Year 8 expectations

The writing standard

By the end of year 8, students will create texts in order to meet the writing demands of the New Zealand Curriculum at level 4. Students will use their writing to think about, record, and communicate experiences, ideas, and information to meet specific learning purposes across the curriculum. The text and task demands of the curriculum are similar for students in year 7 and year 8. The difference in the standard for year 8 is the students’ increased accuracy and fluency in writing a variety of texts across the curriculum, their level of control and independence in selecting writing processes and strategies, and the range of texts they write. In particular, by the end of year 8, students need to be confidently and deliberately choosing the most appropriate processes and strategies for writing in different learning areas.

Key characteristics of students' writing at this level

Students will write for a range of different purposes on topics and themes across the curriculum at this level, selecting and applying a process appropriate to the task and drawing on the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that will help them achieve their purpose. The knowledge, skills, and attitudes expected at this level, including those needed for spelling and punctuation, are described in the Literacy

Learning Progressions. Students will independently write texts, choosing language and a clear and logical text structure that they have deliberately chosen for their specific audience and purpose, drawing on their knowledge of the conventions for particular text forms (for example, when writing personal narratives, poems, arguments, feature articles, character profiles, research reports, essays, responses to literature, and short answers).

These texts will include, when appropriate:

• • content that is concise and relevant to the curriculum task and that often includes detail and/or comment supporting or elaborating on the main points

  • paragraphs within which the ideas are clearly related and links within and between paragraphs

  • grammatically correct sentences

  • words and phrases that are appropriate to the topic, register, and purpose, including expressive, academic, and subject-specific vocabulary.

Source: http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/National-Standards/Reading-and-writing-standards/The-standards/End-of-year-8