In English, students learn to read, write, speak, view and represent language. They learn about the English language and literature through working with a wide range of spoken, visual, multimedia and digital texts. Students learn how language varies according to context, and how to communicate with a range of audiences for different purposes. They learn to read for information and pleasure. Students gain a sound grasp of language structures, punctuation, spelling and grammar. They also learn to think in ways that are imaginative, creative and critical.
Some Year 3 and Year 4 examples
Students:
- communicate for a range of purposes and audiences, eg conduct brief interviews to obtain information, give instructions for a visual arts project
- use a wider range of reading strategies to confirm predictions and locate information, eg skim read using headings and subheadings
- enrich writing through the use of adjectives, adverbs, phrases, conjunctions, pronouns, direct and indirect speech and action verbs using the correct tense for the story, eg present tense, past tense
- use a range of digital technologies to construct, edit and publish written text, and select, edit and place visual, print and audio elements
- understand how to use strategies for spelling words including spelling rules, knowledge of word families, spelling generalisations, and letter combinations including double letters
- employ various speaking skills to give confident presentations, eg gesture, facial expression, pause, emphasis, volume, humour, rhetorical questions, clarity
- read and engage with a wide variety of stories, poems and visual texts
- use comprehension strategies to build meaning to expand content knowledge, identify the writer’s point of view, describe and compare different interpretations, and identify stereotypes
- produce more complex pieces of writing, eg a persuasive text to develop a position on a new school rule
- use a variety of spelling strategies to spell high-frequency words correctly when composing imaginative and other texts
- respond to a range of texts, eg through role-play or drama, for pleasure and enjoyment, and express thoughtful conclusions about those texts