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Widening participation in higher education has led to the global expansion of universities, increased student and program diversity, and greater provision of flexible pathways into university. Critical to supporting a growing student body is helping all students develop their ability to communicate confidently and effectively in their academic communities. This research employs a collaborative benchmarking framework to explore academic literacy instruction in pathway or ‘enabling’ programs across nine Australian universities. While prevailing assumptions hold that such programs are overly diverse, the findings demonstrate that these programs have developed remarkably similar approaches; in particular, the investigation found that the programs all drew on established academic literacy models and reflected an emerging disciplinary coherence across the enabling education sector, despite the lack of a formal curriculum and standards framework.Kindly check and confirm the processed Article title is correct.This is correct.

A lack of representation of diverse families in children’s books can affirm insecurities and contribute to a sense of “otherness”. This study reports on the representation of family diversity in award-listed Australian children’s picture books. A critical theoretical framework was employed to analyse both texts and images. This study found a lack of diverse family structures in children’s books, especially LGBTIQA+, foster, step and blended families. This paper argues that to ensure inclusive and equitable literacy learning opportunities for all, educators need to go beyond award-listed books when selecting books for early literacy environments.

Reading difficulties have been associated with limited academic success and related social-emotional outcomes including anxiety and low motivation. Recent research on the educational impact of the COVID-19 pandemic indicates that children with poor reading skills were disproportionally disadvantaged. This growing number of students experiencing reading difficulties will require effective implementation of strategies to prevent long-term disadvantage, including in the challenging context of secondary schools where teachers are unfamiliar with reading instruction and constrained by timetabling of subjects and teachers. This research examined whether a Direct Instruction programme could be implemented with fidelity in the real world of a secondary school over a sustained period. Reading progress was monitored using a standardised assessment. Programme implementation was monitored via interviews with staff, classroom observations, and field notes. These data revealed that, whilst fidelity of programme implementation was challenging, programme delivery and student ability and confidence in reading improved over the three years.

Chinese-speaking students enroll in Australian tertiary institutions in large numbers. Success for these international students is heavily dependent upon their mastering the conventions of academic writing in English. How best to ensure such mastery among EAL learners has been a matter of debate among tertiary educators and language specialists, with competing theories and methods proposed. This paper reports on an attempt to improve English academic writing through intensive lexical instruction, a method proposed by Ackermann & Chen (2013), Boers et al. (2016), Lewis (1993), Selivan (2018), Wray (2005, 2018) and others. Nine Chinese-speaking tertiary students were offered training in recognising and employing those lexical constructions commonly found in relevant technical and academic genres. The project employed a mixed methods case study approach to describe students’ performance and their perceptions and responses to the teaching they underwent. While gains in performance were evident in some cases, the outcomes of the teaching were inconsistent and equivocal overall. We conclude that this raises questions about the efficacy of purely lexical methods and underscores the challenge involved in teaching complex genres at tertiary level. These findings have implications for those teaching Chinese-speaking students, particularly in EAL contexts.

PURPOSE: We report findings from a survey of elementary teachers regarding reading instruction. The purpose was to examine teachers' beliefs about how children in the first 7 years of schooling develop reading comprehension skills and to characterize the self-reported practices and strategies they use to support children to comprehend connected text. METHOD: A web-based survey was used to collect data from 284 Australian elementary teachers about their beliefs and practices regarding reading comprehension instruction. Selected Likert-scale items were aggregated to determine the degree to which participants held "child-centered" or "content-centered" views of reading instruction. RESULTS: Australian elementary school teachers hold a wide range of beliefs about reading instruction, some of which are in direct opposition to each other. Our findings indicate low consensus about what elements of instructional practice are useful in classrooms or how time should be apportioned to different tasks. Commercial programs had significant penetration in schools, and many participants reported using multiple commercial programs, with varying degrees of pedagogical harmony. Participants indicated that their most common source of knowledge about reading instruction was their own personal research, with few nominating university teacher education as a primary source of knowledge or expertise. CONCLUSIONS: Little agreement exists within the Australian elementary teacher community regarding the ways that reading skills can and should be taught. There is significant room for teacher practice to have improved theoretical underpinnings and to develop a consistent repertoire of classroom practices aligned with these.

This project focused on developing, delivering and evaluating a literacy text-messaging program for parents / carers with a child at kindergarten in WA. Texts were delivered weekly over 30 weeks, in collaboration with Better Beginnings. Families were invited to participate through a flyer in the book gifting bag delivered by local librarians to families attending kindergarten across Western Australia. Kindergarten teachers and librarians from 16 LGAs attended workshops to establish kindergarten-family library partnerships, along with the production and evaluation of a partnership framework and implementation materials. Evaluation involved all participants, with in-depth data collected from participants in six communities.