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Oral language is the primary means through which a child controls, describes, organises, and evaluates their life experiences and their ability to use oral language which effectively impacts their future literacy development. Currently, the world is awash with dynamic change and constant disruption. These include natural disasters such as the ongoing Australian floods and bush fires, droughts, the global COVID-19 pandemic, the pervasive use of digital technologies, continuing global unrest, and impacts on economic and social adversity. Many of these disruptions are having a negative impact on the development of children's oral language and ongoing communication capacities. This is interesting given the prioritisation in many western nations, including Australia, of learning to read and write over learning to talk and communicate. This paper serves as an example of what makes good classroom literacy research. It outlines the elements of robust research including a research proposal structure. In this instance, our research investigates educator perceptions of children's developing oral language and communication skills and practices in birth to 8-year-old education contexts within the current backdrop of extreme disruption. The paper includes a literature review, our proposed research methodology which includes interviews from participants in birth to 8-year-old education settings, in both national and global contexts sourced via snowball sampling. The data analysis uses Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the contextualised interview responses from educators within a socio-cultural global malaise of disruption and power. We outline future plans and funding sources, including publications and potential school resources in the spirit of collegial cooperation to support excellence in literacy classroom research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technology has long been ubiquitous in many communities within Australia and internationally, thereby requiring suitable digital proficiencies. While a majority of Australian children experience digital literacies as part of their everyday lives, limitations in access disadvantage others. In educational settings, there is a clear need for teachers to incorporate the digital literacies of learners while also working towards addressing inequities by providing rich literacy experiences that bring together print and digital forms of texts. Well-established understandings about the importance of literacy development early in a child's life support teachers of the first years of school to teach essential digital literacies. In Australian schools, teachers are mandated by a range of documents, including the Australian Curriculum, that provide content for teachers to teach. Situated within a frame of New Literacies theories, this paper reports findings from analyses of the ways these mandated documents may support teachers in the first years of school to design learning experiences that respond to learners' needs in producing digital texts. We then determine implications for teachers' responsiveness to these documents. With the recent release of the Australian Curriculum version 9.0, we argue for the pedagogical knowledge that teachers require to implement digital text production experiences within the mandates of the curriculum and, consequently, the professional learning they need for realising the potential of all children's digital capabilities in their classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss the place of plurilingualism in Language and Literacy Education. The article problematises English-only, monolingual-centric assumptions upon which much of Australia's current literacy education policy discourse has been based, to instead advance pluriliteracies as an alternate, more generative lens through which to view literacy learners, literacy learning, and literacy capabilities. The paper begins with tensions inherent in how policy "imagines" learners in Australian schools, and the problem of imposing English-only, monolingual-centric notions of literacy when multilingualism is increasingly more the norm than the exception in many mainstream Australian classrooms. We consider how a pluriliteracy perspective on literacy education offers a more appropriate approach to addressing learners' developmental literacy needs, with particular attention to students' identity and agency. Finally, we consider effective implementation of plurilingual approaches to language and learning, with a focus on the intersection of ideology, practice, and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First Nations languages can play a significant role in ensuring connection to land, culture, Songlines, kinship, history, and stories. Ongoing language attrition for First Nations peoples of Australia has been due to colonization and past adverse government policies, which rendered First Nations languages a threat to the expansion of the colony. Through processes of dislocation from country and punishment for speaking language, many First Nations peoples began to lose their languages and were forcefully compelled to speak the English language on missions and reserves. Promoting First Nations languages in early educational contexts can instill a sense of cultural identity and connectedness to schooling for First Nations children, helping to ensure that languages are passed on to future generations. In many parts of Australia, First Nations languages are being revitalized and are being taught to both First Nations children and non-Indigenous children in early learning centers and in classrooms. This paper draws upon existing literature, briefly examining the removal of First Nations languages in Queensland from a historical perspective. The authors consider three essential elements required to work with First Nations communities when revitalizing First Nations languages and implementing a successful language program into schools: co-design, authentic delivery, and cultural inclusivity. We demonstrate how these elements have been used in the revitalization of First Nations languages in two Queensland schools. Finally, the importance of using an Indigenous centered approach to maintain languages at a local level is posited as a critical step in creating culturally inclusive environments for First Nations children in mainstream school settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Senior secondary Literature courses in Australia all aim, to various extents, to develop students’ critical literacy skills. These aims share emphases on reading, reflecting and responding critically to texts, on critical analysis and critical ideas, and on forming interpretations informed by critical perspectives. Critical literacy is not assessed on its own; rather, it is assessed indirectly alongside other concepts and skills. The most common form of assessment in these courses is the extended response, while multiple choice (MCQ) tests appear to be uncommon. We contend that multiple-choice assessments offer the potential to assess critical literacy at least as well as essay responses, and they do so independently of writing skills. We define critical literacy as a complex reading process involving challenging and resisting dominant representations in texts, foregrounding power relationships and acknowledging the multiple ways in which readers apply critical understandings to texts. This paper outlines the process by which two test developers researched and developed a small prototype test of critical literacy for senior school students that was aligned to senior secondary school Literature curricula. Cognitive laboratories were conducted in which these items were administered to a small number of students. The outcome suggests that the items were aligned to the construct and this assessment method shows promise in its capacity to measure students’ critical literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper furthers the understanding of literacy being developed through this Special Issue by bringing a pluralistic, complex account of literacy into conversation with assessment. The rise of neoliberalism in education--and its related focus on standards, accountability, and efficiency--has seen literacy positioned as the "core business" of contemporary education systems and, accordingly, a construct that must be rendered readily measurable, benchmarked, and accounted for. Through a critique of current literacy assessment practices in Australia relying on standardized testing to achieve such accountability using National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy and Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education as examples, we argue that the resulting dominant account of literacy is both reductive and deficient. On the one hand, we show how standardized literacy testing fails to recognize students' actual potential, in terms of the diverse and varied plurilingual and cultural meaning-making resources that many students now bring to literacy, beyond using Standard Australian English alone (and as a monolingual speaker would use SAE as an isolated language system). On the other, we show how standardized tests can render the assessment of literacy as effectively meaningless, given difficulties discriminating between test-takers' full range of literacy skills in meaningful ways. We conclude by considering alternative practices with potential to more accurately assess learners' literacy capabilities from a plurilingual perspective, and implications for education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how changing digital literacy practices in educational contexts require that we continually revisit conceptualisations of digital literacy education. We begin by analysing the positions taken by stakeholders who contribute to digital literacy discourses in Australia, exploring how competing interests produce effects which manifest in ways that differently consecrate social and cultural practice in the digital age. We advocate the need for pedagogic frameworks that support digital literacy education. Existing approaches tend to privilege the operationalisation of digital technology. By contrast, teaching is needed which focusses on meaning-making and creating. However, the 'datafication of everyday life' (Barassi, 2018, p.170) has included extraordinary interventions into schooling that have significant implications for teachers and students. We argue that preparing young people for digital citizenship must include a focus on critical digital literacies that are responsive to contemporary digital forces (e.g. platformatisation, artificial intelligence, edu-apps, algorithms) as well as those digital technologies that are yet to make their way into formal schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fairy tales are ubiquitous in Australian primary schools. Drawing on a review of key literature, this paper aims to determine the implications of teaching fairy tales in the twenty-first-century primary classroom. Research points to the benefits of including fairy tales as a tool to improve all subject areas of the curriculum. Fairy tales present opportunities to positively engage students through the teaching of social justice and the development of emotional intelligence. The review of literature found that teachers need to be cautious and critical when teaching traditional fairy tales which often perpetrate an outdated, gender-ignorant representation of society, and allow students an opportunity to confront these ideas. The book form of Disney fairy tales can be problematic, particularly the earlier versions, which are criticised for being domesticated, sentimental and overly simplistic. The review has also found that multicultural fairy tales have enormous potential to increase cultural equity in the contemporary classroom, but unfortunately, they do not appear to be easily accessible in Australia. The fairy tale is constantly being reinvented and reimagined to fit into modern society, which has led to the emergence of the fractured fairy tale genre, where a traditional fairy tale is subverted. This review found that when used in a critical and inclusive manner, fairy tales have the potential to be an effective resource to teach primary school students in the contemporary classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The student category of ‘at risk’ is often assigned to learners who are considered by teachers and school administrators to not meet specified curriculum and assessment requirements. It is a pervasive term that manages to go unquestioned. Being ‘at risk’ implies being out of alignment with opposite terms, that is terms such as stability, safety, not at risk. This way of thinking can lead to an assumption that there is a fixed, normal position for learners, and that being other than that involves becoming ‘risky’. This paper questions the very idea that such a binary exists and explores the ways teachers talk about learners who are considered to be ‘at risk’ within the schooling system. We also argue that teachers’ talk about such learners and their ‘at riskness’ can constitute learners in ways that are either more constraining or more enabling to their pathways through schooling. The paper draws on our experience of analysing teacher interview data collected across a variety of research projects with teachers in Australian schools. Employing discourse analysis focusing on the discursive element of time as we trace temporal markers in teacher interview talk, we provide specific analysis of one teacher’s talk about her English language learners on their path to also becoming literate in English. Her talk demonstrates an optimistic and generative discursive position that challenges views of English language learners as ‘wanting’ and potentially as ‘at risk’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past eight years, Australian school students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 have engaged in the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) writing test, with a one-in-two chance they will be tasked with producing a ‘narrative’ genre. This paper examines the way in which the very notion of storytelling and narrative is conceptualised in the NAPLAN supporting documentation, and its potential negative consequences. The paper begins by providing a review of the literature on storytelling, paying particular attention to research which has established the ‘Complication- Resolution’ narrative as one type of storytelling. It then provides an account of how story and narrative are typically characterised and defined in the official NAPLAN documentation, that is, as the ‘Complication-Resolution’ narrative exclusively. The final section of the paper presents a genre analysis of eight student writing samples and the related comments and gradings from the NAPLAN narrative marking guide. The analysis found a number of student texts in the marking guide that were effectively structured stories, but which had been marked down for Text Structure because they did not comply with the specific structure of the ‘Complication-Resolution’ narrative. The analysis also found a number of texts that scored highly with respect to the Text Structure criterion, even though they were not instances of the Complication-Resolution narrative sub-type. Drawing on these findings, the paper argues that various inconsistencies and points of apparent confusion in these comments and gradings can be taken as evidence that other sub-types of storytelling are being inappropriately devalued, and that ultimately, there is a lack of understanding in the nature of storytelling in the NAPLAN documentation. By way of conclusion, the paper reflects on some of the negative consequences that may flow from storytelling being defined in this limited way, including the implications for how storytelling is taught by teachers and caregivers, the potential misdirection of students as to what constitutes a ‘good’ story, as well as the cultural implications of limiting stories to one specific type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education systems around the world have moved to develop literacy progressions that describe a sequence of development in oral language (talking and listening), reading/viewing and writing. In Australia, the National Literacy Learning Progression (ACARA, 2021) is designed to support students' literacy development across the years of primary and secondary school. Common arguments for the use of such descriptions include the need to provide extra detail to official English syllabuses, and to inform teachers' pedagogical choices of the next logical focus for teaching. However, while it is understandable that teachers want to identify their students' needs and to plan for their development, there is slim evidence for common and systematic progression through stages of literacy development for all students. In this paper we report on a review of the literature into literacy development (Weekes, forthcoming) pointing out the gaps and discontinuities in the existing research as well as demonstrating the highly contextualised nature of literacy growth. We argue such factors pose significant challenges for policy and curriculum writers charged with responsibility for producing literacy progressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes visible particular persuasive language choices made by the highest scoring Tasmanian primary and secondary school students who completed the 2011 NAPLAN writing test. Specifically, it draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to consider how these students used different forms of nominalisation to persuade readers about the 2011 writing prompt: that too much money is being spent on toys and games. The paper explores how the use of nominalisation differed across the primary and secondary school years and draws links to the Australian Curriculum: English which introduces the nominalisation in Year 8. Recommendations are made for primary and secondary school teachers who wish to equip students with the language resources to deal with the demands of NAPLAN testing, but also to write persuasively in more authentic educational and social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In much the same way that a squirrel stores a range of food in a range of places, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority's (ACARA) Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2015) stores references to grammar in a range of places. This paper explores some seemingly 'hidden' grammars within the AC:E to (re)discover their genesis and how they unfold across Foundation to Year 6. The first 'Secret Squirrel' moment centres on the introduction of a new grammar which weaves traditional Latin-based and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory. The second 'Secret Squirrel' moment centres on the use of one sub-system of SFL Theory, the System of Appraisal, and its potential to provide an analytical lens for 'reading' the interpersonal meaning within narratives. The remainder of the paper draws on Goodson's (1990) notion of curriculum as a social construction, paying attention to the levels of processes and (potential) practice. This part of the paper focuses on the System of Appraisal as it is introduced in the AC:E and then translates the Content Descriptions to an example analysis. One stimulus text, Melanie Watt's (2012) children's picture book 'Scaredy Squirrel at the Beach', is introduced then analysed using the System of Appraisal as an analytical lens for identifying how language choices 'go to work' (Macken-Horarik, 2003, p. 285) on readers, that is how Watt's language choices are crafted so a 'compliant' child reader (Martin & White, 2005, p. 62) has the opportunity to 'feel with' and thus 'adjudicate' the behaviour of characters in particular ways (Macken-Horarik, 2003, p. 285). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the national testing regime in Australia, the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), has influenced how teachers understand their work and learning, particularly as this relates to the literacy practices most valued under these circumstances. Drawing upon an emerging literature on the sociology of numbers and statistics, and literature on the nature of quality and purposeful teaching practices, including in settings with significant proportions of ESL students, the paper describes how teachers' understandings of their practice in one rural/remote school serving a low SES, predominantly Indigenous community in northern Queensland reflect the co-constructed nature of statistics and students' learning, as well as efforts to try to be more responsive to these students as predominantly additional language learners. The paper reveals that this is not a straight-forward process, but involves tensions between what Sætnan, Lomell and Hammer (2011) describe as various 'centripetal forces' which trend towards standaridisation of learning, and 'centrifugal forces' which challenge this standardisation by valuing local context, knowledge and traditions. Furthermore, how these tensions actually play out also reveals a nuanced understanding of the nature, benefits and problems of such testing, English language learning in Indigenous settings more generally, and evidence of student and teacher learning beyond testing per se. Such considered, situated knowledge and understandings are silenced in much of the current discourse around national education provision and testing in Australia, and other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the recent introduction by the Australian government of standardised literacy testing, and raises questions about the impact of this reform on the professional ethics of English literacy teachers in primary and secondary schools. We draw on data collected as part of a major research project, involving interviews with teachers about their experiences of implementing standardised testing in Victoria and South Australia that focused on the changing nature of their work practices through the implementation of such tests. The paper traces the ways in which teachers' work is increasingly being mediated by standardised literacy testing to show how these teachers struggle with the tensions between state-wide mandates and a sense of responsibility towards their students. Through an analysis of research data collected in public schools, the paper challenges circumscribed understandings of ethical practice on the part of teachers as a matter of being publicly accountable through mechanisms like the publication of standardised test results. It invokes, instead, a situated notion of professional ethics as responsiveness to those around us. The paper argues the primacy of an ethic of care that cannot be measured, and which is enacted in resistance to the judgments made by standardised tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My purpose in this paper is to address the place of English as a Second Language (EAL) students in The Australian Curriculum. Given the significant numbers of EAL students in schools, I argue that overall responsibility for education of EAL students is a mainstream, rather than minority, issue and that it is therefore legitimate to ask to what extent and how EAL students are positioned in the Curriculum. I begin the paper by addressing the needs of EAL students and the domains of knowledge required of mainstream teachers who work with such students in their classes. I suggest that these domains, while most obviously including extensive knowledge of language, literacy and language development, also include in-depth curriculum knowledge and knowledge of how to plan and implement programs characterised by high intellectual challenge and high support. I ask to what extent these domains of knowledge are acknowledged in The Australian Curriculum, and what guidance and support are provided for teachers in relation to them. I argue that within the constraints of what is possible in a national curriculum, developments to date offer considerable hope for EAL students and the teachers who work with such students, but they also present some challenges. I conclude by offering some suggestions of how these challenges may be addressed [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of knowledge about grammar ('grammatics') within The Australian Curriculum: English could be expected to be more useful to students than grammar taught in isolation, although the potential benefits of an integrated approach to teaching grammatics remain somewhat under-researched. This paper describes a case study in which Year 2 children were taught the grammatics of quoted ('direct') speech using a language description informed by systemic functional grammar. The teaching of grammatics was integrated with literacy and literature studies, although the focus of the paper is not on instruction per se but on the benefits of instruction for children's learning. The children were able to use their knowledge of verbal Processes ('saying verbs') to improve their punctuation of quoted speech and to become more aware of using expression in oral reading of dialogue. Evidence for these claims is provided in the form of pre- and post-tests of punctuation, oral readings of a picture book and interview data. The findings are interpreted using Vygotskian theory, particularly the significance of the conscious control of 'scholarly' knowledge and the role of explicit and integrated approaches to teaching in helping students develop higher order understandings of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2012) has considerable implications for teachers' knowledge about language (KAL) and pedagogic practice. To successfully implement the functionally oriented model of grammar proposed by the Curriculum, many teachers will need to expand their expertise in grammar to understand 'the structures and functions of word- and sentence- level grammar and text patterns and the connections between them' (ACARA, 2009. p. 7). They will also need to apply that knowledge to enhance their students' learning outcomes. This paper describes a small-scale research project involving a group of primary and secondary teachers in a targeted professional learning program. The initial findings have implications for theory and practice. In terms of theory, the research provides one of the first studies of the implementation of the new Curriculum. The case study reported underscores the importance of the implementation phase for the Curriculum and of the need for appropriate professional learning programs. The paper argues that such programs must go beyond a 'trainthe- trainer' or 'one size fits all' model. They must be nuanced enough to account for the range of teacher needs in terms of linguistic knowledge and the contexts in which they will enact the Curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Somewhat surprisingly, an explicit knowledge about language has been often absent from English curricula. The new Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2012) has taken a fairly radical step in placing knowledge about language at the core of classroom practice, thereby raising the issue of an appropriate model of language to inform the Language Strand of the Curriculum. This paper will outline the rationale behind the Language Strand, and will then make explicit its underlying model of language. The paper thus provides a context for the ensuing articles in this Special Focus Issue of AJLL, which take up various concerns in relation to implementation of the Curriculum and especially of the Language strand of the English Curriculum. The paper concludes by canvassing a number of issues relevant to the development and implementation of the Curriculum: student outcomes, terminology, and pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of teacher-child dialogue in facilitating young children's language learning is well established in the research literature, with significant outcomes accrued from rich language use in the classroom (Shiel, Cregan, McGough & Archer, 2012). This study focuses on the opportunities teachers provide to engage children in talk during small group teaching sessions and considers teacher-child talk patterns, within and across preschool and school settings. The intention was to examine teacher talk behaviours that facilitate children's language use and explore how teachers support children's oral language development as they move from preschool to school. Teachers from a preschool and school setting serving children from a low socioeconomic region of outer western Melbourne in Victoria, Australia were invited to plan, implement, and record teaching interactions with small groups of children that specifically built on their oral language skills. This paper reports on the fine-grained analysis of the teacher-child talk patterns in two specific ways: (1) teachers' talk behaviours, to review the discourse patterns used to foster young children's language learning; and (2) the children's responses, to ascertain the dialogic interplay that created opportunities for children's talk and learning. The findings indicate that during talk where teachers were supporting children's oral language, the teachers' preference for closed questions that were directed toward the immediate stimuli resulted in limited responses from the children. This particular teacher-child talk pattern was dominant in both preschool and school settings. While the common teacher talk behaviours across both settings support the continuity of children's learning, as they transition from preschool to school, there was little evidence of interactions that engaged children in rich dialogue to extend their oral language competencies. These results suggest that expanding teachers' repertoire of talk practices to involve children in a wide range of oral language experiences that draw on children's understandings and are associated with building knowledge, provides a foundation for engagement in children's language use and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This literature review explores the potential impacts of high-stakes testing on literacy education in Australia. The paper draws upon research primarily from the United States and the United Kingdom. Both of these countries have pursued high-stakes testing in order to increase accountability, encourage standardisation, and to close the achievement gap between socially advantaged and socially disadvantaged students. The issue is discussed by exploring the impact of high-stakes testing upon curriculum and pedagogy. The paper concludes that the predominantly negative unintended consequences of high-stakes testing result from a failure to gain the support of teachers for testing systems. It is recommended that, in order for literacy education to benefit from the opportunities provided by the emphasis upon literacy in high-stakes systems, teachers be provided with a greater role in the design, implementation and evaluation of the tests, as well as having input into how test results are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a complex communicational environment and at the dawn of an Australian curriculum, teachers need new kinds of knowledge about language (KAL). Our paper investigates the character of a 'good enough' KAL through 'grammatics' - a metalanguage based on careful study of grammar - a way of thinking with grammar in mind. It identifies four challenges facing any grammatics that is going to be adequate to the discipline: (1) Building a coherent account of KAL for contemporary English; (2) Fashioning a rhetorical grammatics for improving students' compositions; (3) Improving continuity and cumulative learning through the years of schooling; and (4) Developing a grammatics adequate to multimodal communication. Our paper draws on the resources of systemic functional grammatics to explore these challenges and considers the implications for teachers and students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper notes that reading in today's world necessarily entails sophisticated integrative processing of meanings afforded by the combination of images and language. Secondly it notes that Australia's first National Assessment Program in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) does not reflect this multimodal conceptualisation of reading comprehension. Thirdly it outlines some of the results of an ARC-funded study using the NSW Basic Skills Test (BST), explicating different types of image/language relations entailed in test questions and the relative difficulty of these. Fourthly the paper outlines the results of the final phase of the study, which investigated year six students' understanding of different types of image/language relations in online texts. Finally, implications for the development of a National Assessment Program that takes due account of the multimodal nature of contemporary paper and screen based texts, will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the implications of quality teaching initiatives and intellectual challenge from the perspective of English as a second language (ESL) students and their teachers. In doing so, it draws on recently completed research that investigated the experiences of teachers working with quality teaching frameworks in a range of Sydney schools with high proportions of ESL students. Via questionnaires, responses and case studies, teachers' views were sought on the ways in which they had worked with quality teaching initiatives, their successes and frustrations in this work, and on how they saw their ESL students positioned in relation to frameworks within the initiatives. Relevant findings from the research are discussed in the paper. These include the teachers' overall levels of enthusiasm towards the quality teaching frameworks and the features that they found most useful and most challenging. More general issues that emerged as important are also discussed. These include the ways in which the notion of intellectual challenge has been taken up and (variously) understood, the extent to which teaching of language is (or is not) recognised and supported in the frameworks, and the broader implications of the high challenge curricula for ESL students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study of some writing done by a Year 3 class in an Australian school. The children were aged approximately eight years and came from culturally diverse backgrounds. In Western Australia the majority of primary schools make use of materials which contain a version of Australian genre theory. Some aspects of the theory, such as the schematic structures or ‘frameworks’ of the genres, have been enthusiastically taken up by teachers, while lower-level linguistic features have received less attention. This paper focuses both on the translation of genre theory into teaching materials, and on the way in which some of these ideas are implemented in the classroom. The aim is to document the way in which writing is taught in this particular classroom, and to begin to investigate the relationship between linguistic theories about writing and learning to write, and what actually happens in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competence in literacy skills has long been associated with educational (Moore, Bean, Birdyshaw & Rycik, 1999; Sullivan & Brown, 2015), vocational (Kirsch et al., 2002; Zasacka, 2014) and social achievement (Wilhelm, 2016). Since research indicates that reading as a recreational pursuit improves students' outcomes on a range of literacy measures, supporting adolescent reading in an age of personal media is a key issue for policy makers in fields as diverse as education, library science, youth programming and arts policy. In order to be effective advocates of reading in this digital era, these diverse stakeholders need to remain abreast of adolescents' reading engagement frequency, and factors influencing this engagement in a dynamic educational and social environment. As such, this paper seeks to provide insight into how age, gender, place of residency and maternal education may potentially influence adolescents' intensity of engagement in the literacy-supportive practice of recreational book reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a qualitative study of the practicum learning experiences of thirty students of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) enrolled in a Masters of TESOL Education at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on current thinking about the role of reflective practice in teacher education, the value of real world learning beyond the classroom and the pedagogical affordances of the practicum, the enquiry aims to identify the types of practitioner learning that occur during practicum placements in terms of enhancing learners' knowledge and skills, increasing their self-reliance and self-confidence and contributing to their growth as educators and individuals, their professional and social identities. Utilising reflective surveys from a portfolio of authentic practicum documents as data, the researchers create thematic narratives of 'being and becoming' which foreground the salient themes. Hence, we demonstrate how the practicum develops participant practice teachers' realisations of their emerging agency as practitioners, makes manifest their perceptions of their increased professional confidence and then serves to indicate the pedagogical value of applying theoretical learning from the classroom to their professional practice. These results suggest the importance of preparing teachers for discovery, both the usual and the unexpected, in the process of planning, implementing and evidencing practicum work, and emphasise the importance of being and becoming to the practicum's work of embodied learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks to the past, to the watershed of Australia’s first National Literacy Plan (Australian Education Council, 1994) and National Numeracy Plan (Australian Education Council, 1994); to the present (reported National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) data and evidence about literacy gains), and forward, to possible futures for young people’s literacy education and the prospective experience of literacy testing in Australia. The discussion situates NAPLAN in its historical context, recognising how it emerged from different approaches to state based testing of literacy and numeracy. Against this background we examine the 2015 NAPLAN writing data to reveal increasing numbers of students who are achieving below the national minimum standard in the domain of writing. Finally we call for a sharpened focus on writing standards as benchmarks in NAPLAN and how these relate to achievement standards in the Australian Curriculum. We also argue for an increased emphasis on teachers’ criterial knowledge, essential for the teaching and assessment of writing. Such moves would go some way to realising the potential of NAPLAN for evidence informed policy for achieving real educational improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a language-based model of direct instruction known as text-based, or genre, pedagogy, customised in collaboration with English teachers in four Australian secondary schools to teach creative writing in Years 7 and 8 classrooms. A distinctive feature of this pedagogy is a shared metalanguage used to make visible to students the literacy demands of specialised discourse, in this case, the specialised discourse of creative writing. We demonstrate the use of the metalanguage at four different levels of language, in order to build visible bridges from more general patterns of language use, in this case, the generic structure of narrative, to specific grammatical patterns that require more specialised terminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing literacy demands of senior secondary studies have been noted by government agencies and scholars both in Australia and overseas. Disciplinary differences in writing has similarly received attention, although much of the research in this area has focused on the junior school, or spanned the whole of the secondary context. Less research has been focused specifically on disciplinarity in the senior high school, or on differences within what may often be conceived as a single discipline, such as between writing in Modern and Ancient History. This paper investigates disciplinary difference in the context of senior secondary writing for Modern and Ancient History and the resulting demands on students. It focuses on the different ways that dialogism, or the negotiation of competing knowledge claims, is managed in each subject. The Systemic Functional Linguistic system of engagement is used in a discourse analysis of highly rated student writing to reveal how writers in the histories open up or close down spaces for other voices in their arguments. Analysis illustrates the ways that 'objective evaluation' is managed, illuminating one aspect of what is valued as appropriate argumentation and raising implications for the way that literacy pedagogy in the senior secondary subjects of Modern and Ancient History is understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a written version of the closing plenary at the 2014 AATE/ALEA conference, aNTicipating New Territories, in Darwin in July 2014. It begins by highlighting several major interrelated themes from the conference keynotes, papers and workshops that I attended. Each of these themes resonated strongly with me during the conference. Two potential and competing storylines and the potential direction each could take Australian literacy education are then sketched. The first storyline envisages a continued technical and highly prescriptive approach to literacy. The second advocates a more creative approach to literacy pedagogy and briefly describes two contemporary programs that embody this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Success in literacy is critical to effective learning outcomes for all children, however for many Indigenous students who move variously between their Indigenous languages, Aboriginal English, and Standard forms of English the teaching of language and literacy has heightened significance and requires distinct, concentrated attention. This paper will consider principles for practice that have been derived from the adaptation of teaching programs implemented to effectively support Indigenous students' (English) literacy learning. The three programs discussed: the Abecedarian Approach Australia (3a) for preschool children, the Literacy Acquisition for Pre-primary Students pilot program and Reading Recovery, a literacy intervention for students after one year of school. From the evidence presented, successful literacy outcomes for students can been related to engaging with and connecting to Indigenous communities and families, teachers' professional skills and knowledge, the provision of responsive teaching interventions and investment in well-researched proven programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The move towards a national curriculum in Australia has created a new urgency to consider the extent to which teachers can claim agency within their profession. Drawing on data from interview transcripts of a small scale participant centred research project involving secondary English teachers in a school in Melbourne, Australia, this paper explores an apparent contradiction in teachers' perceptions of their role in curriculum decision-making. The focus of the project was to investigate teachers' attitudes to the teaching of poetry in an attempt to explain why this genre of literature is now almost entirely absent from the senior secondary 'taught' curriculum in the Australian state of Victoria. On one hand, the teachers in this study express frustration that the looming introduction of a national curriculum - combined with an increased emphasis on standardised testing - seems set to reduce their agency; on the other, they entertain the possibility that children from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and communities might be better served by a centrally set curriculum than has previously been recognised. We draw on Bernstein's theories to argue that an analysis of this apparent contradiction may lead to the development of more socially just pedagogical practices within the teaching profession and among teacher educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stage theories of spelling development have been widely accepted since their conceptualisation in the 1970s; but, converging evidence offers support for non-linear models of spelling development. Specifically, Triple Word Form Theory (TWFT) suggests that students are capable of drawing on and coordinating phonological, orthographic, and morphological skills from quite early in their spelling development. Assumptions about the nature of spelling development have important implications for the way spelling is taught; however, many existing assessment systems currently being applied by educators and systems have failed to consider non-linear perspectives of spelling development. This paper presents the Components of Spelling Test (CoST) as a new approach to spelling assessment. The test is a valid and reliable assessment tool informed by TWFT and developed through a method of analysis suggested by stage theorists. Data used to develop and test the CoST were drawn from students in Year 3 and Year 5 across four schools in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) (n=198). The results of the testing clearly demonstrated that the CoST can provide teachers and educational researchers with a means to validly and reliably identify individual differences in specific phonological, orthographic and morphological skills associated with spelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recreational book reading offers significant benefit for literacy outcomes. To increase the frequency of recreational book reading in adolescents, an understanding of the reasons leading to infrequency of engagement in the practice is required. This paper explores both quantitative and qualitative data collected in a survey response to a West Australian study on adolescent book reading. Findings from this study further understandings of the reasons that may limit adolescents' recreational book reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complexity of teacher's work is manifest in the divergent use of digital technologies in and out of school. This paper explores the logical step of connecting students' out-of-school mediated literacy learning to the content descriptors of the Australian Curriculum. The study uses published evidence from four previous studies of young people to demonstrate the diverse ways that out-of-school practices can be linked to literacy learning in the Australian Curriculum. We frame this linking of informal literacy learning to the Australian Curriculum by highlighting the 'funds of knowledge' children bring through the school gate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ways educators incorporate technologies into their classroom literacy experiences and the implications these present for professional practices have been the focus of discussion for some time. We believe it timely to re-examine these debates in a period of 'digital reform' as we consider the realities teachers report as they use technology as a tool in literacy classrooms. In doing this, we acknowledge the potential of new technologies such as laptops, wireless connectivity, Interactive White Boards and mobile communication devices to reshape pedagogic activity within primary classrooms but aim to capture the reality reported by active practitioners. In this paper we share results from a survey of literacy teachers around Australia. The survey and our analysis are guided by Activity Theory which enables pedagogic activity as it occurs in specific contexts within a larger socio-cultural milieu to be studied. In particular, this approach assisted us to identify, describe and explicate the synergies among (i) the technology or tools the teachers have access to and use in the context of a particular organisation (their school and their classroom), (ii) the contextual factors shaping their selection and implementation, and (iii) and teachers' reported literacy pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the preliminary findings of an investigation into a number of everyday practices of primary and secondary teachers at the beginning of the implementation of the new Australian English curriculum. Teachers of the KLA/subject English participated in an on-line survey designed to explore their perceptions in relation to four domains of their practice: curriculum use, planning, professional learning needs, and the teaching of subject English. The survey results for the first three domains confirm the importance of official curriculum/syllabus documents in teachers' perceptions of their everyday practice but suggest that most teachers view 'in-school' resources considerably more authoritative than externally produced resources. The survey responses also reveal that teachers focus more on the process of teaching than on subject/ discipline content in reporting their practical realisation of teaching and learning activities, and view assessment as a key issue when responding to open-ended survey items. This research, forming part of the first phase of an ARC Linkage project, is being used to orient subsequent phases of data collection and explore possible implications for this period of curriculum change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-stakes literacy testing is now a ubiquitous educational phenomenon. However, it remains a relatively recent phenomenon in Australia. Hence it is possible to study the ways in which such tests are reorganising educators' work during this period of change. This paper draws upon Dorothy Smith's Institutional Ethnography and critical policy analysis to consider this problem and reports on interview data from teachers and the principal in small rural school in a poor area of South Australia. In this context high-stakes testing and the associated diagnostic school review unleashes a chain of actions within the school which ultimately results in educators doubting their professional judgments, increasing the investment in testing, narrowing their teaching of literacy and purchasing levelled reading schemes. The effects of high-stakes testing in disadvantaged schools are identified and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Middle school learners are increasingly required to engage with curriculum-specific literacies as they transition from primary to secondary school. Teachers of middle school learners are correspondingly required to provide for learners' needs in identifying and making explicit the various literacy requirements of specific disciplines; and in utilising pedagogical models to assist learners to cope with these new demands. This paper describes a small-scale 'proof of concept' Design-Based Research (DBR) experiment conducted by a Year 5 teacher as part of a wider Australian Research Council project addressing new literacy demands for middle years' learners. The teacher investigated the benefits of explicit teaching of technical language in a science unit, aimed at increasing learners' facility, understanding of and confidence with scientific language in writing descriptions. She experimented with a DBR approach to allow for the gathering of multiple point sources of evidence to support her expectations and initial theoretical investigations, and for refinement and extension of her intervention as it occurred, based on analysis of data collected during the intervention phases. Positive outcomes of the experiment included increased learner confidence and facility in using scientific language, affirmation of the benefits of explicit subject-specific vocabulary teaching, and engagement by the teacher with a research approach that shows promise as a way forward in documenting classroom-based literacy research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its Language Strand, the Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2012) refers to the importance of students learning to describe language as a system, paying attention to both structure (syntax) and meaning (semantics) at word, sentence and text levels. Yet English teachers in Australia remain uncertain about how to make principled connections between language as system and language as text. It is clear that the role of a linguistically informed knowledge must be addressed if teachers are to support their students to develop the 'dynamic and evolving' body of knowledge about language (KAL) required by the new Australian Curriculum. Focusing on persuasive texts, this paper uses the lenses provided by the Australian Curriculum: English to explore how language construes meaning at group, sentence and text level. The analysis contributes towards a multi-level language framework to help teachers to help students construct and appreciate the valued forms of argumentation required in the new Curriculum, as these draw variously on logical reasoning and emotional impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the extent to which ESL teachers' understanding of their work as literacy educators has collective resonance with other practitioners in the same professional space. In so doing, it seeks to identify what aspects of individual knowledge stand the test of professional consensus (Wise, 2005), and thus give greater credence to practitioner-generated expertise that has become increasingly marginalised in the move towards more 'scientific', evidence-based paradigms for educational research (Harper & de Jong, 2009). While not arguing that professional consensus is, in itself, sufficient for defining best practice, it does argue of the need to recognise teacher expertise as one significant element in shaping understandings of pedagogy. The data emerges from a larger study of what it means to 'teach literacy' when working with ESL learners that initially focused on three teacher case studies. The second phase, presented here, surveyed a larger body of teachers in Victorian high schools to elicit their response to statements extrapolated from case study interviews. Following an overview of literacy within current Australian curriculum discourse and a summary of the first phase findings, I then present an analysis of the survey results from phase two. I conclude by arguing what insights these findings offer current understandings of literacy, and the implications they begin to raise for teaching literacy to ESL learners in the Australian middle years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst commissioned research reports and policy reforms in literacy education, this paper examines research reported in the 2000-2005 archive of the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy (AJLL). This focus arises from the selective inclusion of literacy research in recent literacy education policy reform documents in Australia and overseas and the exclusion of other research, including research from this AJLL 2000/5 archive. Given the high national and international standing of AJLL, we felt it was timely and important to engage in a retrospective mapping exercise with this collection of research and critically examine its relationship to literacy education policy. So doing forms part of our broader concerns about connections between literacy research, policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early years in a child's life are widely acknowledged as significant for development and learning, yet in Australia a co-ordinated approach where emergent literacy is acknowledged and prioritised is not evident, particularly in early childhood settings during the period prior to school. Despite a large body of International and Australian research conducted with young children, families and teachers where results emphasise the need for emergent literacy opportunities to be made available for all, there is little evidence that changes are being made in early childhood settings in Australia. This paper describes a study of emergent literacy conducted in two early childhood classes in the year immediately prior to Year 1 in North Queensland where teachers embedded emergent literacy opportunities within their play-based programs. Design-based research, an emerging paradigm, was utilised and both quantitative and qualitative data were collected. Results showed young children's emergent literacy understandings improved significantly on a number of measures over a period of five months and teachers' perceptions of emergent literacy pedagogy changed due to the experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores inequities in student achievement in literacy that emerge when data are interrogated from a metropolitan, regional and rural perspective. In this analysis, data are drawn from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Australian National Benchmark results for Years 3, 5 and 7 students. The results in relation to geographical location highlight significant differences in student performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a period in the history of the primary English curriculum í the 1920s to the 1950s - that has sometimes been assumed to be relatively static and uninteresting. Taking the case of the Reading curriculum in South Australian public schools, the modifications that were made to the course are analysed to consider how what counted as reading changed over this time, and the implications this had for the work of the classroom teacher. The analysis shows that these forty years saw some major changes in the curriculum, and that over much of the time there was a struggle to define and redefine what it meant to read and to teach reading. Apparently minor additions to course content, for example the introduction of Supplementary Readers in the primary school in 1924, opened up new problems in the teaching of English through the way that they emphasised silent reading. These changes seem to have required a new kind of relationship between the teacher and the student in order to allow the students' reading to be monitored, guided and supervised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper lends support to the argument that reading pedagogy must be understood and practiced as much more than adherence to a particular reading 'method'. An historical account of debates about particular methods recommended for teaching reading in Australia is presented, through a case study of 'The Jones Method' — an expressly home-grown method. This account, contextualised by a larger curriculum-historical study of English teaching, teacher education and public schooling in the first half of the twentieth century, helps us to rethink current conceptions of primary English and reading pedagogy in schools — when radical socio-cultural change raises new questions about school curriculum, teacher education, and the purposes of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]