At St Anthony’s Catholic Primary School, our approach to Literacy aligns with the MACS Vision for Instruction. We use evidence-based practices, including direct explicit instruction, the science of learning, and the science of reading. We believe Literacy is the ability to read, write, speak and listen in ways that allow us to communicate effectively and make sense of the world.
We aim to provide all students with the opportunity to write with purpose, read for meaning, and develop strong skills in speaking and listening. Students engage with the English language through written, spoken, and visual texts of increasing complexity as they progress through their schooling.
Our structured approach to teaching reading and writing is grounded in explicit teaching that is purposeful, systematic, and engaging. Students are encouraged to build their skills in ways that spark curiosity and foster a love of learning. Literacy lessons at St Anthony’s not only develop the essential skills of reading and writing but also nurture the equally important skills of speaking and listening, ensuring students are confident, capable communicators.
How we teach oral language
We use Story Champs as a multi-tiered, multisensory, language curriculum to promote our students’ use of academic language in the classroom. The primary focus of Story Champs is to provide a strong oral language foundation through narrative language intervention. Story Champs uses narrative language (storytelling), to improve our students’ understanding and use of story grammar, vocabulary and complex sentences. In addition, Story Champs uses information (non-fiction) texts to improve our students’ understanding and use of the five different information text structures, and content specific vocabulary.
How we teach Reading:
We adopt a simple view of reading which teaches decoding and comprehension through six components:
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| DECODING | COMPREHENSION | ||||
| Phonological Awareness | Phonics | Fluency | Vocabulary knowledge | Reading comprehension | Oral language comprehension |
| Phonological awareness is a key early competency of emergent and proficient reading, including an explicit awareness of the structure of words, syllables, onset-rime and individual phonemes, | Knowledge of letter-sound correspondences essential for beginning to read. Phonics involves learning the alphabetic code as letter-sound correspondences. | Capacity to read texts with rhythm, phrasing, intonation and accuracy. A critical component of skilled reading, Reading fluency; quality and accuracy are both necessary for the continued achievement in reading. | Knowledge of words including structure, use, meanings and links. Reading vocab is crucial to a skilled reader’s comprehension processes. Morphology is an important aspect of vocabulary instruction. | Involves understanding the meaning and intent of a written text. An active process in which cognitive engagement is central. Comprehension is regarded as a series of interactions between the text and the reader. | Oral language provides the foundation for learning to read and is directly linked to overall reading achievement. |
How we teach Spelling Year 3 – 6
In Years 3 to 6, we use the Spelling Mastery program. This is a structured, research-based, Direct Instruction program designed to teach spelling skills to students. It uses a daily lesson format and combines three approaches, phonemic (sound-letter relationships), morphemic (word parts like prefixes and suffixes), and whole-word (word meaning and roots), to help students understand how spelling works. The goal of the program is to build understanding of spelling rules and patterns.
Use of Text-Based Units
Reading and writing draw on similar skills and knowledge such as vocabulary, text structure and comprehension. At St. Anthony’s we develop language comprehension through “text-based units’. These are whole-class units which introduce age-appropriate concepts, with adjustments and supports included to address students’ individual needs. Novels, picture story books and non-fiction texts are chosen to engage students’ interests while meeting the requirements of the curriculum. Text-based units are designed to build background knowledge, language structures, verbal reasoning and literacy knowledge. Rich text provides a model for the language we want students to use. Throughout the units, writing skills are developed using a structured approach at the word, phrase, sentence and paragraph level, building to complete texts.