Procedural texts – Year 7, Levels C1 and C2

This unit focuses on procedure texts, with the main text – the ‘mentor text’ – being a recipe. However, while the activities in this unit focus on procedures, there is scope for the teacher to incorporate other examples of instructional or procedural texts such as protocols and procedural recounts e.g. science experiment reports, giving directions, maintaining your bicycle, rules for cyber safety. Multimodal aspects of procedure texts (e.g. graphics and videos) are also included in the unit.

Rather than discrete ‘lessons’, the unit is organised in a sequence of numbered learning ‘activities’, with each activity having one or more components. This enables the unit to be adaptable to teachers’ contexts and flexible enough to be spaced across a number of lessons, depending on the structure of the school curriculum and the organisation of EAL classes. Links to information referred to in some of the activities (e.g. punctuation games, dictogloss etc.) are provided on the last page of the unit.

Finally, some academic references have been embedded in the middle column of the unit planning template titled Language Focus – Additional EAL Focus. These provide a theoretical and practical rationale for the activities selected. A list of these is also provided at the end of the unit, before the Appendices.

This unit was initially developed for a group of Year 7 students working in a parallel EAL class. Some of the students were from families that sought refuge from war and violence in Sudan. Several were fluent in spoken Arabic, which was the dominant language used at home, but were unable to read and write fluently in Arabic. While most of the parents conversed in Dinka, a few could speak and understand basic English. Cultural factors that influenced the students’ behaviour in class included difficulty adjusting to classroom routines, maintaining eye contact and lack of response when interacting with the teacher.

Student year level/EAL level/s:

Assessments of the students’ capabilities placed them at Level C2.2 on the Victorian Curriculum F-10 EAL Reporting Resource reading, speaking and listening, while writing was at Level C1.3. They were, for the most part, confident in using oral conversational English with peers and staff; however, they were reluctant to read aloud from texts and to give oral presentations to the class. Several of the students struggled with pace, maintaining eye contact with their audience and pronunciation.

Learning area/s: Victorian Curriculum English Year 7

MODE: Speaking and Listening

STRAND – Literacy Substrand – Interacting with others

Listening and speaking interactions

• Identify and discuss main ideas, concepts and points of view in spoken texts to evaluate qualities, using interaction skills when sharing interpretations or presenting ideas and information.

Oral presentations

• Plan, rehearse and deliver presentations, selecting and sequencing appropriate content and multimodal elements to promote a point of view or enable a new way of seeing, using body language, voice qualities and other elements to add interest and meaning.

Achievement Standard

• They make presentations and contribute actively to class and group discussions, using language features to engage the audience.

MODE: Reading and Viewing

STRAND – Literacy  Substrand – Interpreting, analysing, evaluating

Analysing and evaluating

Analyse and explain the ways text structures and language features shape meaning and vary according to audience and purpose.

Achievement standard

• They demonstrate understanding of how the choice of language features, images and vocabulary affects meaning.

MODE: Writing

STRAND – Language Substrand – Text structures and organisation

Punctuation

• Understand the use of punctuation to support meaning in complex sentences with prepositional phrases and embedded clauses.

Achievement Standard

• When creating and editing texts they demonstrate understanding of grammar, use a variety of more specialised vocabulary, use accurate spelling and punctuation.

EAL indicators from the Victorian Curriculum F-10 EAL

Speaking and Listening

Productive

• use adverbial phrases, pronouns and irregular past tenses with some accuracy

Maintaining and negotiating spoken communication

Productive  

• use pauses and fillers (ah, um) appropriately to allow ordering of thought

Reading and Viewing

Linguistic structures and features

• display an understanding of the function of punctuation marks, e.g. when reading aloud, pauses at appropriate points in the text, adjusts speech to reflect dialogue
• identify some basic organisational features of texts, e.g. procedure, recount, report, argument.

Cultural conventions

• interpret the way information is organised in texts, e.g. layout, illustrations, headings

Text and response

Writing

• use models to write simple texts for different purposes, e.g. recount, description, instruction, procedure, narrative.

Linguistic structures and features

• use time adverbials plus the simple present to show past time, e.g. yesterday we go to the library
• use punctuation with some consistency, e.g. full stops, capitals, commas and question marks.

In speaking and listening, the students are permitted to repeat instructions, act out and use gestures to reinforce understanding but are not permitted to add extra details or words in the presentation of the instructions. This challenges the spoken language skills of presenters, as they need to articulate words clearly, use intonation and to speak at a reasonable pace and volume in order to be heard and understood by their audience (Blake Education, 2006).

In terms of reading and viewing, students need to be able to decode and comprehend the instructions quickly to be able to perform them without asking clarifying questions to aid comprehension. This requires a high level of reading skills to be able to decode and comprehend text, pictures/videos as well as execute the instructions simultaneously. According to Hertzberg, EAL students rely heavily on graphophone decoding and, therefore, while they may be able to read the text, they may need repeated reading and more time to comprehend the text (2012). Further, a multimodal text requires comprehension of multiple modes with pictures and/or video as well as text, which is an additional challenge for the students.

In the written mode, the linguistic challenges require the presenter to use precise yet detailed language in order to provide sufficient information to carry out the instructions, which places the assessment further towards the written end of the mode continuum. This means fewer reference items (such as pronouns, articles etc.) and an increase in noun groups, circumstances (such as adverbs and preposition phrases), the use of conditionals and embedded clauses. These grammatical features pose challenges to EAL learners as some understanding of prepositions, clauses and adverbs is required before attempting more complex phrases and embedded clauses. To address these issues, the unit of work will focus explicitly on the use of adverbials and preposition phrases.

The linguistic demands of the text may pose a problem from a cultural perspective with interference from the students’ interlanguage. In the students’ first language of Arabic, adjectives are rarely used, but when they are used they are written in a different order to English. In Arabic, the adjective usually follows the noun in noun groups (Shoebottom, 2015). Also, since adverbs with the ending ’ly’ are rarely used in Arabic, students tend to add the suffix ‘i’ which may pose a problem (Dickins, Hervey & Higgins, 2002). In addition, there are no modal verbs used in Arabic which could also be challenging (Shoebottom, 2015).

In this unit, the teacher needs to take into account collaborative group work, peer support and scaffolding at points of need. In the ‘building the field’ stage of the teaching and learning cycle, the teacher will need to determine the students’ prior knowledge and familiarity with the structure and language of various instructional or procedural texts, including the students’ cultural knowledge of Australian cuisine – in particular, the hamburger. Also, while the activities in this unit tend to focus on writing, listening and speaking, students’ reading comprehension and decoding skills need to be supported in order for them to progress to the next level of the Victorian Curriculum F-10 EAL.

Main genre focus: Procedure (recipe)

The core procedure text (recipe) displays a series of steps leading to an end product.

The challenge for written language is to write a text using precise, detailed language in order to have a participant perform the instructions. This challenges the students to include details via expanded noun groups, adverbials, preposition phrases and conditionals rather than writing in basic simple sentences.