Literacy Professional Learning Resource – Key Concepts
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Key concepts: VELS 1 & 2 | VELS 3 | VELS 4 | VELS 5 & 6
VELS level 1 & 2 – Repertoires of language (Gee, Halliday, Snow)
This section explores the repertoires of language. This refers to the knowledge of a language required to attain literacy. This is split into the following areas:
Purposes and functions
Michael Halliday (1975) identifies seven functions that language has for children in their early years. Children are motivated to acquire language because it serves certain purposes or functions for them. The first four functions help the child to satisfy physical, emotional and social needs.
Halliday calls them instrumental, regulatory, interactional, and personal functions. The next three functions are heuristic, imaginative, and representational, all helping the child to come to terms with his or her environment.
Instrumental, regulatory, interactional and personal language functions:
- instrumental: this is when the child uses language to express their needs (e.g. 'want juice')
- regulatory: this is where language is used to tell others what to do (e.g. 'go away')
- interactional: Here language is used to make contact with others and form relationships (e.g. 'love you, mummy')
- personal: This is the use of language to express feelings, opinions and individual identity (e.g. 'me good girl')
Heuristic, imaginative, and representational language functions:
- heuristic: this is when language is used to gain knowledge about the environment (e.g. 'What is the tractor doing?')
- imaginative: here language is used to tell stories and jokes, and to create an imaginary environment.
- representational: the use of language to convey facts and information.
Syntax
Definition of syntax: the way in which linguistic elements (words and phrases) are arranged to form grammatical structures.
English has a highly developed set of conventions which govern the ways words can be combined to form phrases and sentences. In some traditions of linguistic description, grammar is seen as one of four systems of language structure. The other systems are: phonology (the sound system); semantics (the meaning system) and the lexicon (the words and fixed expressions of a language).
Grammar is often further divided into morphology (the principles of word formation and inflection) and syntax (the principles of word combination and sequencing).
Traditionally grammar is limited to the analysis of structures at and below sentence level. This area of study is sometimes called text grammar. Another term sometimes used is pragmatics.
Systemic-functional grammar is an approach to grammatical description based upon the work of Halliday (1985). Central to the analysis is the idea of choice.
Each aspect of grammatical description is seen as a series of options from which the speaker or writer makes choices dependent on context and intention. Of particular importance in this type of analysis are the notions of transitivity, theme and field, mode and tenor.
A feature of this work is that grammar is related to meaning in a way that is not achieved in all other approaches, which tend to separate the form of grammar from its function.
Vocabulary
- Oral vocabulary development ensures that a child is successful in literacy after Year One.
- There is a relationship between the vocabulary developed in a child’s early years and reading comprehension in Years Three and Four.
- Young children are capable of, and should be exposed to, specialised language.
James Gee 2006
Phonological knowledge
It is important to recognise the significance of students hearing the sounds of the language and mapping the sounds of English to different letter combinations.
Definitions:
- phonology: the sound structure of speech and includes intonation, stress and timing, as well as words, syllables and phonemes
- phonemes are the sounds units of a language
- phonemic awareness: the understanding that every spoken word is made up of small units of sounds
- phonics: the teaching of phonological and phonemic awareness.
Refer to the glossary from the English Developmental Continuum for definitions of phonology, phonemes, phonemic awareness and phonics.
http://www.education.vic.gov.au/studentlearning/teachingresources/english/englishcontinuum/englishglossary.htm
A focus on phonological knowledge and systematic instruction in phonics, is reported in the recommendations of The National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (2005), initiated by the Federal government (pages 14-24).
Read the report (http://www.dest.gov.au/nitl/report.htm)
Some of these findings include:
- direct systematic instruction in phonics during the early years of schooling is an essential foundation for teaching children to read.
- all students learn best when teachers adopt an integrated approach to teaching reading that explicitly teaches phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary knowledge and comprehension.
- a rich print environment with many resources, including fiction and non-fiction books, charts and computer programs provides contextual support for language and literacy development
- t eachers provide an integrated approach to reading that supports the development of oral language, vocabulary, grammar, reading fluency, comprehension and the literacies of new technologies.
Professional learning
Knowledge about phonics (phonology and phonemic awareness) assists students to speak, listen, read and write.
Consider strategies of how to explicitly teach students to hear the sounds in words for the purposes of speaking/listening, reading and writing.
Download the resource sheet: Repertoire of language brainstorm table (PDF - 13Kb)
Responses might include:
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Speaking and listening |
Reading |
Writing |
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Hearing extended stretches of language; experiences that promote active listening; playing with language [rhymes, chants, poems] to discern sounds; frequent opportunities for sustained listening and talk; the importance of the teacher as model. |
Decoding a text: initial predictions, confirming predictions, and word recognition. |
Beginning writers go from sounds to letters; spelling analysis [segmenting sounds in words] and synthesis [blending sounds]; alphabet, onset (rime) [b/ag] blends [sc, sk, br], digraphs [sh, wh, oo…. Ie, syllables [ sud/den, don/key]. dipthongs [b/ uy], more complex digraphs [ought, ould], prefixes, suffixes, compound words [break/fast], base words [big, bigger, biggest]. |
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Related material
Previous key concept - Developing literate language (Christie, Clay, Wells)
Next key concept - Oral language and schooling - Speaking and listening (Wells)
Teaching strategy - Variety of methods for teaching vocabulary