Photo: RNZ / Rebekah Parsons-King
Children will be learning more about grammar and less about pictures and video under the new primary school English curriculum.
A draft version of the curriculum for children in Years 0-6 was published on Monday. Educators told RNZ it gave teachers a lot more guidance about what they should teach and how.
The draft recommended seven to 10 minutes a day of handwriting for the youngest children, explicit teaching of punctuation for older children, and reading a wide variety of texts, including poetry and children's literature.
South Canterbury teacher Barb Curran, who is also a primary school representative on the the Educational Institute executive, said the draft was a lot bigger than the curriculum it was replacing.
Curran said she agreed with some aspects of the draft.
"I was really pleased to see the focus on oral language because we know how important that is for literacy and learning and there's a big focus on that."
The curriculum was also much more explicit about what teachers should teach.
"It's certainly provided clarity and specificity about what is to be taught and I think that will be of use to schools," Curran said.
A key change was a focus on structured literacy for teaching young children to read and write, an approach that emphasised decoding the sounds associated with different letters.
Curran said her school, like many others, was several years into adopting that approach.
"So in terms of the focus on letter-sounds, on spelling patterns, on decoding and encoding, all those things are things that we've been doing. Having said that, I don't think that you needed to have been doing a structured approach to be teaching those things," she said.
University of Auckland school of curriculum and pedagogy associate professor Aaron Wilson said the draft dropped visual language completely and there was a big focus on what teachers should teach and how.
"It's quite specific about some teaching actions both in terms of content and approaches and I think many teachers will find that level of specificity quite helpful. I think that some teachers might find it on the other hand disempowering," he said.
Wilson said overall, the curriculum was less of an English curriculum and more of a literacy curriculum, meaning it required more explicit teaching of aspects of reading and writing.
"There's a greater focus on correctness then there has been in the past. Like correctness of spelling and grammar so it's a big focus on accurate spelling and grammar."
Principals Federation president Leanne Otene said the shift to more explicit guidance for teachers was something the previous government had been working on too, so schools were ready for that.
"Obviously what we have got though is a change in approach, so we're now looking at a structured literacy approach versus and a whole language approach... That's a significant difference," she said.
Otene said the entire workforce would need a lot of training to ensure the change was successful.
Consultation on the draft English curriculum closes on 20 September.
