Language/Reading Curriculum in the Fourth Grade
Reading Policy
Reading is an integral part of Polish language instruction. The national curriculum considers reading to be the main goal of primary education, defining it as the technical skill of decoding graphemes into phonemes and understanding, using, and processing written texts.5 Students are expected to master these skills to achieve knowledge acquisition; emotional, intellectual, and moral development; and participation in social life.
Summary of National Curriculum
The national curriculum divides the six grades of primary school into two periods. In the first period (Grades 1 to 3), teaching content is provided in the integrated form by a single teacher, who evaluates students’ progress descriptively. In the second period (Grades 4 to 6), the curriculum is divided into subjects taught by different teachers who mark students’ performance. Students take external examinations at the end of Grade 6.
The national curriculum defines the objectives of education, teaching content, and expected achievement for each three year period of primary school. Teaching programs and methods of instruction are left up to teachers to develop themselves or, more frequently, purchase from a commercial publisher along with the students’ textbooks. Therefore, there is no common program for Grade 4.
In the first period of primary school, the national curriculum does not specify the amount of time assigned to language instruction or reading. Students at Grades 1 to 3 are expected to:
- Grasp the meaning of encoding and decoding information
- Recognize all letters of the alphabet
- Recognize the difference between letters and sounds
- Divide words into syllables, sentences into words, and texts into sentences
- Read and understand texts for children, drawing conclusions from and voicing opinions about the content
- Read texts aloud and recite poems, considering punctuation and intonation
- Seek out information in texts by consulting dictionaries and other references for children
- Recognize distinctive features in literary works (e.g., main characters and the time and place of action)
- Use functional forms such as greeting cards, announcements, letters, chronicles, and notes
- Use exercise books with the help of the teacher
- Have an interest in books and reading
- Enrich personal vocabulary and develop aesthetic sensitivity through reading
In the second period of primary school, the national curriculum bases reading instruction on a complex network of philological concepts with distinctions among the reception, analysis, and interpretation of texts. The receptive aspect of texts in Grades 4 to 6 involves:
- Effectively reading texts, tacitly and aloud
- Identifying topics and keynotes of a text
- Identifying the speaker and audience of a text (e.g., author, narrator, reader, listener)
- Recognizing informational, literary, and advertising texts
- Using functional forms of text (e.g., invitations, messages, instructions, recipes)
- Distinguishing relevant and irrelevant information in a text
- Seeking out overt and covert information in a text
- Understanding the literal and figurative meanings of words within a text
- Drawing conclusions from a text by recognizing true and false premises
- Grasping the relationship between the parts of a text (e.g., title, introduction, development, conclusion)
Analysis and interpretation of texts is reserved for “texts of culture” or works of art; analysis is divided into “initial” and “proper.”
- Initial analysis entails:
- Discussing personal responses to a text (e.g., impressions, emotions)
- Comparing a character’s situation with personal experience
- Expressing personal attitudes toward a character
- Proper analysis entails:
- Recognizing the artistic characteristics of a work
- Distinguishing fiction from facts
- Distinguishing fantasy from realism
- Recognizing literary techniques (e.g., simile, metaphor, epithet, onomatopoeia) and explaining their roles in a text
- Recognizing literary characteristics (e.g., line, strophe, rhyme, meter, chorus)
- Distinguishing rhymed and unrhymed poems
- Describing the action, strands of the plot, and episodes
- Evaluating the characters in a literary work
- Recognizing literary genres (e.g., short story, novel, fairy tale, legend, myth, fable, epigram, poem, proverb, cartoon)
- The interpretation of texts entails:
- Perceiving works of art on the literal and figurative levels
- Explaining the message and moral of fairy tales and fables
- Identifying positive and negative values depicted in a text (e.g., friendship and hostility, love and hate, truth and lies, faithfulness and betrayal)
According to the national curriculum, reading “texts of culture” should be a vehicle for students’ development of values, sensitivity, good taste, identity, and patriotism. Curiosity and pleasure are not mentioned as valuable motives for reading.