Through the Middle Years, students practise, consolidate and extend what they have learned. They develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of grammar and language, and are increasingly able to articulate this knowledge. Gradually, more complex punctuation, clause and sentence structures, and textual purposes and patterns are introduced. This deeper understanding includes more explicit metalanguage, as students learn to classify words, sentence structures and texts. To consolidate both ‘learning to read and write’ and ‘reading and writing to learn’, students explore the language of different types of texts, including visual texts, advertising, digital/online and media texts.
Students at Mortlake College are taught English in multi age, multi ability classrooms with an emphasis on differentiation to the Zone of Proximal Development for each child.Classroom strategies incorporate aspects of the Cafe, Daily 5 program and the Six Traits of Writing. Unit themes are presented on a 3yr rotation, aligned with the 5-7 and 8-10 vertical groupings.
Assessment is triangulated through external data (P.AT, On Demand & NAPLAN), summative and formative testing such as TORCH and teacher assessed classwork based on the AusVels level appropriate to expected year level and the learning stage of the individual students.
