From the English Department and The Study Hub – On Reading
Wide Reading Lessons
Research on the benefits of reading have been long documented. It not only helps students’ language development and written expression it exposes them to new ways of understanding and thinking about the world.
While the English Department has always implemented wide reading lessons, we have restructured our program this year so students will reflect on and respond to the content they read. Wide reading lessons will continue to run across Years 7,9 and 10 once a fortnight for 40 minutes, with the last 10 minutes of the lesson dedicated to students responding to a series of critical inquiry questions in their reflection journal. These questions will be related to plot, character building, textual form and the ways in which the author prompts readers to think critically about key ideas in the novel. The reflection journal will inform the Learning Profiles on the half yearly and yearly Report.
We believe the combination of reading and reflecting on what is read will help students build their applied reading skills, vocabulary and prompt them to think about the ways in which writers craft their creative writing and so, this will enrich students’ own creative and critical responses.
Assessment Feedback Process
We will also continue our post-assessment feedback process Rewrite: Working to Get it Right. Students will have the opportunity to reflect on teacher feedback by reviewing what they did well, what needs improvement and how to improve. They will then be given time during class to rewrite an aspect of their task. A requirement of this process is that parents look over their daughter’s assessment feedback and sign this document. We believe this process will keep you informed and up to date with your daughter’s strengths and areas requiring improvement in English over the course of each term.
Your daughter’s English teacher is always available to discuss any questions or concerns you may have about her English learning. Please also feel free to contact me to discuss your daughter’s progress.
Ms. Lavinia Scarfone, English Coordinator
Year 8 Literature Circles in The Study Hub
To build student investment in reading more widely and their ability to draw comparisons between literary texts, the College librarian, Mrs Harada, will work closely with the English department and Year 8 English classes to implement a specialised reading program that extends student learning in each unit of work studied this year. The program will be collaborative in the sense that students will be grouped together to read aloud and discuss supplementary literature. Each student will then be responsible for responding to what they have read with the benefit of peer discussion.
The program will, for example, extend a student’s understanding of the refugee experience in Australia by exposing students to refugee literature beyond the core novel Mahtab’s story, which they study in Term 1. In Term 2, students’ study of monologues and Shakespearean excerpts will be broadened through engaging critically with supplementary theatrical texts, while in Term 3, students’ understanding of the dystopian genre will again be enhanced through close group reading and discussion of the different ways writers construct these texts for different purposes and audiences. In Term 4 students will be introduced to the bildungsroman genre to supplement the performance poetry unit that explores notions of identity and selfhood.
At the end of the Literature Circles lesson, students will be encouraged to borrow books and this will be registered on OLIVER (The College Library Management System). We will be checking and rewarding our best borrowers throughout each Term.
Mrs. Nicole Harada, Teacher Librarian