An Effective Teacher Of Primary English And Literacy

Assignment 3: Essay Discuss the attributes and skills needed to be an effective teacher of primary English and literacy The attributes needed to be an effective teacher of primary English and literacy are as follows. Firstly, a good teacher must know have an in depth understanding of the subject matter and how to help students learn those subjects. They must recognize how knowledge is constructed in the discipline, as well as how it can be linked to other disciplines. I believe knowledge of the discipline ensures students are exposed to modes of critical thinking, and encourage them to analyze, apply, synthesize, and evaluate. Secondly, a teacher must know how to make the subject come alive for their students. They must realize students†¦show more content†¦The methods used to engage students, such as, multimodal sources and narrative. In addition, to different forms of assessment, the ways in which teachers use assessment and the effects of assessment on students. Teaching essential skills The Australian English curriculum is based on three interrelated strands of language, literature and literacy. Together, the three strands focus on developing receptive skills, such as listening, reading and viewing, as well as productive skills including, speaking, writing and creating (Australian Curriculum, 2015). In order to develop these skills teachers need to instill in children key concepts such as phonemic awareness. Phonics, as a teaching theory, was established in the early nineteenth century (ref). It can be defined as a system of teaching reading that builds on the alphabetic principle, a system of which a central component is the teaching of correspondences between letters or groups of letters and their pronunciations (Adams, 1994; Liu, 2010). English is a complex language with thousands of words. Therefore teaching students 42 sounds or phonics is far more effective than focusing on words as a whole (DeCeuklaire, 2015). There are many benefits that come from teaching p honics, for example, phonics assist in the decoding of unfamiliar words, improve comprehension, expand students vocabulary and increase their ability to read fluently