Cabramatta West Public School

Key features

Improving student writing by engaging stage 3 students in using everyday texts and technology.

Context

Cabramatta West Public School is situated in a culturally diverse area in South Western Sydney Region. Student enrolment is 567 with 92% of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. There are many teachers in their first years of teaching, both permanent and in temporary positions. There is a strong focus on professional learning.

In 2007, the school investigated the effectiveness of using newspapers in the classroom to improve literacy learning for students in Stage 3.This included teaching students how to navigate and critically analyse the content of newspapers.

Teachers adopted an action research approach and posed the question:

Does the use of ICT and media sources, as a tool, effectively engage and improve students’ knowledge and use of language structures and features, text structures, grammar and conventions, to enable achievement of Stage 3 writing outcomes?

This was the central question teachers at Cabramatta West Public School wanted to investigate through a media literacy project. They drew on resources provided by Herald Education which offers free subscription to all Priority Schools.

Organising to improve student writing

Year 6 teachers were concerned that a number of their students were not achieving national benchmarks in literacy and were not achieving stage appropriate outcomes in writing. They wanted to make a difference to the literacy performance of their Year 6 students, particularly in writing.

A review of school data indicated a need to focus explicitly on the skills and strategies students would need to achieve Stage 3 outcomes in writing.

Literacy groups operated at the school for one hour sessions four times per week. Within this existing structure three literacy groups were involved in using newspapers to improve their writing. 

Teacher learning

The school allocated time for teachers to engage in professional learning in the use of interactive whiteboards as a teaching tool for their literacy lessons. This became an effective way of explicitly demonstrating literacy strategies. Teachers met informally and formally with their supervisor to discuss ongoing student progress and to share teaching strategies. The group of teachers implementing this media literacy project shared their progress and success strategies with peers at the term 3 school development day. 

Student learning

Year 6 students were taught how to:

• critically read and deconstruct visual, written and oral texts
• transfer knowledge into appropriate written text structures for specific purposes
• independently identify and use relevant language features in texts
• evaluate their own writing using specific criteria.

Students devised research questions as a focus for achieving Stage 3 writing outcomes. Each group worked on a specific ‘big question’ or ‘big idea’ as an anchor for their writing focus. For example:

Each student group used newspapers in the process of learning how to write compound and complex sentences. They also identified other grammatical features of sentences such as nouns, adjectives and adverbs. They identified the components of newspapers and researched articles related to their research question or topic. Newspapers proved to be an effective resource for improving each group’s writing outcomes.

Optimising student literacy learning through quality teaching

Teachers and students collaborated in ways that demonstrated elements of the Quality Teaching model in practical and meaningful ways. Some examples are:
 

Connecting with parents and the community

A parent newsletter was distributed each week with information about the project and ongoing progress of each group’s literacy development. The newsletters were printed on high quality paper, with one side presenting information on each group’s development for the week and the other side with photos under the title What literacy looks like in the classrooms.

Cultural background was acknowledged with students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds drawing comparisons between their local newspapers in community languages, such as Vietnamese, Chinese or Khmer, and the Sun-Herald newspaper. In addition, a part of each LOTE lesson was devoted to working on media literacy.

Making a difference to student writing

Pre assessment data was collected to determine each group’s starting point. This assessment consisted of:

1. a writing task, where students needed to demonstrate the conventions, language structures and features of a particular type of text
2. a deconstruction task, where students read a text and identified the purpose, audience, structure and grammatical features.

Data was collected from literacy journals, where students recorded their learning and understandings for the week. Parents sighted and signed the journals. Other sources of data included:

• observations
• class and individual discussions
• student responses during literacy sessions and when using the interactive whiteboard
• ongoing writing samples demonstrating weekly writing strategies
• photos of lesson interactions and students work that were shared with parents via the weekly newsletter.

What changed for students?

Over a term all students were working within stage 3 writing outcomes across outcomes WS 3.9 – WS3.14. There was a demonstrable improvement in student engagement during literacy lessons due to the use of newspapers and the interactive whiteboard which were used to model literacy strategies.

Following the media literacy sessions, students continued to progress in their achievement of Stage 3 writing outcomes in 2007.

What changed for teachers?

Each teacher found the interactive whiteboard an effective teaching tool for explicitly demonstrating literacy strategies. Teachers also acknowledged the effective use of newspapers as a resource to support literacy development and will continue to consider their use in literacy lesson preparation.

Students have demonstrated an increase in engagement during literacy lessons due to the use of both newspapers and the interactive whiteboard to demonstrate literacy strategies (Teacher).

What changed for parents?

Parents received regular updates through the weekly newsletters on the progress of the media literacy groups and gained a better understanding of literacy learning in their child’s classroom. Parents also signed the literacy journal and provided positive feedback on their child’s learning.

For more information on using newspapers in the classroom, particularly in the middle years:

www.psp.nsw.edu.au
www.classscoop.com.au
www.heraldeducation.smh.com.au

Subscriptions

Currently all Priority Schools can subscribe at no cost to receive a class set of the Sun-Herald. Contact: