Cross curriculum content enriches and supports the learning areas and adds depth to student learning. In NSW students study a range of learning across the curriculum content.
Cross curriculum priorities
- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures
- Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia
- sustainability
General capabilities
- critical and creative thinking
- ethical understanding
- information and communication technology capability
- intercultural understanding
- literacy
- numeracy
- personal and social capability
Other learning across the curriculum areas
- civics and citizenship
- difference and diversity
- work and enterprise.
© NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) for and on behalf of the Crown in right of the State of New South Wales, 2012
Talk for writing
Talk for writing is a program, developed by Pie Corbett and supported by Julia Strong, based on the principals on how children learn. It is a powerful program which gets children to imitate the language they need for a particular topic orally before reading and analysing it and then writing their own version. Watch the video or read the transcript below for more details.
Video transcript
Image description: Two students writing in an exercise book, with a blue background and the text 'Talk for Writing Across the Curriculum' in white on the right hand side.
Voiceover of Pie Corbett (PC): This video is made at a series of conferences hosted by the National Literacy Trust. Julia Strong and I explored the process of using Talk for Writing in relation to teaching nonfiction and its application across the curriculum. I began by explaining why talk to text and shared writing are so important.
[Cut to footage of Pie Corbett speaking at conference]
PC: We know that linguistically children can't write sentences unless they can say them and they can't say a sentence unless they've heard it a lot, so somebody actually has to model the language that the children are going to be using. Obviously you do learn how to write from your reading so we know to go from the reading into the writing. We know that we're going to look in Year 5 and 6 at several examples of, I don't know, discussion writing to see how different writers have tackled this particular thing .So we know to go from the reading into the writing, but we have so many children who aren't read to at home, who don't read very much themselves, who maybe come into school with no English language at all or only speaking in sentence fragments, for instance. So for many children the whole business of reading into writing, whilst it's fairly successful, we have to add in the talking. So if we're going to read the type of text that we want them to internalise but they also need to hear it and tohave a go at saying it so that those patterns, so they interact with the language patterns, so that they become deeply embedded like grooves in the mind. What you're trying to do is to add the language patterns into their linguistic competency and just sitting on a carpet and looking at the whiteboard, or looking at a big book, for some children, isn't enough. They actually have to really had those sentence patterns model lots and lots and lots, and then have a go at saying those sentence patterns so that when they come to write, they've read them, they've heard them and they've said them.