The texts that students will be able to read, largely by themselves, include junior novels, poems, plays, stories, procedures, and information texts, journals and magazines designed for their age group, and daily newspapers. The students will be reading texts in print and electronic media. These texts often include:
- topics, themes, and settings outside the students’ personal experience;
- stories with multiple themes, plots, and/or subplots;
- mixed text types (e.g., an explanation within a report);
- visual-language features that extend or clarify the meaning of the text and that require some interpretation;
- ideas that are conveyed indirectly;
- a significant amount of unfamiliar vocabulary (often explained by words or illustrations), including academic and subject-specific words and phrases;
- varied sentence beginnings, long phrases, and some use of figurative language;
- words and phrases that can have different meanings depending on the context in which they are used.
“The Vege Car” by Peter Stevens
School Journal 3.1.07
Students understand that readers have purposes for engaging with texts.
As they read, students build on their expertise and demonstrate that they:
- use and can explain several reliable strategies for finding and learning the meanings of unknown words;
- have a knowledge of basic grammatical constructions and use this knowledge to assist meaning;
- understand the specific language features and structures of many common text types and use this knowledge to assist comprehension;
- monitor their reading for accuracy and sense and have the confidence to adjust their reading (including adjusting the speed of reading, rereading, and attending to the most important information) when they encounter difficulties;
- draw on a repertoire of comprehension strategies to assist their understanding of information and ideas in texts and can explain how using these strategies helps them make meaning;
- can locate information in a variety of texts, using a repertoire of strategies that includes skimming, scanning, identifying key words, topic sentences, and key questions, and using subheadings;
- use strategies to compare and evaluate information and ideas across a small range of texts;
- can identify and reflect on writers’ purposes and on the ways in which writers use language and ideas to suit their purposes (e.g., by using vocabulary to set a scene or develop a mood);
- regularly read for sustained periods (thirty minutes or more) and can sustain meaning in longer novels and across a variety of texts on a single topic over several days.
As they write, students build on their expertise and demonstrate that they:
- can make text-level choices (e.g., about text type and text form) to suit the intended purpose and audience and routinely plan for writing, using a variety of planning activities;
- can make sentence- and word-level choices to select the best language for the purpose and audience (e.g., precise and descriptive words to create a mental image or to imply meaning, short sentences to build tension, and complex sentences to add detail);
- draw on their knowledge of how words work (e.g., how all basic sounds and patterns are written in English, including prefixes, suffixes, roots, and spelling patterns) and of word derivations to fluently and correctly encode most unfamiliar words, including words of many syllables;
- organise related ideas (e.g., into a topic sentence with supporting details) in paragraphs;
- achieve cohesion by using some devices, such as pronoun references and lexical chains;
- use grammatical devices that reflect register and text type (e.g., variety in use of tenses where appropriate) and have some control over complex grammatical structures that communicate increasingly abstract ideas, such as noun clauses and adverbial clauses of reason;
- have automatised the basic skills for writing words (handwriting, spelling, and punctuation);
- independently review and revise their writing, to clarify meaning and add impact, and proofread to correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
The texts that students will be writing, largely by themselves, include texts written for a variety of purposes to meet the demands of the curriculum. They include personal, historical, and information texts written to clarify, describe, explain, persuade, inform, recount, report, narrate, and instruct. The texts they write will often include:
- overall text structures that are consistent with the purpose and text type or form, e.g., an orientation, a problem, a climax, and a satisfying resolution (for a narrative) and an introduction, a series of main points, and a logical conclusion (for a report);
- combinations of text forms and text types and more diverse purposes and topics;
- visual-language features to extend or clarify meaning;
- information and ideas that are relevant and meaningful to the topic or theme;
- some language features to engage the reader;
- academic, subject-specific, and general vocabulary used appropriately (for the register, topic, purpose, and text type) and correctly (in the grammatical context);
- accurately punctuated dialogue;
- accurate spelling of most words.
Students use strategies (e.g., planning, making notes, organising ideas and/or information, and synthesising ideas and/or information) to connect reading and writing and to complete tasks by producing a written text.
