Resources
Text Selection Guidelines
One of the most important tasks for teachers is to select appropriate texts to use with their students. The instructional texts provided by the Ministry of Education, such as the School Journal, include information about their reading year levels.
The guidelines will help teachers with such texts. They include an easy-to-use framework designed to help teachers estimate the difficulty of texts from many sources.
Framework
The framework provides both a process for estimating the difficulty of a text and a record of the supports and challenges it presents to the students. Download the framework template to use to help you estimate the difficulty of a text.
Planning for Writing Across the Curriculum – Literacy Planners
Teaching and learning resources
- Literacy Online, English Online and ESOL Online: these three websites have been developed as the overarching resource to support leaders and teachers enhance teaching and learning, and in particular ensure that all students have the literacy and English language skills required to meet the demands of the NZ Curriculum.
- Literacy Learning Progressions: the Literacy Learning Progressions support literacy teaching and learning by describing the knowledge and knowledge and skills students need to meet the reading and writing demands of the curriculum. Teachers can use them to identify where their students are now and where they need to be if they are to engage successfully with the curriculum at their level.
- English Language Learning Progressions (ELLP): This resource describes a typical pathway to English language acquisition, enabling teachers to track and monitor the progress of students who are acquiring English as an additional language. The extraordinary diversity of English language learners means that they will have many different starting points for their learning. The intention is that all students whose progress has been mapped on the ELLP will eventually be ready to have it mapped on the LLP.
- Sounds and Words: Sounds and Words is an online resource intended to help teachers of students in years 1 to 8 provide instruction in phonological awareness and spelling.
- Making Language and Learning work (DVDs): These DVDs provide practical examples of how teachers can effectively integrate content-area teaching and language learning. Schools can use the accompanying facilitation notes to support the design of in-school professional development.
- Effective Literacy Practice in years 1–4; and Effective Literacy Practice in years 5–8: These handbooks identify and describe the features of literacy teaching, at the respective year levels, that are clearly linked by research to improved outcomes for students. They are designed to help teachers to: build their professional knowledge; become more aware of what makes literacy teaching effective for students; become more strategic in their; examine their beliefs about themselves as teachers and about children as literacy learners; and see themselves as part of a professional learning community and reflect critically on their practice.
- Language Enhancing the Achievement of Pasifika: LEAP is a professional learning resource developed for teachers working in mainstream New Zealand classrooms with bilingual Pasifika students. It is designed for primary, intermediate/middle, and secondary teachers. The resource includes information that may be useful for teachers of bilingual students from many backgrounds, although it has been developed for Pasifika.
Updated on: 31 Mar 2021
