Advice for teachers -
Foundation English

Unit 1 - Area of Study 1​: Reading and viewing texts

Outcome 1

Produce prose and graphic summaries and explanations of specified texts.

Examples of learning activities

• Annotate different types of texts, considering their structural elements and exploring how these elements can be used to make predictions about the text.
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  Consider a headline from a recent media article and predict what the article would be about. Then, read further on the issue to develop new ideas on it.
  
• Study a long paragraph from an informative or literary text projected on the whiteboard and practise predicting content by skimming for key words.
• Complete comprehension questions designed by the teacher to explore the key information in a text.
• Using a well-annotated copy of a literary work, take notes and record key information from the text. The teacher can model this using bullet points on one section of the whiteboard.
  
• Read a brief untitled text (short story, article, poem) and create a suitable title or headline.
• Complete cloze activities to build capacity to infer information from texts.
• Read two brief texts that present individual perspectives on the same issue, and compare their perspectives using a Venn Diagram.
• Create a mind map of the key characters or themes in a literary text.
• View a brief audio-visual clip (for example, a news-clip, advertisement or TED-talk), taking notes on a set number of key points and using a teacher-provided handout as a scaffold to draw attention to the main ideas.

 

Detailed example

Making predictions about key ideas in texts to aid comprehension

Teacher prompts students to complete this activity in the following steps.

1. Project a recent headline from a media article on the whiteboard. It needs to be an issue that is accessible and engaging to the students in the class, and about which they may have some pre-existing knowledge.
2. Ask students what issue the headline relates to, establishing what they know about it already and summarising their prior knowledge on the whiteboard.
3. Consider the headline itself in more detail. What key information could be learned from this article that may develop our pre-existing understanding?
4. Look for any emotionally charged language in the headline, which may indicate authorial agenda or bias. Use this to establish which aspects of the article may need further checking.
5. Students then read the article itself, looking for ideas and information that confirm or challenge their predictions. They list a set number of new ideas learnt about the issue through their reading. This can be presented in note-form, or with the aid of a graphic organiser.