Scope & Sequence
A Scope and Sequence is any planning tool used by educators to both describe the curriculum content to be covered within any given period and the order and timing of that curriculum content.
While there has long been a focus on the scope of the skills and knowledge to be taught and the order in which they are taught, there has been far less emphasis until recent times on the associated language demands of such skills and knowledge across schooling and within the different discipline areas.
In this section, we are providing links to a range of Scope and Sequence documents that have proved very useful to teachers in articulating both the language demands of the curriculum (the scope) and the most judicious order and timing for supporting students to meet those language demands (the sequence).
Within the documents provided, we have those that variously describe the scope of the range of genres of the curriculum and others which go beyond describing the scope of genres and articulate both the scope and sequence, not only in terms of genre but in terms of register and importantly language itself.
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Source; From Teacher Resource Book 2: Selecting and Analysing Texts. Reading to Learn: Accelerating learning and closing the gap. Sydney: Reading to Learn
Author: David Rose, University of Sydney
Audience: Teachers and students
Description: A key for identifying the written genres of school curricula, and analysing their structures. Designed as a curriculum and lesson planning guide for primary and secondary teachers. Based on genres described in Martin, J.R. & Rose, D. (2008). Genre Relations: Mapping Culture. London: Equinox.
Genres are grouped in families, followed by their purposes, names for their stages, and typical types of phases. The rubric is a key for the activities that follow in the teacher resource book, in which teachers are guided to identify and analyse exemplars of each genre in the families.
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Author: Lexis Education
Audience: Educators working at all levels of schooling
Description: This document maps out the key genres taken up in schooling contexts.
Based principally on the work of Jim Martin, Joan Rothery , Fran Christie and David Rose among others, it organises genres into two broad categories: constructing and responding. These categories reflect the fundamental features of the genres in each category with the first category focused on the genres that construct reality and the second the genres that typically are a reaction to the constructing genres.
Within each of these sets of genres there is potential for greater complexity as we move down from the top of each set. An understanding of these patterns across families of genres is very useful for teachers in setting up possible sequences of teaching programs in a principled way.
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Author: South Australian Department for Education
Audience: Educators working at all levels of schooling
Description: The Learning Area Genre Maps: A Practical Guide developed by the South Australian Department for Education provides a comprehensive framework for identifying the genres associated with typical tasks set across learning areas from Reception to Year 10.
The document organizes genres into various categories (e.g., argument, narrative, report, recount, explanation) and outlines how these apply in eight curriculum areas: English, HASS, HPE, Languages, Mathematics, Science, Technologies, and The Arts.
It presents genre progression visually and in detail, including example tasks for each year level. For instance, in English, students move from personal recounts and narrative retells in reception to critical responses, comparative essays, and speculative fiction in secondary years. In Science, students develop from simple procedural writing and sequential explanations to complex causal and factorial explanations and laboratory reports. Each learning area has genre expectations aligned with literacy development and subject content, ensuring consistent writing instruction across disciplines.
The maps serve as a planning and assessment tool, offering year-specific, curriculum-aligned writing tasks and emphasizing multimodal, inclusive, and culturally aware practices, especially with reference to First Nations perspectives. It is an invaluable resource for teachers seeking to integrate writing purposefully and equitably across the curriculum.
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Author: Department for Education, South Australia
Audience: Teachers should use the LEAP Levels to support English as an additional language or dialect (EALD) student learning at all levels of schooling
Description: Learning English Achievement and Proficiency (LEAP) is the South Australian tool for assessing Standard Australian English (SAE) and designing learning that accelerates students’ language development.
LEAP is used to:
assess SAE proficiency, focusing on the development of academic language for learners of English as an additional language or dialect (EALD)
determine students’ level of language learning need
identify key teaching points in formative and summative assessments and set learning goals
inform learning design using targeted teaching strategies.
The LEAP Level rubrics describe the development of SAE required to meet the demands of curriculum from Reception to year 10. Levels 1–3 describe the beginning stages of development of SAE: learning to hear, understand and produce English words and phrases. For English-speaking background students, this is generally achieved before commencing school, but for many EALD students these Levels describe their early development of English at school. Level 4 describes the level of language necessary for satisfactory achievement across the curriculum towards the end of Reception. Levels 5–14 each describe 1 year’s expected progression and are aligned to the subsequent years of schooling from Year 1 to Year 10.
The alignment of LEAP Levels with the academic language required to achieve at year level standards means that any gap can be identified for a student. The wider the gap, the greater the difficulty for the student to achieve and thrive within the curriculum, and the greater the need for explicit teaching, scaffolding and differentiation. The LEAP Levels can also guide the extension of language activities for high achieving students.
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Author: John Polias, Lexis Education
Audience: Educators working with students in the age groups 7-10 years and 11-15 years.
Description: The LLDC is a resource for helping teachers to support their students achieve the learning outcomes of the curriculum, and to report on those achievements. The LLDC outlines the language demands that need to be addressed in supporting students’ learning and they should be used in conjunction with the benchmarks or standards of the various disciplines that comprise a school’s curriculum.
The LLDC is organised according to Genre, Field, Tenor and Mode with each of these categories then organised and described according to ‘Texts and Contexts’ and ‘Language’. The continuum is organised also according to developmental phases and the relationship between ‘Texts and Contexts’ and ‘Language’ is essentially that, for any phase, the former is describing the kinds of texts a student is comprehending and composing in the various described contexts, while the latter is describing the kinds of language resources that a student has developed to be able to comprehend and compose those texts in those contexts.
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Author: Brian Dare, Lexis Education
Audience: Educators working at all levels of schooling
Description: The first section of the Mapping Genre and Register resource articulates a scope and sequence for the most common school genres from the early years of schooling to the upper middle years.
These genre descriptions are grouped according to their broad social purposes: instructing, recounting, describing and organising, explaining, narrating and reacting and arguing.
There is some attempt to articulate the notion of macro-genre, which may be composed of more than one of the more iconic genres.
The second section provides a scope and sequence of what might be taught and what might be learnt about language across schooling, which is divided into three broad stages: early, middle and later.
The register variables; field, tenor and mode provide the framework for describing in some detail the aspects of language related to each register variable.
It describes what aspects of language the teacher can focus on at any given level and describes the learning outcomes we can expect from students at the various stages of development.
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Author: Beverly Derewianka & Pauline Jones, University of Wollongong
Audience: Preservice teachers; experienced teachers; teacher educators and curriculum and policy makers
Description: This scope and sequence summarises the description of school genres presented in Teaching Language in Context (3rd Edition rev) (TLIC).
The purpose is to provide an overview of major genres in different curriculum areas from foundation to year 10. In organising our textbook around the different ways of using language such as describing, explaining, persuading, we emphasise the place of curriculum in driving school literacy programs.
In our view, genres emerge from these various purposes for using language thus providing teachers with very useful ways of planning for both content and language teaching. For example, in learning about language for appreciating and creating story worlds in English, the focus is on development within narratives. Similarly, in language for observing and describing the world in science, we focus on development within and different kinds of reports.
Where relevant we have attempted to capture the increasing complexity of texts as students come to grips with greater conceptual demands of the school curriculum.
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Author: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Audience: Teachers and educators
Description: The WIDA English Language Development (ELD) Standards Framework, 2020 Edition provides a comprehensive guide for supporting multilingual learners in K–12 settings. Emphasizing equity and access, the framework integrates language and academic content, fostering collaboration among educators. It identifies five ELD standards and introduces four Key Language Uses—Narrate, Inform, Explain, and Argue—to guide instruction. Language Expectations define learning goals, while Proficiency Level Descriptors chart language growth across six levels. The framework is rooted in sociocultural understanding, multimodal communication, and a functional approach to language. It serves educators, policymakers, and communities in creating linguistically and culturally sustaining learning environments.