources for the complex, “unconstrained” task of working out text meaning. Similarly, as students master the “constrained” expertise needed to record sounds, spell words, and form sentences, they become more fluent writers and can then apply more of their thinking to conveying meaning in increasingly sophisticated “unconstrained” ways.
The literacy learning progressions alert teachers to what students need to know and be able to do at particular points. This is important because, when students have not mastered the prerequisite knowledge and skills at the places identified in the progressions, their further development is limited. These skills and this knowledge will need to be priorities for instruction.
Oral language
Expertise in oral language (3) is essential to learning the code, making meaning, and thinking critically, and not just in the early years at school. For example, through discussion, we focus on ideas found in our reading and writing and on how they are expressed, and we extend both our vocabulary and our thinking.
The literacy learning progressions take account of the role of oral language in both reading and writing and reflect the fact that expertise in written language (for example, vocabulary learned in reading) increasingly extends oral language.
Vocabulary development
“Knowing” a word involves a complex network of connections (including collocations, connotations, and denotations), images, and understandings. Initially, children’s vocabulary knowledge is gained from their exposure to and use of oral language. They hear and learn the meanings of large numbers of words, storing them in memory and recalling their meanings when they are heard again. Some experts (cited in The English Language Learning Progressions, in press) have estimated that native speakers of English at primary school learn at least three or four thousand new words each year.
The literacy learning progressions take account of the vocabulary that students should be able to recognise and use in their reading and writing at particular points.
Fluency
Fluency in reading and writing refers to the ease with which students are able to read or write. Fluent readers are able to adjust their rate of reading to take into account factors such as the purpose for reading and the density of the text. Refer to “A note on fluency in written language”, on page 24 of Effective Literacy Practice in Years 5 to 8, for more information about the concept of fluency.
Increasingly complex texts and tasks
A text’s complexity is affected by the complexity of its vocabulary, sentence length and construction, cohesion, layout, length, and illustrative and graphic support. The kinds of information in a text and the ways in which that information is related and presented also affects the text’s complexity – for example, the inclusion of abstract information, separated (non-continuous) information, multiple pieces of information, implied information, and distracting (competing) information.(4) The relative complexity of a text is also affected by the reader’s prior knowledge.
The PISA (Programme for International Students Assessment) framework (OECD, 2003) distinguishes between continuous and non-continuous text formats. Continuous text means (usually) sentences organised into paragraphs, for example, in narration, exposition, description, argumentation, instruction, and hypertext. As well as the more familiar continuous texts, students need to be able to read and retrieve information from non-continuous texts, which include charts and graphs, tables and matrices, diagrams, maps, forms, and vouchers.(5)
The texts that students read and write and the tasks with which they must engage as they move through the school system become increasingly complex. This is reflected in the progressions through the features of reading and writing texts and the brief examples of curriculum-based tasks (“curriculum demands”) provided. Teachers need to be aware of the challenges of the texts and tasks that their students engage with and also of those that they will need to engage with in later years.
Motivation and engagement
Students’ enthusiasm for their learning can be a good indicator of what their progress will be. All students need to be motivated to learn and engage actively in their learning if they are to make the expected progress in literacy learning, and every student is different. Students are engaged and motivated by learning that makes connections to their individual expertise and interests and builds from there. Teachers need to be aware of cognitive, emotional, environmental, and cultural aspects of engagement.
The progressions are based on the understanding that teachers are attending to and addressing issues of motivation and engagement. This critical aspect of developing expertise cannot be presented in the form of a progression.
Metacognition
It is important that students are actively taught to be aware of what literacy expertise they are using and how they are using it, so that they can deliberately select from their repertoire and apply their literacy knowledge and strategies in more and more contexts in different areas of the curriculum. This metacognitive awareness enables them to become independent readers and writers.
The progressions reflect an emphasis on the development of awareness and increasing control of a widening range of strategies.
Spelling
Expertise in spelling is essential to writing. It develops as writers build knowledge of spelling patterns and how words are constructed and learn how to use and co-ordinate a range of spelling strategies.
Expert spellers have learned to use such strategies automatically, employing one or more of them as needed to solve specific problems. To help students develop their spelling expertise, teachers need to understand what strategies students are using effectively and provide instruction in those they need to learn. Vocabulary instruction that teaches students how words and parts of words work, as well as what they mean, also supports the development of expertise in spelling.
The literacy learning progressions indicate expectations for students’ spelling at particular points.
Effective Literacy Practice in Years 1 to 4, pages 144–148, and Effective Literacy Practice in Years 5 to 8, pages 161–166, provide suggestions to help students develop spelling expertise.
Developing students’ literacy expertise
The Ministry of Education has published resources to support teachers of literacy at all levels and in all curriculum areas. The literacy learning progressions align with the key resources. Teachers need to understand the developmental process for the year groups they teach; they need to be aware that learners construct meaning within social settings, including home and school settings; and they need to recognise the need to make connections to students’ individual expertise and interests and to build from there. These concepts underlie the literacy-learning model on which both Effective Literacy Practice in Years 1 to 4 and Effective Literacy Practice in Years 5 to 8 are based. For secondary school teachers, Effective Literacy Strategies in Years 9 to 13: A Guide for Teachers provides suggestions, based on the same model, to help develop students’ relevant literacy expertise in all subject areas.
Developing English language learners’ literacy expertise
The document The English Language Learning Progressions describes language and literacy learning for students who are learning English as an additional language. All teachers need to be aware of the particular challenges that reading and writing English-language texts across the curriculum can present for these students and to be able to identify the differing language-learning needs of these students.
Developing literacy expertise for increasingly complex texts and tasks
For learner readers in the early years, teachers choose texts in which the complexity of the features is carefully controlled. The complexity of the texts that students read increases gradually until, by year 10, they are reading materials written for a general adult audience.
The supports and challenges of any text or task vary depending on the student’s knowledge and experience (of the world and of texts) and their reading expertise. Features that challenge some students (for example, a cut-away diagram of an engine) may be very supportive to others (for example, students who have met similar diagrams before in texts that they enjoyed).
A note on “reading ages”
The concept of reading age provides only a rough guide to the complexity of a book, and the term is not a valid way to describe a student’s level of reading expertise.
Recent analysis of student data by NZCER(6) reveals that, by year 4, “year level is a slightly better predictor of scale score than age.” The results showed that differences in chronological age made no significant difference to the results of these tests, despite an age difference in any one year group of up to eighteen months.
As students move into secondary school and encounter a wider variety of texts and task demands, a critical factor affecting their ability to use texts is the extent to which reading is still supported by their teacher. In English, a complex novel, poem, or play will most often be read with a substantial amount of in-class support, for example, the teacher may read all or part of the text aloud. In other subject areas, there may not always be this kind of support. For example, a section of a science textbook may be assigned as homework, requiring the students to be able to read and use the information in the text independently. Secondary school teachers in all subject areas should plan to help their students learn the language and literacy skills associated with the subject.
In the literacy learning progressions, the expression “largely by themselves” is used to indicate that students will read or write texts with a relatively small amount of support, for example, the kind of support they would have in a guided reading or writing lesson.
