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All texts are made up of words and phrases. It’s important to expand students’ awareness and appreciation of language and to help them build up their personal vocabularies. Developing an extensive vocabulary enables students to improve both their reading comprehension and their writing.
As part of the instructional programme, teachers need to plan to expand their students’ vocabularies. Students need a substantial and ever-increasing bank of sight words, and they also need to be taught about how words work. The teacher’s role is to:
By exploring language with students and giving them opportunities to practise their new learning, teachers can develop their students’ sense of enquiry and adventure and help to build a vibrant community that thrives on discussion of language and how it works. This is invaluable support for new learners of English and also for those who are experiencing difficulties in their literacy learning. Teachers can help their rapid-progress students to extend their vocabulary development by giving them experiences with texts that make demands on the reader, for example, in terms of the complex abstract ideas they present or the issues they offer for debate. These students need to be challenged to add depth to their writing by choosing language that has fine shades of meaning.
Every year 5 to 8 classroom needs a thesaurus, a comprehensive dictionary, and multiple copies of student dictionaries. Bilingual dictionaries in students’ first languages should also be available where possible. Instructional reading and writing sessions, cross-curricular work, and discussions of current events can be used as springboards to launch students into the study of words – investigating synonyms and antonyms, collecting and discussing examples of homophones and homonyms, or sharing the discovery of a new and unusual word or figure of speech.
It’s part of a teacher’s planning to think carefully about the vocabulary in any text that they are planning to use in their literacy programme (for example, in guided reading). Teachers also need to consider the vocabulary that students will need for a writing task. Published lists with information about vocabulary frequency17 can be useful in helping teachers to monitor and extend their students’ vocabulary.
In order to deepen their literacy learning, students in years 5 to 8 need to develop both background knowledge and literacy-related knowledge.
Successful readers and writers do much more than process information. They bring their prior experience and existing knowledge, accumulated both in and out of school, to their reading and writing in order to construct meaning and develop new understandings.
Billy and Nic are reading at their chronological age, but they’re not enthusiastic readers unless the text has special appeal, and although they know about comprehension strategies, they don’t consistently read for meaning. I’ve been focusing on getting both these Pasifika boys more engaged and strategic in their reading.
We had recently come back from camp, where the boys had had great experiences with water sports. So, for guided reading, I chose “White Water Action”, a story from the electronic storybook The Game.
Our shared learning goals were to form hypotheses, using prior knowledge both about the content (kayaking) and about text forms, and to identify the comprehension strategies they used while reading. We started with a KWL about kayaking, and the boys were keen to share their knowledge and experiences. Then I encouraged them to reflect on the strategy they’d been using – and to use it for the actual reading.
Teacher: So what comprehension strategy were we using when we were sharing just then? Have a look at your bookmarks. (The students have bookmarks with strategies listed on them.) Billy: Making connections. Teacher: Can you explain why you’ve decided it’s making connections? Billy: We were using what we already had in our heads and sharing it with each other so we can think about it before we read. Teacher: ... to help us understand what we read better. OK, the title is “White Water Action”, and here’s the beginning. What sort of writing is this? Nic: Non-fiction. Teacher: And how do you know that? Nic: Because it’s got a photo, and that means it’s about someone real. And if it was a story, they’d probably make the title more interesting instead of saying “white water”. Teacher: Good thinking. So if it’s non-fiction, then what sort of things are we going to find? Billy: Photos. Information. Nic: Fact boxes. Oh, main points and supporting facts. Teacher: Good, so what sort of information will we find in the article? What clues is the author giving us? Nic: Action. Like, kayaking down big rivers. Billy: Um, information about what you do when you kayak. What you have to have, like equipment and stuff. Teacher: OK, what strategy were we using just then? Billy: Forming hypotheses. Nic: Yes, ’cause we were predicting what the author’s put in the article.Teacher: Yes, and you were also making connections to what you knew about non-fiction texts and about kayaking.
The boys were very receptive to using strategies to help understand what they were reading and enjoyed learning the technical vocabulary. They were keen to read more about this topic, but I’ll also be looking at getting them to read more widely (using some of the other CD-ROM pieces), actively drawing on their prior knowledge. For the next session, I’ll get them to talk to each other before the reading and jot down a few predictions rather than having me lead the discussion.
Teacher, year 7 and 8 class
In responding to a teacher question during a guided reading lesson, Latu attempted to read aloud a sentence from the first paragraph of the School Journal text “Tauhara Street” by Norman Bilbrough. While reading the sentence “We were cruising down Tauhara Street … when the engine gave a groan, something graunched in the innards, and the car shuddered to a stop”, she hesitated at the word “graunched”. With teacher prompting, she decided that it was probably a verb because of the “-ed” ending, and she knew that the initial consonant blend was “gr”. So she read on, trying to think of a verb beginning with “gr” that made sense.She soon realised that something bad had happened to the car, because it “shuddered to a stop”. All she could think of was “groaned” – it made sense – but she knew this was not correct because she had just read “groan” in the previous phrase. With further teacher prompting (I used the words “launch” and “staunch” to focus on the letter–sound relationship of the “-aunch” spelling pattern), she recognised the “-aunch” in the middle of the word and was able to bring all the clues together to self-correct to “graunched”.Teacher, year 6 classOne of my reading groups had been reading an article about the effects of water on the landscape, and one aspect we had discussed was erosion. A little later, the class was writing a shared explanation of how water makes changes to the landscape.I began by inviting the group who had read the article to share what they had learned. Eli said, “We learned that water can cause large amounts of rock, soil, and other debris to move. I think it was called erosion.” I encouraged him to frame this into a sentence for our shared piece of writing. He said, “Water can cause large amounts of rock, soil, and debris to move. It’s called erosion.” I scribed this until I came to “erosion”. I wanted the class to consider how it might be spelled.“How do you think we write this word?” I asked.Josh said, “I think it’s e-r-o-tion”.“Yes, the first part’s correct,” I agreed, “but the ending of this word is a bit tricky.The ending ‘-tion’ usually sounds like ‘shin’ as in ‘station’ and ‘fiction’, but ‘erosion’ isn’t quite the same. Listen carefully to the sound. Think of other words that have the same sound.”Chelsea volunteered “explosion”.“Exactly, it’s ero-sion,” I confirmed.Teacher, year 6 class
As students explore and experiment with increasingly complex sentences in reading and writing, they continue to need teacher guidance – for example, in making connections between main and subordinate clauses and in developing the language to discuss such issues.
When students begin to develop as readers and writers, they realise that there is a relationship between what they say or hear and the written text they create or read. They learn the importance of sounds, of words, and of the flow and rhythm of language. They learn that words, sentences, and texts are formed according to recognised conventions. They learn that words and the way people use them can evoke an emotional response. They learn that texts can entertain and inform and that it is worthwhile and enjoyable to listen to, read, view, and create them.
As students become more skilled readers and writers, they refine and extend this knowledge. The learning may be independent and unconscious (as when they automatically infer the meaning of new vocabulary when it is clearly implied in a text), or it may be the result of explicit instruction (as when they learn something new through the teacher’s modelling or explanations). It may also occur on an ongoing basis.
Readers and writers need to know that all texts have meaning and purpose, and they need to be able to distinguish between different text purposes. They need to know, for example, that some texts are intended primarily to raise reader or writer self-awareness, some to entertain, and some to communicate ideas or information. A major purpose of most texts is to affect the target audience in a particular way, often by conveying the writer’s point of view effectively. Students need to know that many texts have several purposes.
Students should understand that all texts are intended for an audience (the audience is sometimes the writer) and that effective texts have an impact on their readers. They also need to know about the text features that writers use to achieve the desired impact. The deeper features of a text generally relate to the writer’s purpose and voice and include the structure and language features of the text. Its surface features include grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Young readers and writers will also learn that accurate or inaccurate use of surface features affects readers’ ability to make meaning of texts.
Readers and writers need to know that there are different text forms and that these are generally characterised by a particular structure and certain other features. Forms such as stories, recounts, reports, procedures, arguments, explanations, varieties of poetry, and plays all have characteristic structures and features that are linked to their different purposes. Students in years 5 to 8 need to know about the structures and features associated with each of these text forms.
The characteristic features of any text form (which can be used to identify the form of a text) are likely to include specific structural and language features and may include specific kinds of content, vocabulary, and/or surface features.
This syndicate had evidence that many of their students were not aware of the purpose of an explanation and lacked basic knowledge of the structure and features of this text form, which was one that they needed to be able to read and write in more than one subject area. The teachers decided that the school’s planning for a science fair could provide an authentic opportunity to teach the information and develop students’ awareness of explanations.
When planning our science, social studies, or technology topics, we always look for ways of extending our students as readers and writers. For the science fair, they had to explain their experiments and discoveries clearly, and we confirmed, from their first attempts, that they hadn’t yet learned to do this. So we found some examples of scientific explanations at the right reading level and explored these with the students during shared and guided reading, to identify the features of explanatory texts. Then, during writing, we explicitly taught them how to write up their scientific discoveries and explanations using the reading texts as models. The judge of the science fair specifically commented on how clear our students’ written explanations were.
Syndicate leader, years 7 and 8
Students also need to know that the features usually associated with one form can often be effectively used in another, depending on the purpose for writing. Poetic vocabulary and selected imagery, for example, can be used to increase the impact of a report or an argument.
While every text has meaning and purpose, each writer or reader composes or interprets each text by drawing on their own unique life experiences and perceiving through their particular cultural lens. As readers, they learn to think about the writer’s intention and viewpoint (as well as their own viewpoint); as writers, they have to think about their intended audience in relation to the viewpoint that they wish to convey.
Through their experiences of reading and writing texts, learners build up a first-hand knowledge base that helps them to develop the theoretical knowledge described above. With the teacher’s guidance, they learn to make connections between texts, both at surface level and at deeper levels. Each new text experience gives them access to new knowledge, which then becomes part of their background experience.
Effective teachers encourage their students to articulate their knowledge about what they are doing in reading and writing. This builds their metacognitive awareness of how written language works. They need to be able to describe, for example, why they believe that the simile they choose to use in a poetic text might have more impact on the reader than a list of adjectives.
In the years leading up to secondary school, it is important that students develop the kind of reflective and analytical perspective on literacy that will, increasingly, enable them to think critically about language, texts, and ideas.
Understanding the concept of awareness is central to understanding the nature of literacy learning. Students are not always aware of how to use the knowledge and strategies they have acquired. When they adapt their literacy learning to new contexts, they become more aware of that learning and its potential uses. Students become more independent learners when they know how to articulate and demonstrate what they are aware of and what they need to work on further.
Students in years 5 to 8 need to develop social understandings as part of their critical awareness and to think about the ways in which texts shape values and position audiences. They can be helped, through deliberate acts of teaching, to think about what they are reading and writing. For example, they can consider how an author’s choice of language is intended to affect the reader or work out how they, as writers, could persuade their readers to think in a particular way.
All readers and writers need to have phonemic awareness (awareness of the separate sounds within words), phonological awareness (awareness of the sound system of language), an understanding of phonics (the correspondence between spoken sounds and the letters that represent them), and print awareness (awareness of the basic conventions of print). Refer to pages 32–37 of Effective Literacy Practice in Years 1 to 4 for information about these concepts.In order to be able to read and write fluently and independently, students need to develop many kinds of literacy-related awareness. They need to be aware, for example:
More proficient readers and writers demonstrate their awareness of:
Students develop their literacy awareness through many activities and interactions with the teacher and their peers. Teachers can deliberately build students’ awareness by noticing what a student is attending to and entering into a discussion about it. This means challenging students, for example, by asking them to explain how they reached a conclusion about a character’s personality and what textual evidence they used to inform this conclusion.
Students who know how to identify the knowledge and strategies they use are better able to deliberately control their use of them. However, they do not always develop this kind of metacognitive awareness automatically. For example, the teacher may need to prompt students to cross-check when they are reading or writing more complex texts. Students often ask the teacher what to do when they are “stuck”. Handing the responsibility back to the student, by responding with a question or prompt rather than an “answer”, obliges them to think about what they know and can use and helps them to take increasing responsibility for their own learning.
Making learning intentions more explicit has resulted in a greater transfer of skills and knowledge. Students who are able to apply a skill across different text forms generally progress more quickly. For example, when we moved from a focus on arguments to looking at explanations and I asked one group what the main point of the first paragraph was, I was thrilled when a student responded, “We know the main point will probably be at the start and the other points will support it – that’s what paragraphs DO. This is just like before, when we were writing arguments!”
Reading strategies include processing strategies and comprehension strategies. The reading processing strategies are the “in-the-head” ways in which readers make use of the sources of information in the text to decode words. They include attending and searching (looking for particular text features or information), predicting what will be in the text (for example, words, text features, or content), cross-checking to confirm that the reading makes sense and fits, and self-correcting by searching for more information when an error is detected. Refer to pages 139–140 for more about the processing strategies that readers use.
The ways in which students learn and apply the processing strategies illustrate the importance of metacognition in literacy learning. For example, readers developing more advanced skills might need to be taught how to search for and identify technical language in a text and encouraged to cross-check its meaning using contextual information. Students whose control of the processing strategies is limited may process text in inappropriate ways, for example, by trying to sound out every single word or by making random guesses rather than using the available sources of information in the text or their own prior knowledge.
Reading comprehension strategies enable readers not only to make sense of a text but also to think about what they are reading and enter into a mental dialogue with the author. The main comprehension strategies that proficient readers use are:
Refer to page 152 for information about how teachers can help their students develop comprehension strategies and to pages 141–151 for information about the comprehension strategies that readers use.
Although teachers may focus on teaching one particular strategy at a time, neither processing strategies nor comprehension strategies are discrete processes to be used in isolation. Processing strategies underlie comprehension strategies – readers need to be able to use the processing strategies in order to use the comprehension strategies effectively.
Proficient readers use the processing strategies in an integrated way and use more than one comprehension strategy to make maximum meaning from text. For example, in order to infer meaning, the reader has to make connections with prior knowledge, including knowledge of other texts. The reader will also use all the processing strategies, searching, predicting, cross-checking, and self-correcting as they attend to the information in the text. The processing and comprehension strategies are employed in complex combinations, depending on the nature of the text, the reading task, and the individual learner’s pathway of development.
Strategic readers use their knowledge and their processing and comprehension strategies to find ideas and information in texts. They draw conclusions and provide evidence from the text to support their statements. They identify cause and effect, sequence ideas and information, and explore the ways in which texts use language to convey information or emotion, to persuade, or to entertain. They develop an awareness of texts that carries over to their writing.
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