Literacy skills are explicit in the Australian Curriculum: English. However, literacy is strengthened, made specific and extended in other learning areas. Literacy enables students to access, understand, analyse and evaluate information, make meaning, express thoughts and emotions, present ideas and opinions, interact with others and participate in activities at school and in their lives beyond school.
Australian Curriculum: English
The Australian Curriculum: English aims to ensure that students:
learn to listen to, read, view, speak, write, create and reflect on increasingly complex and sophisticated spoken, written and multimodal texts across a growing range of contexts with accuracy, fluency and purpose (Australian Curriculum: English, Aims 2017).
The National Literacy Learning Progression helps teachers to develop fine-grain understandings of student literacy development in the Australian Curriculum: English, especially in the early years. The progression amplifies the literacy skills in the Australian Curriculum: English, particularly in the Language and Literacy strands, and is organised by modes of communication, which in the Australian Curriculum: English are identified by icons. The progression is particularly useful in guiding teachers to support students whose literacy development is above or below the age-equivalent curriculum expectations of the Australian Curriculum: English. The progression has not been designed as a checklist and does not replace the Australian Curriculum: English.
Each sub-element has been mapped to the year level expectations set by the Australian Curriculum: English.
Other Australian Curriculum learning areas
This National Literacy Learning Progression is designed to assist schools and teachers in all learning areas to support their students to successfully engage with the literacy demands of the F–10 Australian Curriculum. The overarching sub-elements of Listening, Interacting, Speaking, Understanding texts and Creating texts have specific relevance for learning areas other than English.
Advice on using the Numeracy Learning Progression with other learning areas and subjects can be viewed. This advice will assist teachers to plan how to teach specific literacy knowledge and skills essential to students’ understanding of subject content.