Language/Reading Curriculum in the Fourth Grade
Summary of National Curriculum
The Gradual Release of Responsibility Model, the pedagogical approach of the Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC), seeks to support the individual instructional needs of each student. While progressively moving them from a state of dependence to one of independent practice and skills application, this approach expects the teacher to make careful observations of individual students’ learning and use professional judgment in order to plan learning opportunities.3 Three instructional strategies that exemplify the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model while addressing specific literacy skills—shared, guided, and independent reading—have been implemented in ADEC schools. Exhibit 1 illustrates the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model.
Exhibit 1: Grade 4 English and Arabic Curriculum
The Abu Dhabi School Model curriculum is organized around a set of learning outcomes and has a dual focus on the Arabic and English languages. The English and Arabic curriculum is broken into four strands: Literacy Readiness Skills; Speaking and Listening; Reading; and Writing. The English Reading strand consists of three substrands: Reading Texts; Reading for Meaning; and Vocabulary/High Frequency Words. The Arabic Reading strand consists of four substrands: Comprehension/Self-Assessment/Reading Strategies; Vocabulary; Nonfiction Texts; and Fiction Texts.
The focus of the Grade 4 Arabic curriculum is to enable students to determine their reading goals, predict the content of texts, and use a variety of skills to analyze different texts. Students also are required to:4
- Summarize texts
- Use tables and graphics
- Answer direct and indirect questions
- Read both paper and electronic publications
- Self-check their understanding of the text
- Read independently
- Listen to their teachers
- Participate in diverse readings of the persuasive and technical texts knowledge
- Use catalogs and titles
- Ask questions about reading
- Outline the main idea and identify important details
- Distinguish between fact and opinion
- Compare story plots and features of a narrative
- Distinguish between different characteristics of literary genres; find the relationship between the general atmosphere of the story and the writerʼs choice of vocabulary
In the Reading strand of the Grade 4 English curriculum, students are expected to:5
- Use context knowledge to understand familiar and unfamiliar texts
- Analyze how the structural features of explanatory texts support a specific purpose
- Evaluate the main idea of texts and support their answers with key details
- Analyze the use of figurative language, inferences, visuals, author’s purpose, and characterization in terms of the meaning they add
- Increase their English vocabulary to include homophones, synonyms, antonyms, and high frequency words