The texts that students will read include novels, reference materials (including primary source materials), textbooks, poetry, plays, historical documents, manuals and procedural texts, extended instructions for tasks and formal assessments, maths problems, specialist texts, newspapers, and magazines. These texts often feature:
- complex information (multiple pieces of information), in the context of longer texts;
- complex themes, plots, settings, and relationships;
- sophisticated concepts and information (written for a general adult audience rather than a specialist one);
- non-sequential organisation, which may include complex graphics and sections that are not clearly linked.
Students control their rate of reading according to their purpose and the time available. This includes slow, careful reading of a complex text as well as rapid reading to cover a lot of material in a short space of time or to skim for specific information.
Break Free magazine,
Ministry of Health, March 2000
As they read, students build on their expertise and demonstrate that they:
- can select texts according to their reading purpose and make decisions, as they read, about the value of the text for the purpose (e.g., by using criteria to evaluate the readability, accuracy, relevance, and status of the information and/or ideas);
- understand why and how particular text structures, terminology, and conventions have been used socially, culturally, historically, and academically and how they are used in different curriculum areas;
- draw on a large reading vocabulary that is connected to their own knowledge of the world and that includes academic, subject-specific, and technical words and terms to express abstract concepts within and across curriculum areas;
- recognise a wide variety of grammatical constructions and use this knowledge to comprehend dense and complex text;
- read flexibly to find and understand information that is not readily accessible or that is organised in unfamiliar (possibly non-linear) ways and to identify what information a text does not contain;
- use strategies (which may include note making, skimming or scanning, mapping ideas, coding information, and rephrasing) to locate, evaluate, analyse, and summarise information;
- use their repertoire of comprehension strategies flexibly, depending on their purpose (e.g., skimming a difficult text to get its gist or making connections across a range of texts to collect evidence);
- can explain some of their personal preferences for reading.
As they write, students build on their expertise and demonstrate that they:
- can interpret the requirements of writing tasks and plan ways to meet them, using multiple planning strategies;
- use writing as a means of developing their ideas and their writer’s voice (e.g., by rethinking previous knowledge and presenting their new knowledge);
- use writing to explain, describe, or debate theories, principles, beliefs, and opinions (their own and those of others);
- can select from a wide variety of text types, forms, structures, and media appropriate for their purpose to conform to the demands of different curriculum areas;
- draw on a large vocabulary that includes academic, subject-specific, and technical vocabulary, including some low-frequency words and phrases, to make effective word choices;
- decide on sources appropriate to a writing task and at an appropriate reading level and use strategies (e.g., note taking, note making, and rephrasing) to select and incorporate relevant information or ideas from one or more of these sources;
- review paragraphs or sections of their writing for coherence and cohesion and then revise (e.g., by inserting a subheading or by using discourse markers such as although to make meaning clear and to link clauses);
- understand a complex notion of audience (e.g., the teacher and an imagined audience) and write for such an audience showing an awareness of voice, tone, and register and of how to choose a voice, tone, and register according to a specific purpose or task;
- review, revise, edit, and proofread a text to check that it matches the purpose for writing, to identify and address problems, to add detail or modify tone, and to ensure conformity to any expected standards.
The texts that students will write include personal narratives, feature articles, character profiles, research reports, essays, responses to literature, and short answers. Students will need to write texts that:
- express a complex range of ideas concisely, e.g., in short answers;
- include specialised vocabulary that relates to a range of topics within and across curriculum areas and that expresses abstract concepts;
- use a variety of grammatical constructions in more complex and varied sentences with greater paragraph elaboration;
- use rhetorical patterns, such as classification, comparison and contrast, definition, and cause and effect, within a variety of text types;
- are organised in clearly marked sections and paragraphs, using headings and subheadings where appropriate;
- correctly acknowledge sources of information, quotations, and graphics;
- use most punctuation marks appropriately.
Students need to have an understanding of the links between reading and writing (in terms of the strategies and processes involved) and to use their knowledge of these links to strengthen their reading and writing skills.
