ENGLISH

The study of English is central to the learning and development of all young Australians. It helps create confident communicators, imaginative thinkers and informed citizens. It is through the study of English that individuals learn to analyse, understand, communicate with and build relationships with others and with the world around them. The study of English helps young people develop the knowledge and skills needed for education, training and the workplace. It helps them become ethical, thoughtful, informed and active members of society.

The Western Australian Curriculum: English, aims to ensure 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.

In 2020, our main focus area in English is: 'Talk For Writing'.

TALK FOR WRITING

'Talk For Writing' is a unique approach that uses spoken activities to develop writing skills.

As children read and are read to, they store patterns that form the building blocks of written expression. In order to write sentence patterns appropriate to a given text (e.g. a recount starts with ‘when, who, what and where’ elements) children need to have these patterns modelled with multiple opportunities to say them before being expected to write them. In 'Talk For Writing', the process of 'Imitation – Innovation – Invention' is explored. Students learn to orally recite and act out popular stories through listening and reading. The teacher maps out the story using pictures to aid students’ memory. The repetition allows the students to interact with the text and helps them to internalise the language patterns and text features. Students are then taught to use the underlying structure of the original text to create their own version on a different topic. Over time, they move towards independent writing as they create texts about their own topics.

“Unsurprisingly, the best writers in any class are always readers. Reading influences writing - the richness, depth and breadth of reading determines the writer that we become.”

- Pie Corbett, Talk For Writing.