Language/Reading Curriculum in the Fourth Grade
Reading Policy
In Chile, schools are mandated to develop reading skills and a positive attitude toward reading through guided reading in class and home reading. In fact, reading is a strand of the national curriculum of the subject language and communication, which is taught from Grades 1 to 6. The curriculum prescribes curricular bases and includes goals and objectives for the development of skills at each grade. It also includes study programs suggested by the Ministry of Education that deliver activities and evaluation indexes; these guide schools in the development of the objectives and goals that students are expected to achieve. Public and private schools that do not follow the study programs may develop their own, but it is mandatory that they are based on the national curriculum.
The national curriculum states that reading skills and dialogue using writing and oral skills are fundamental. Although the curriculum does not indicate a percentage or amount of total instructional time to be devoted to reading, the goals and objectives related to reading have predominance over writing and oral skills.
Summary of National Curriculum
The national curriculum establishes three axes for the subject of language and communication: Reading, Writing, and Oral Skills. In a general view, at the end of Grade 4 students should have achieved the following goals and objectives in Reading:11
- Fluently read aloud a variety of age appropriate texts:
- Pronounce the words with precision
- Respect the punctuation marks
- Read with adequate intonation
- Read with appropriate speed for level
- Understand texts applying reading comprehension strategies; for example:
- Relate the information in the text to personal experiences and knowledge
- Reread what was not understood
- Visualize what the text describes
- Ask questions about what has been read and answer them
- Underline relevant information in a text
- Read and become familiar with a wide range of literature to increase knowledge of the world and develop their imagination; for example:
- Poems
- Stories
- Myths
- Novels
- Comic books
- Deepen their understanding of a narrative text:
- Extract explicit and implicit information
- Determine the consequences of events or actions
- Describe and compare the characters
- Describe the different environments that appear in a text
- Recognize the problem and the solution in a narrative
- Express informed opinions on the attitudes and actions of characters
- Compare different texts written by the same author
- Understand poems appropriate to the level and interpret figurative language present in them
- Read independently and understand nonliterary texts to broaden their knowledge of the world and form an opinion:
- Extract explicit and implicit information
- Use the organizers of expository texts (e.g., titles, subtitles, indexes, glossaries) to find specific information
- Understand the information provided by discontinuous texts (e.g., images, charts, tables, maps, diagrams)
- Interpret idioms in figurative language
- Compare information
- Answer questions (e.g., Why did it happen? What is the consequence? What if…?)
- Formulate an opinion on some aspect of reading
- Support an opinion with information from the text or their previous knowledge
- Enjoy reading through searching diverse types of texts with regularity
- Frequently visit the library for various purposes (e.g., to find information, choose books, study, work, research), taking care of the material in favor of common use
- Search and sort information to carry out an investigation on a topic (e.g., on the Internet or in books, newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, atlases)
- Implement strategies to determine the meaning of new words:
- Key of the text (to determine which meaning is relevant according to the context)
- Roots and affixes
- Ask another person
- Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and the Internet