The Australian Curriculum: English has three strands: Language, Literature and Literacy. Together the three strands focus on developing students' knowledge, understanding and skills in listening, reading, viewing, speaking, writing and creating.
- The Language strand, knowing about the English language, takes in the understandings of grammar and the structures and features of English.
- The Literature strand encompasses the understanding, appreciating, responding to, analysing and creating of literature. At Turner we value the place of literature and maximise its use every day.
- The Literacy strand involves expanding the repertoire of English usage. It refers to a repertoire of skills that enable students to use and produce a range of texts to learn and communicate confidently at school and to become competent individuals and effective community members, workers and citizens. These skills include listening to, reading, and viewing a variety of texts for different purposes, and speaking, writing and creating texts in print, visual and audio form accurately and purposefully, in a variety of formats, within and across all learning areas.
Turner School promotes an approach to teaching English that allows daily opportunities to engage with literature, to read, write, listen and talk in creative and purposeful ways. A range of resources and learning technologies, print and digital, fiction and non-fiction are used to support learning. Time is included for explicit teaching, investigation, creativity and enjoyment of English. Time is prioritised to think and talk about English and language because we believe that oral language underpins strong literacy learning. Students work both independently and collaboratively to construct meaning and build comprehension and effective literacy skills through engagement with real texts and authentic, purposeful learning opportunities.
The skills needed to become a proficient reader, writer, speaker and viewer are taught explicitly across all areas of the curriculum and we use our inquiry units as a means to provide authentic contexts for learners to develop and use language.
The individual literacy learning needs of students are catered for through differentiation. A variety of strategies, resources and support mechanisms are used to scaffold student success and allow every student to achieve.
At Turner School we foster a love of literature and language in partnership with parents through our home reading program and the parent/carer and volunteer workshops that we offer each term. Home reading encourages the growth of children who love to read and become lifelong readers by including a mix of books being read 'to' children, 'with' children and 'by' children.