| Level |
Use of Texts |
Contextual Understandings |
Conventions |
Processes & Strategies |
| 1. The student engages in reading-like behaviour and demonstrates understanding that written symbols and illustrations convey information. |
R1.1 The student roleplays being a competent reader and recognises familiar symbols.
 Retell a story that has been read by a teacher or parent by following the pictures and text.
Use pictures to talk about the story.
Engage in reading-like behaviours. |
R1.2 The student makes connections between own knowledge and experience and the ideas, events and information in texts read aloud.
Make connections between illustrations and print in picture books.
Discuss aspects of favourite books Identify features, e.g. favourite characters. |
R1.3 The students demonstrates emerging awareness and use of symbols and conventions when making meaning from texts.
Talk about a story that has been read using an illustration to help explanation. |
R1.4 The student recognises and uses cues to predict and construct meaning in texts.
Use title and illustrations to predict what a text might be about.
Draw on personal experience or knowledge of a topic or context to predict events and information during shared book activities. |
| 2. The student uses basic strategies to locate, select and read a range of simple texts; recalls and discusses significant ideas form texts; and understands that people write about read and imagined experiences. |
R2.1 The student constructs and retells meanings from short written texts with familiar vocabulary, predictable structures and frequent illustrations.
Read and respond to texts for beginning readers.
Relate the story of a picture book, providing some supporting detail and offering an opinion about the story.
Place a set of pictures in a sequence and write or paste appropriate captions to retell a familiar story.
Retell and comment on incidents from a narrative giving attention to plot elements such as settings, character, conflict and resolution. |
R2.2 The student understands that print texts are constructed by people and represent real and imaginary experience.
Discuss the way different groups of people are represented in narratives, e.g. young or old people, male or female, etc.
Discuss with the teacher the way the illustrations in a story help to anchor meaning.
Refer to the author and illustrator of a book commenting on other books produced by them.
Recognise that texts could have been written differently.
Use library to locate reading material that serves different purposes, e.g. differentiate between fiction and nonfiction.
Consider, on the basis of personal knowledge and experience, how likely are the events, behaviour, settings and outcomes in narratives. |
R2.3 The student recognises and interprets basic linguistic structures and features of texts.
Have a bank of known sight words that are recognised automatically in printed texts.
Recognise letters and combinations which represent sounds in words. |
R2.4 The student uses basic strategies for selecting texts, making meaning and maintaining continuity of understanding.
Use picture clues to predict a texts's content and make connections between illustrations and written text.
Try to work out the meaning of unknown words using more than one cue, e.g. picture clues, knowledge of the topic, patterns of language, graphophonic clues.
Make substitutions or omissions which maintain meaning when reading.
Choose, from a range provided, texts for enjoyment on the basis of interest, book cover, title, illustrations, print size and recommendations of others. |
| 3. The student integrates a range of strategies to interpret and discuss relationships between ideas, information and events in written texts; identifies and uses language structures; and recognises and discusses the use of symbols and stereotypes to make meaning. |
R3.1 The student interprets and discusses some relationships between ideas, information and events in texts with familiar context and which include some unfamiliar words or linguistic structures and features.
Read for personal enjoyment and interest, poetry, short stories, autobiographies and novels.
Re-tell and discuss interpretation of texts read, with attention to key events, main characters and settings.
Make some inferences about ideas implicit in a text, e.g. infer a character's motives from actions. |
R3.2 The student identifies simple symbolic meanings and stereotypes in texts and discusses their purpose and meaning.
Recognise stereotyping as a recurring element in some texts, e.g. describe the stereotypical characteristics of "goodies" and "baddies".
Discuss the way people are stereotyped in texts recognising that people could have been represented differently.
Explain how people from different sociocultural or minority groups are represented and if this is fair. |
R3.3 The student identifies and uses the linguistic structures and features characteristic of a range of text types to construct meaning.
Make statements identifying text types, e.g. genres in fiction.
Construct timelines, storymaps or flow charts to represent event sequences in a novel.
Identify how language is used to signal logical relationships in texts. |
R3.4 The student integrates a variety of strategies for interpreting texts and uses some strategies for identifying resources and finding information in texts.
Clarify or correct meaning by pausing, re-reading, reading-on or slowing down.
Adjust reading strategy for reading picture books, e.g. examine both picture and text in a picture book.
Use keywords, author, title or series searches to find fiction books. |
| 4. The student understands how language structures work to shape meaning; explains possible reasons for varying interpretations; and justifies own interpretation of ideas, information and events in texts. |
R4.1 The student interprets and discusses ideas, information and events in texts with familiar content and which include some unfamiliar words or linguistic structures and features.
Read for own enjoyment.
Explore and discuss humour in narratives, showing an awareness of how it is constructed, e.g. bizarre or unusual situations, events, people, dialogue.
Explore an alternative point of view of the character to that promoted by the text, e.g. how would a narrative change if told from a different point of view. |
R4.2 The student recognises that texts are constructed for particular purposes and to appeal to certain groups.
Conduct a class survey on favourite books and explain the most popular in terms of storylines, characters, language used as well as marketing and design.
Discuss the enjoyment most people get from narratives and note how this is used by writers to present a point of view.
Recognise that different fiction genres appeal to different audiences. |
R4.3 The student identifies and discusses how linguistic structures and features work to shape readers' understandings of texts.
Recognise and discuss the purpose of important organisational elements of story in narrative.
Understand and discuss how some stories use figurative language. |
R4.4 The student selects, uses and reflects on strategies appropriate for different texts and reading purposes; identifies information needs; and finds resources for specific purposes.
Use search strategies on the Internet and library databases to find authors and / or books of their choice.
Use a range of automatic monitoring and self-correcting methods when reading. |
| 5. The student discusses and compares texts to examine issues, ideas and effects; pays attention to synthesising information from different sources to construct reasoned responses; and recognises that texts are constructed for particular audiences and purposes. |
R5.1 The student identifies, discusses and justifies own interpretation of challenging ideas and issues presented in texts containing complex linguistic structures and features.
Discuss the motives and feelings of characters or people in fictional texts.
Support a point of view about themes and issues in texts by distinguishing between plot and theme, identifying major points of conflict and significant turning-points in plots, and using an understanding of cause and effect. |
R5.2 The student explains possible reasons for varying interpretations of a text.
Recognise that interpretations of some texts are more readily agreed upon than others.
Discuss and justify their own preferences for a particular interpretation of a text, referring to text details and their own knowledge and experience.
Consider how changes to aspects of a text can alter people's interpretation of its meaning. |
R5.3 The student draws on knowledge of linguistic structures and features to explain how texts are constructed.
Examine aspects of structure such as chronology, plot and sub-plot in novel and short stories, e.g. discuss the way supporting characters are used to move the action along, cause conflict.
Justify inferences about information and ideas implicit in novels by referring to features such as vocabulary and text structure.
Discuss the way that authors use particular words to convey precise or subtle meaning. |
R5.4 The student uses knowledge of texts to construct meaning from a range of text types and systematically finds and reconstructs information.
Explore purposes and effects of manipulation of chronological order in narrative, e.g. to create suspense in a mystery tale.
Examine how narrative texts are constructed, focusing on setting, character, conflict and resolution.
Use background knowledge about settings to enhance understanding of theme.
Question the text, predict and hypothesise knowing that authors sometimes deliberately seek to confuse readers. |
