• Develop your own knowledge of what literacy looks like in your subject area – What are typical text types? What are good examples of writing? What types of writing tasks are common? What subject specific vocabulary do ākonga need to learn?
• Share your own reading habits with ākonga.
• Display and share interesting texts that are relevant to your area.
• Encourage ākonga to share when and what they are reading.
• Share the challenges you yourself are experiencing with writing to show that writing is a complex and challenging process.
• Talk with ākonga about the different times writing is needed in school and in personal life.

• Support ākonga to read and write frequently, on a regular basis, and for different purposes.
• Make use of small periods of time to increase reading and writing opportunities eg, you could use the last 5 minutes of a lesson to record important ideas in a learning diary that have been covered during the lesson.
• Give ākonga opportunities to use writing as a tool to clarify ideas.
• Ask ākonga to write their thoughts down before sharing their ideas orally.

• Get ākonga to write about what they have read, as writing improves students’ comprehension.
• Establish the connection between reading and writing – reading is a source of ideas and language for writing.
• Support ākonga to make judgements about what might be useful for a subsequent writing task; they can annotate texts or make notes.
• Use a graphic organiser for reading and then for subsequent writing; the graphic organiser is a scaffold of important ideas and a plan for writing.

• Analyse texts with ākonga so that they start to build knowledge of what texts look like in your subject area.
• Model five key reading strategies¹: 
  • activating background knowledge
  • questioning
  • analysing text structure
  • creating mental images
  • summarising.
• Make your own writing processes visible to ākonga by sharing how you plan, compose, write, review and revise.
• With ākonga, unpack questions and writing tasks by talking about what might be needed in terms of text type and structure, register, ideas, sentence structures and vocabulary.

• Get students into the habit of predicting the audience, purpose, and content of texts they are about to read, and evaluate those predictions as they read.
• Give attention to how the writer’s purpose is linked to text and language features.
• Provide ākonga with opportunities to read texts with conflicting or different information, and use a tool like an Inquiry Chart to synthesise them.
• Support ākonga to analyse and evaluate text, visual and online resources using a framework or tool eg, the Rauru Whakarare Evaluation Framework (Feekery & Jeffrey, 2019)².
• Support ākonga to use a viewing log when working across multi-media texts.

• Check your own knowledge of different types of words: technical words - essential for a subject or topic (eg, parallelogram, migration), general academic words - that can be used across many subjects (eg, aspect, locate), high frequency words - the 2,000-3,000 most common words that occur in everyday and school contexts (eg, like, find), and low frequency words - that are unusual but not useful or necessary (eg, behemoth).
• Give ākonga opportunities to encounter words repeatedly, and in a variety of contexts.
• Give ākonga opportunities to try using new words they have heard or read.
• Make sure ākonga know most high frequency words.
• Spend most time on general academic words, and technical words.
• Support ākonga to make distinctions between the everyday meaning of words and the subject-specific meaning of words (eg, odd, mean).
• Go beyond focusing on definitional knowledge of a word – understand the context it is used in, and what other words it is commonly used with, what connotations the word has, etc.
• Build up ākonga knowledge of word parts (prefixes, Latin roots, Greek roots/word parts, suffixes) that are useful for decoding word meanings and building up vocabulary knowledge.

• Support ākonga to become familiar with important text types³ in your subject area.
• Analyse examples of text types so that ākonga can see the overall structure, the parts, the types of sentences used and vocabulary.
• As part of planning for writing, discuss audience and purpose then link to text type.
• Provide an outline of the structure of text types so that ākonga know what they have to include.
• Show ākonga examples of texts that do not conform to text type expectations and discuss why.

• Provide ākonga with support on the language aspects of a writing task. This helps free up their capacity to focus on other aspects of the task.
• Brainstorm vocabulary, phrases and sentences before starting a writing task.
• Provide a planning template for writing.
• Rehearse ideas in oral form first before writing – with a partner or in a group.
• Provide questions or sentence starters for parts of a writing task.
• Give students practice in manipulating language structures eg, combining parts of a sentence in different ways.

• Design checklists to support ākonga to check whether they have:
  • covered specific content or ideas
  • structured their text according to text type expectations
  • addressed parts of the writing process (planning, composing, reviewing and revising)
  • reviewed their text for spelling, grammar, and punctuation
• Model the use of a checklist for ākonga.
• Encourage ākonga to remember aspects of a checklist for future writing tasks (eg, a checklist based on parts of a research report in Science) so that this knowledge becomes internalised.

Further Reading^4,5

• Give ākonga feedback at different times during the writing process.
• Be selective - focus on particular aspects of writing for feedback.
• Reformulate texts written by ākonga and ask them to compare the versions and evaluate the changes.
• Encourage ākonga to use tools to check surface level aspects of text such as spelling and grammar.