Literacy Resources
Learning to be literate in the Diocese of Ballarat is framed by inclusive practices of participation, equity and access, so that every child is enabled to realise diverse life goals and be socially connected.
Literacy is an integral part of learning in all disciplines, in all years of schooling and is foundational to lifelong learning. The early years of schooling are critical in a learner’s literacy development. Priority is given to systematic, explicit instruction, supported by ongoing monitoring and early intervention. Beyond early literacy, teachers engage and cognitively challenge learners through providing scaffolded, purposeful literacy instruction.
Catholic Education Ballarat partners with schools to inspire school communities to be effective change agents in students’ lives by intentionally co-designing learning that accelerates student outcomes.
“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope”
Literacy Updates
English Curriculum
English Curriculum F-10
The Victorian Curriculum F–10 details what every student should learn during their first eleven years of schooling. The curriculum is the common set of knowledge and skills required by students for life-long learning, social development and active, informed citizenship.
These Progressions map the sequential development of literacy skills across year levels. They support teachers to understand individual student’s literacy development and assist teachers in developing targeted teaching and learning programs.
Speaking & Listening
“One of the key indicators of students’ success in school, and indeed, in life, is their vocabulary.
The reason for this is simply that the knowledge anyone has about a topic is based on the vocabulary of that information.
Vocabulary is pivotal to background knowledge.
Explicit Vocabulary Instruction - Effect Size=0.97 ”
Marzano, Pickering (2005) and Hattie (2009)
Wolf, Crossen and Resnick (2006) describe three aspects of accountable talk:
Accountability to the learning community
Accountability to accurate knowledge
Accountability to rigorous thinking
The curriculum presents speaking and listening as a means of addressing purpose. It is useful to examine speaking and listening through Halliday’s functions of language. Teachers can audit the types of oral language interactions they are planning for their students.
Think aloud protocols involve the teacher vocalising the internal thinking that they employ when engaged in literacy practices. The intention is that think alouds make transparent the cognitive processes that literate people deploy.
Extended talk involves students being given the time to explore and deepen their ideas. It involves students engaging in discussion or explaining their thinking. Dialogic talk is talk that achieves common understandings through structured, cumulative questioning and discussion
This paper is part of the DECD Leading Learning Improvement Best advice series, which aims to provide leaders with the research and resource tools to lead learning improvement across learning areas within their school.
Reading & Viewing
It is essential for all our students to develop deep understanding, knowledge and component skills of reading to enable them to be proficient, academic, competent and confident readers who will have a critical voice and presence in our world.
The key components at the core of reading instruction are focused upon recent research that underpins the following components that support learning to read: Oral Language, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Vocabulary, Fluency and Comprehension.
Please note that these components are referred to variously in the literature as ‘The Big Five’, ‘The Five Pillars’, ‘The Five Pillars plus Oral Language’, ‘The Big Six’ and even ‘The Big Seven’. Catholic Education Ballarat chooses to use the terminology “The Five Pillars of Reading (underpinned by Oral Language)” and, its abbreviated version “The Five Pillars”.
Effective reading instruction for all students requires selecting the right strategy, at the right time, to target the right learning intentions and scaffold the student’s learning towards independence.
Our students require a secure grasp of the core skills, knowledge and dispositions to enable them to be life-long readers and learners.
Leonie Trimper, former APPA President, presents a series of short videos that outline each of the elements of effective Reading instruction
Deslea Konza outlines the Five Pillars of Reading: Oral Language, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary and Comprehension.
Reading proficiency is built on a wide knowledge and fluent use of oral language and teachers can do much to support students in this across all content areas and with all year levels.
Phonemic awareness - the ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds in words, is an essential skill that underlies a student's ability to learn to read and spell.
Phonics is the understanding that there is a relationship between the individual sounds (the phonemes) of spoken language and the letters (graphemes) that represent those sounds.
Fluency requires background knowledge of the material being read, rapid retrieval of the relevant vocabulary and knowledge of syntax and grammatical forms.
The number and variety of words that children know in the preschool and initial years of schooling, is a significant predictor of reading comprehension in the middle and secondary years of schooling.
Each of the five pillars of reading contributes to comprehension, the ultimate goal of reading, and the extent to which each is developed to the point of automaticity will impact on understanding.
Shared reading involves the whole class and the teacher reading a text that can be viewed by all together and is beyond the level students can read by themselves. Students can follow the words as the teacher reads.
Modelled reading is an opportunity for teachers to read a text aloud to students that is beyond the level students can read independently. The teacher models skilled reading behaviour.
Guided reading is an instructional practice in which small groups of students engage with a text beyond the level they could read on their own.
Reciprocal teaching is based on the foundational skills introduced through guided reading and uses scaffolded talk between a teacher and the group members to develop and support comprehension.
Close attention to and recognition of the reciprocity between reading and writing, allows students to be mindful as both readers and writers.
The language experience approach integrates speaking and listening, reading and writing. Through scaffolded talk, the teacher and student develop a written text based on first hand experiences.
Independent reading is the opportunity for individuals to be immersed in reading for enjoyment.
Literature Circles is a small group instructional approach to support the development of comprehension through discussion.
To effectively comprehend, respond to and compose visual texts, students need to understand how visual semiotic (meaning making) resources enact meaning.
These work samples are provided to support teacher understanding of the Reading and Viewing achievement standards in the Victorian Curriculum F–10: English.
Reading and viewing, as a mode of English, is an integral part of learning in all disciplines in the primary school.
These seven videos feature experts discussing different dimensions of language and literacy education.
This video explains the Fundamentals of Reading, a flexible professional learning opportunity, based on researched strategies that are effective for the learning and teaching of reading.
Writing
Writing is an integral part of learning in all disciplines, requiring students to write or compose a diverse range of texts that meet the literacy demands specific to the various curriculum or discipline areas. Through explicit teaching, knowledge and skills are built, setting all students up for success as writers.
Writing expresses who we are as people and makes our thinking and learning visible and permanent. It fosters our ability to entertain, inform and persuade our audience as we endeavour to elicit a response.
Modelled writing is a strategy in which the teacher demonstrates and verbalises the thoughts and actions that go into creating a text. It is an opportunity for students to observe a proficient writer going through the process of putting ideas into written form.
In shared writing, students collaborate with the teacher to jointly construct a written text. The teacher is scribe, prompting, questioning and supporting students as the text is shaped
Interactive writing involves the teacher sharing the writing with students. The teacher records words that are already known, so that the students can use learnt strategies to write words that challenge them
Guided writing is a small group approach, involving the teacher meeting with a group of students. It can be thought of as a group conference or small group mini-lesson, undertaken strategically in response to an identified challenge faced by the selected students.
The language experience approach is a strategy focused on creating a text about a shared experience. Language experience texts typically include visual elements such as photographs of the shared experience or illustrations by students.
Close attention to and recognition of the reciprocity between reading and writing, allows students to be mindful as both readers and writers, exploring the choices that writers make when creating texts for others.
Writing, as a mode of English in the Victorian Curriculum, is an integral part of learning in all disciplines, requiring students to write or compose a diverse range of texts that meet the literacy demands specific to the various curriculum or discipline areas.
Bump it Up Wall
Contact the CEB Literacy Team to learn more about creating a Bump It Up Wall.
This video explains the Fundamentals of Writing, a flexible set of learning modules that unpack researched strategies that are effective for the learning and teaching of writing. Writing Fundamentals can be facilitated as flexible learning opportunities determined by your school context and student learning data.
Literacy Assessment
“The only defensible reason for assessment of any sort is that it helps educators make better decisions about what to teach kids and how to teach them most effectively.” Popham, Everything School Leaders Need to Know About Assessment.
The intended purpose of the Literacy assessment section of the HIVE is for Literacy Leaders to be able to lead professional learning for teachers in order to assist them to implement assessment tasks with validity and rigour. All primary schools implementing the CECV mandated assessment tasks are advised to purchase the Record of Oral Language (2015) and An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (Fourth Edition).
F-2 Reading Assessment
F-2 Literacy Assessment Guidelines
This guide provides information to principals, literacy leaders and teachers regarding Catholic Education Ballarat and Catholic Education Melbourne data collection requirements.
This online ‘AlphaAssess Teacher Notes’ is a special Catholic Education Commission of Victoria Ltd (CECV) edition that should be used with the AlphaAssess Levels 1–28 CECV Benchmarking Kit.
Progressive Achievement Tests in Reading assess students’ reading comprehension skills, vocabulary knowledge and spelling
Progressive Achievement Tests in Written Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar assess students’ understanding of the standard English language conventions of grammar and punctuation.
The National Assessment Program (NAP) is the measure through which governments, education authorities, schools and the community can determine whether or not young Australians are meeting important educational outcomes.
ROL Administration Guidelines Video
ROL Analysis and Interpretation Video
This brief video introduces the UK Year One Phonics Screening Check. Follow this link to find further information about the Australian Government online version of the Year One Phonics Check.
Language Conventions
Control of spelling, grammar and punctuation is vital across all curriculum areas, as learners strive to communicate clearly. These are key skills that impact significantly on life outcomes.
This resource includes information about the 4 spelling knowledges, which students need to draw upon to be effective spellers, and details the developmental stages of spelling.
Morphology is the study of words and their parts. The Victorian Government’s literacy toolkit provides an outline.
An article from the International Literacy Association (2019). “The question of whether to include phonics instruction has been resolved. The answer is yes. The discussion now should be how...”
“Orthography, morphology, and etymology are not the preserve of the advanced learners, something interesting to challenge the gifted. They are necessary skills, including for the students who are finding spelling difficult.”
This animation explains the historical roots of the English language.
The Progressions support teachers to understand individual students' literacy development, independent of curriculum area, and they can assist teachers in developing targeted teaching and learning programs.
Information about the language conventions test which focuses on the use and knowledge of language conventions in written standard Australian English. Minimum standards for Years 3, 5 and 7 are detailed.
The Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority provides sample NAPLAN Tests.
In this resource, the NSW Department of Education outlines teaching strategies for all key language conventions.
This exemplar lesson uses Alison Lester’s ‘Are We There Yet?’ as the basis of a Year 4 lesson about prepositional phrases. It provides an example of explicit grammar instruction within the context of a text study.
Find out more about how language conventions and grammar skills are developed from infancy and throughout childhood.
In this filmed webinar, Alison Clarke explains the five different types of spelling logic that teachers need to know.
Oral Language Supporting All Learning - OLSAL
OLSAL focuses on enhancing teacher capacity to explicitly plan for the oral language learning of students, as language is the core means through which learning and teaching is facilitated. Focus areas for OLSAL include: What is Oral Language? Why focus on Oral Language? Phonological Awareness, Vocabulary, Complex Sentences, Story Grammar and Teacher /Student Talk Ratio.
Professor Iram Siraj discusses the importance of oral language for early childhood, primary school, and beyond.
Oral language development is strongly linked to literacy, the development of social skills, friendships, prosocial problem solving and conflict resolution skills, self-esteem, school attachment and hence mental health (OLSEL Report, 2011).
This DOBCEL presentation has been created to foster dialogue focused on: Why focus on Oral Language?
This DOBCEL presentation can be used to foster dialogue about phoneme counting.
This DOBCEL presentation can be used to foster dialogue about syllables.
“Phonological awareness is a crucial skill to develop in children, as it is strongly linked to early reading and spelling success, through its association with phonics. It refers to the awareness of the different sound units within words e.g. syllables, phonemes, onset and rime.”