English

 

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Our purpose is to empower our students to communicate effectively through different means and mediums, including digital contexts to connect with their multicultural audiences.

As Papatoetoe West is a multicultural, multilingual and richly diverse school community, it is essential that we enable our learners to be able to share and understand each other.  Empowering students to communicate effectively also supports them with living the ‘West Way’ school values of Respect for ourselves, Respect for others and Respect for environment.  Being part of the West Papatoetoe Kahui Ako, we embrace the goal to build and strengthen effective classroom practice development for literacy by offering support and guidance for teachers.

Teachers are expected to plan and teach lessons using “Explaining Reading” by G. Duffy and the “Duffy” sheet and support their writing programmes with Gail Loane’s “I’ve Got Something to Say” text.  All areas of literacy are also supported with the Effective Literacy book.  Our aim is to empower students to become engaged in their learning, moving the locus of control more to the students, from the teacher.

For an effective literacy programme, we need to ensure that literacy is integrated in to all areas of the curriculum, and students have the opportunity to become literate across the curriculum.

Communication is primarily broken into the areas of:

 

Oral language 

Oral language is integrated across the curriculum and recognises the oratory culture of our community, where students are empowered to speak with confidence and to respond and engage in verbal discussion. Development of oral language skills enables students to be able to negotiate social situations, create meaning of the world around them, and access the curriculum.  This connects with our school vision and values.  

Written language - (Reading and Writing)

Our delivery model is based on a best evidence synthesis which features and prioritises a responsive, adaptive and engaging reading experience. We identify and respond to student strengths and needs, with each teacher designing a flexible programme based on a range of formative assessment tools. Students learn socially, and are given opportunities to respond and share through a variety of texts and interests. We embrace mixed-ability, flexible grouping that recognises more than just a reading ‘age’ or writing level.  A key focus in all areas of our literacy programme will be ensuring the students are clear about the purpose of the text or discussion and who their audience is.

Visual language 

Visual language involves the expressing and responding to ideas through visual media. We provide our students opportunities to share and collaborate through an exposure to and growing understanding of visual media.  Students will create a range of visual language features appropriately, showing some understanding of their effects (posters, brochures, advertisements and other images) over their time at school.