At Christ Our Holy Redeemer we believe literacy development is the foundation to lifelong learning and it is the explicit teaching of the English Curriculum that underpins all areas of learning.
Students develop knowledge, understanding and skills in English across the three interrelated strands of Language, Literature and Literacy. Each strand contributes its own distinctive goals, body of knowledge, history of ideas and interests, and each focuses on developing students’ knowledge, understanding and skills in the language modes of listening, speaking, reading, viewing and writing.
The goals of literacy learning at our school are developed in line with the Victorian Curriculum. We believe that the teaching of English ensures that students:
- learn to listen to, read, view, speak, write, create and reflect on increasingly complex and sophisticated spoken, written and multimodal texts across a growing range of contexts with accuracy, fluency and purpose
- appreciate, enjoy and use the English language in all its variations and develop a sense of its richness and power to evoke feelings, convey information, form ideas, facilitate interaction with others, entertain, persuade and argue
- understand how Standard Australian English works in its spoken and written forms and in combination with non-linguistic forms of communication to create meaning
- develop interest and skills in inquiring into the aesthetic aspects of texts, and develop an informed appreciation of literature.
Effective Literacy teaching within the classroom setting will generally follow the sequence of :
- Explicit instruction: fully explaining the concepts and skills that students are required to learn
- Modelling: breaking down information into smaller learning outcomes and modelling each step so that students can see what is expected of them
- Guided practice: providing multiple opportunities for students to practise, and support is gradually removed as students develop understanding and can work more independently
- Independent practice: once students have developed understanding, teachers ask students to complete tasks themselves while the teacher monitors and provides feedback.
Our vision for reading instruction involves:
- Phonemic awareness: understanding that speech is made up of words and sounds
- Phonics: knowledge of the letter (grapheme) – sound (phoneme) relationships and the ability to use these relationships to decode words
- Fluency: ability to read accurately and quickly to derive meaning from text
- Vocabulary: understanding word meanings in isolation and in context
- Comprehension: ability to understand and derive meaning from text.
Our vision for writing instruction involves:
- Creating supportive writing environments: writing instruction is a priority across all learning areas and year levels. We ensure students write frequently for a range of meaningful audiences and purposes.
- Developing essential writing skills: we explicitly teach handwriting and keyboarding skills. We prioritise explicit instruction in spelling and orthography (encompassing morphology, etymology and phonology) and utilise explicit word, sentence, and paragraph analysis to enhance student writing. We embed grammar and punctuation instruction in meaningful tasks and ensure adequate instruction in planning, drafting, evaluating and revision of writing. Formative assessment is embedded to provide explicit feedback to progress students.
- Building knowledge for writing: we explicitly teach genre macrostructure and microstructure through modelling, guided practice and exemplars, providing subject-specific instruction to build rich content knowledge and language for expressing and developing ideas and extending vocabulary.
Our vision for oral language development involves:
- Engaging with spoken language as the foundation of learning and an essential component of exploring ideas, expressing viewpoints, forming arguments and building vocabulary.
- Providing opportunities to share and listen to others in a variety of settings.
- Developing a consistent way of understanding and talking about language: language in use and language as a system. This enables them to reflect on their own speaking and writing, and to discuss these productively with others.
Multi-tiered Systems of Support (MTSS)
Inclusion of formative assessment and regular review in English enhances student learning. Through effective questioning, teachers can target their instruction to meet the needs of their students. Frequent rehearsal, review and recall reinforces learning connections in all areas of English.
Additional learning support in English is provided within the class setting through small focused teaching groups, pull out groups where appropriate and UFLI (University of Florida Literacy Institute) intensive phonics support with an intervention teacher.