Year 8 Reading Comprehension

This course is aligned with the New Zealand National Curriculum and the Cambridge International Education curriculum.

The course is designed to enable students to develop knowledge and practices including:

• Mastering strategies to understand unfamiliar vocabulary and the meaning of a text.
• Developing strategies to learn, memorise, and expand academic vocabulary.
• Understanding the literary and language techniques used by authors to communicate to an audience for a purpose.
• Explaining how the unique language, structural, and visual features of different text forms create meaning and influence the audience.
• Understanding the effects of grammar and punctuation on meaning.
• Developing a range of strategies to monitor and manage their understanding when reading texts.
• Reading for implicit meanings by making inferences, including identifying themes.
• Summarising key ideas by comparing and combining key details within and across texts to deepen understanding.
• Interpreting texts critically by using evidence from the text, other texts, and their own knowledge and experience.
• Examining how the meaning of a text can be interpreted in different ways.

 The topics per module are:

• Strange worlds
• Voyagers
• Stars
• Runaways and castaways

Text forms include:

• Extracts from novels and short stories.
• Poetry.
• Media texts, including digital media.
• Blended text forms, such as poems that aim to persuade and narrative texts with factual content.