Buenos Aires, Argentina

Language/Reading Curriculum in the Fourth Grade

Summary of National Curriculum

Curricular prescription in Argentina has two levels: national and state. At the national level, the Core Learning Contents (also known by its Spanish acronym, NAP) constitute a common curriculum standard agreed on by the national Ministry of Education and Sports and the ministers of education of the 23 provinces and the City of Buenos Aires. A Ministry resolution states that NAPs are the foundation of the national education system goal of “ensuring all inhabitants achieve equivalent competences, skills and knowledge regardless of their social and territorial location.”⁹

At the state level, provinces mandate their own curricular documents and policies, following the principles of the NAPs. The Autonomous City of Buenos Aires curricular framework for primary education was approved in 2004 by the Secretary of Education of the City of Buenos Aires.¹⁰ This document regulates schoolsʼ work, and its theoretical approach is of language as a social practice. The responsibility of compulsory education is, from this perspective, to train students not only as competent and effective speakers, readers, and producers of texts, but also as active practitioners in the social practices of language. The contents are formulated as tasks to emphasize their character of practices, and although they are written as infinitive sentences, such as “Commenting with others what has been heard that was read” or “Choosing a text according to the reader purpose,” they should not be confused with goals to be achieved but rather describe precisely what is to be taught.

Primary school curriculum structure comprises two cycles of three grades each: Grades 1 to 3 in the first cycle and Grades 4 to 7 in the second cycle. Thus, fourth grade students are in the first stage of the second cycle. Exhibit 2 summarizes the main purposes of each cycle.

Exhibit 2: Purposes for Reading Practices¹¹

First Cycle

To make each classroom a collective of readers and writers providing a framework in which students can unfold their own possibilities and advance as interpreters and producers of texts, so that reading becomes a favorite occupation and a valuable instrument for problem resolution and writing is used as a means of communication, as an instrument for reflection on oneʼs own knowledge. To involve students in a wide range of reading and writing situations, ensuring intense contact with writings of different genres and giving them multiple opportunities to explore, select, and read for purposes relevant to them, as well as to produce varied texts with significant purposes for their authors and addressed to different recipients. To offer children multiple opportunities to act as readers of literature, bringing them closer to works of literary quality, and to make them aware of the way in which writers narrate stories and construct imaginary worlds, the expressive richness of images and the musicality of poems, and the dramatic force of theatrical works.

Second Cycle

To make each classroom a collective of readers and writers providing a framework in which students can unfold their own possibilities and advance as interpreters and producers of texts, so that reading becomes a favorite occupation and a valuable instrument for problem resolution, and writing is used as a means of communication, as an instrument for reflection on oneʼs own knowledge, and as a valid tool to intervene in civic life. To involve students in a wide range of reading and writing situations; to allow them to access genres they had not interacted with in the first cycle and to return to familiar genres but with more complex or less canonical texts; read texts that give them multiple opportunities to select and read works based on relevant purposes, to weave relationships between authors and texts, and to produce writings addressed to different recipients based on meaningful purposes for them. To create conditions so that children can access works of universal literature and advance as “literary” readers, accompanying them in reading, and collaborating with them when faced with passages that are difficult; at the same time, encourage children to immerse in readings that are more appealing to them; orient children so they can appreciate the way in which a writer narrates a story and builds imaginary worlds, the expressive richness of the images and musicality of the poems, and the dramatic force of theatrical works; and help children to observe in which way some texts evoke other texts, bringing them closer to understanding cultural manifestations of other people and other times. To contribute to the training of students as students, reading difficult science-based informational texts for them and helping them build strategies to tackle texts with increasing success; offer them opportunities to develop sustained writing processes through which they can learn to summarize, take notes, report on what they have studied; and prepare and develop expositions, interviews, or debates in order to deepen the study of various content.

The cityʼs curricular guidelines include learning goals per grade and per curricular area, as summarized in Exhibit 3.

Exhibit 3: Fourth Grade Language Learning Goals¹²

Area of Content	Description
Reading Practices	Read extensive texts, alternating autonomous reading with the teacherʼs reading Share the experience as a reader, commenting on literature pieces read throughout the year Use reading comprehension as a tool to support interpretations Find specific information in different texts Consult different bibliographic sources, selecting the most appropriate ones Comment on relevant news
Writing Practices	Produce texts similar to the ones that were analyzed during the year, considering the purpose and the recipient Using writing as a means to record information from different sources Prepare notes collectively Summarize, with the teacherʼs help, texts about study topics known by students Participate, with the teacherʼs help, in the writing process Review writing and edit
Writing Practices and Acquiring Spelling Knowledge	Review and correct use of capital letters Solve spelling problems Internalize spelling convention systems
Reflect About Language, Grammar, and Discursive Strategies	Internalize cohesion strategies Internalize punctuation marks Semantic word classification: Distinction between verbs and nouns Understand the internal structure of words
Speaking Practices at School	Narrate well known stories, reorganizing narration Communicate to the teacher and partners what they have learned; detect the central topic and draw conclusions Participate in group discussions

In 2003, with the aim of improving education in the second cycle of primary education, the cityʼs Ministry of Education launched the Pluriannual Plan for the Improvement of Teaching and Learning in the Second Cycle of Primary Education for 2004 to 2008, defining the focus for the educational policy in the coming years.^b

The plan focused on the areas of language, mathematics, social sciences, and natural sciences and the Ministryʼs subject content specialists elaborated on a series of teaching resources and materials to implement the plan.

The plan contends that what is taught in the area of language are the practices of language. The objective of the plan is to train children as readers and writers in the various contexts where language is used. Materials within this plan are developed to encourage the reading of novels from the beginning of the second cycle and introduce students gradually into reading. In addition, these materials suggest various activities for teachers and students related to the practice of reading and language. To facilitate access, materials are available to teachers and students in libraries of all public primary schools in Buenos Aires. They still are in use.