New challenges for literature study in primary school English : Building teacher knowledge and know-how through systemic functional theory

Australian primary school teachers face two major challenges in their implementation of the national curriculum for English: literary study and multimodality. Whilst teachers and students frequently engage with texts like literary picture books, the requirement that teachers build children’s understandings of texts as patterned, aesthetic constructs is new. And it is especially demanding for teachers without specialized training in either literature or multimodality. They must learn to manage the expanded ‘reservoir’ of meaning in school English and develop ‘repertoires’ of semiotic understanding in the course of fulltime teaching (Bernstein, 2000). This paper emerges from a larger study that aimed to meet the challenge of literary study in English by introducing practicing teachers to a semiotic toolkit inspired by systemic functional grammatics. Grammatics, as Halliday (2002) interprets it, distinguishes the theory from the practice of grammar, the metalanguage from language in use. In our project, systemic functional grammatics included study not just of clause-level choices in language but their role in larger discourse frames and, via analogy, in images and multimodal texts. We made use of the ‘resemblance’ between focalization in print narratives and in bi-modal narratives picture books. Adapting semiotic principles like stratification and metafunction to national curriculum notions of ‘levels of analysis’ and ‘threads of meaning’, we used systemic functional (SF) theory to open up the potential of literature study for English teachers in NSW and Victoria, attempting to build understanding about the ‘uses’ of grammatics for a relatively uninformed group of ‘users’ (Martin et al., 2013). Because of the need to manage the theory-practice nexus in professional learning, we attempted to characterize ‘knowledge about’ images in narrative in accessible and systematic ways and to relate this to pedagogic ‘know-how’ in primary teaching and assessment of narrative. The paper introduces the analytical framework we developed to represent and develop knowledge and know-how in primary school literature study. It shows how we used the framework to benchmark teacher starting-points as they commented on students’ responses to a picture book called The Great Bear by Armin Greder and Libby Gleeson (1999). It overviews input provided to teachers in workshops based on SF principles such as system, stratification and metafunctions. Finally, it overviews our initial findings based on our analysis of follow-up interviews with two teachers as they reflected on students’ responses to The Tunnel, by Anthony Browne (1989). Changes are arrayed on clines produced to account for shifts in teacher knowledge and know-how. Early results of our project are very encouraging, providing evidence of significant if varied growth in teachers’ orientations to narrative meaning and increased levels of meta-semiotic awareness. The paper concludes with reflections on the use of SF grammatics for meeting the challenges of literature study in primary school English in an era of multimodality

The Effects of a Morphological Intervention on Children's Spelling Performance and Understanding: Toward a Relational Approach

Spelling is a very complex process, yet mastering the intricacies and inconsistencies of English spelling is considered a basic skill children must learn from the earliest years at school. Throughout their education, however, many children struggle with spelling, a struggle that can continue into adulthood. In response to the apparently insurmountable challenge spelling poses to so many children, this study proposes a re-conceptualization of children's spelling development incorporating both a cognitive and a linguistic perspective. To this end, a multifaceted methodology was used in the study, first, to investigate children's reasoning about spelling, the cognitive view, and, second, to track the development of spelling performance, the linguistic view

Adolescent literacies for critical social and community engagement

This thesis aims to describe the literacy practices of adolescents who are engaged actively and critically with their communities. In particular it is concerned to make explicit the semiotic resources adolescents deploy to persuade their multiple audiences to effect social change and to build solidarity within the social spaces they inhabit. The study aims to interpret these semiotic resources within their wider social, socio-political and cultural contexts and to respond to concerns by literacy educators and wider social and political theorists to celebrate and make visible the processes and practices of adolescent active citizenship. Data for the study include texts produced by six adolescents involved in two social movements during 2004 and 2005. These texts represent a range of modalities including speeches and radio interviews, print newspaper commentaries, published essays and online weblogs and magazines. The social contexts of texts were analysed using theories from systemic functional linguistics and new literacy studies. The linguistic construal of persuasion was examined using genre theory and the discourse semantic theories of negotiation and appraisal. These theories were enriched with complementary perspectives from new rhetorical studies. The study found that adolescents draw on a wide range of semiotic resources to persuade multiple audiences in the civic domain. The activists deployed rhetorical strategies valued by mainstream politicians, social commentators and activists as well as those valued within the academic and personal domains of their lives. The choice of semiotic resources was found to be motivated by the complex roles, relationships and social positioning of the young activists in relation to their audiences as well as by the constraints and freedoms of the modalities in which the texts were situated. The intertextual positioning of the texts within larger social semiotic affiliations and sociopolitical environments was also found to have a considerable impact on the reading of the texts

Using Readers' Theatre to Promote Intercultural Language Teaching and Learning

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the use of Readers' Theatre for enhancing intercultural language teaching and learning (ILTL) with a group of international students preparing to study at an Australian university. ILTL is gaining increasing recognition as a powerful orientation to second languages education. It emphasises the need for learners to look beyond their own worldviews and to develop the capacity to negotiate meaning across and between languages and cultures in order to participate successfully within a multicultural and globalised world. ILTL also underpins the 'Australian Curriculum: Languages', consistent with the nationally agreed goals of education, and is a core curriculum priority across all subjects in the Australian Curriculum. Readers' Theatre (RT) is a type of process drama that assists learners in exploring language and culture through engagement with authentic texts in performances that help them to understand other worldviews. Sometimes referred to as 'Theatre of the Imagination', it makes minimal use of sets, props and costumes; the performers act their parts while holding their scripts, thus embodying the script through vocal expression and physical movements. Learning occurs through participation in, and observation of, verbal and non-verbal behaviour. A key affordance of RT lies in use of whole class discussions in relation to ideas and themes presented in performances, which provide important opportunities for intercultural language teaching and learning

From dot points to disciplinarity: the theory and practice of disciplinary literacies in secondary schooling

This thesis explores the disciplinary literacies of Business Studies and Music, with a focus on the written component of the HSC examination in the final year of schooling in New South Wales. The syllabus contains dot points of topics to be covered in the course but these offer little guidance for teachers or students in how to compose an answer to an HSC examination question and they obscure relations between different aspects of disciplinary knowledge. To help teachers move beyond syllabus dot points, this thesis aims to illuminate the distinctive literacy demands of Business Studies and Music. This is achieved by using analytical frameworks from Systemic Functional Linguistics and Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis to explore the features of successful HSC writing in these two subjects. Analysis reveals that successful writing in Business Studies explains patterns of cause and effect with profit as the main motive. In contrast, successful HSC writing in Music describes musical events in terms of concepts of music and principles of musical composition. In the analysis, concepts of music are systematised as networks and taxonomies to reveal the relations within and between concepts. The analysis also includes a typology of images (graphic notation and non-traditional notation) used to represent music to enable an investigation of how image and written text are interrelated in successful HSC responses

Developing Students' Knowledge About Language in the Early Years: A Games-Based Pedagogical Approach

A games-based pedagogical approach to developing students' knowledge about language in the early years of primary schooling is the focus of this study. New perspectives about the potential for teaching and learning about grammar to support students' development as expert users of language have emerged in recent literature and these studies have offered insights into how educators might unlock this potential in their classrooms. Recognising the potential of knowledge about grammar to support language and literature development has been aligned with the use in the classroom of a more functionally-oriented pedagogical grammar, one derived from M.A.K Halliday's systemic functional linguistics. Recent curriculum changes in Anglophone countries, including Australia, have foregrounded explicit functionally-oriented grammar instruction. To enact this aspect of the curriculum effectively, teachers, particularly those working with very young students, need more knowledge about grammar and more pedagogical 'know-how'. To contribute to building this 'know-how', the study presented in this thesis explores the use of games-based pedagogy to teach young students about grammar. Specifically, the affordances of dialogic pedagogy, metalinguistic understanding and multimodality were applied to the design of grammar games to teach Year 1 students about clause structure and the functional parts of the clause. In this single embedded case study, the students were video-recorded as they played the games. This enabled an analysis of the students' use of multiple semiotic resources, including gestural and dialogic interaction, colour and movement, to reveal the complex interplay between interactive mediating tools and interactions in games purposefully designed to support these young students learning about grammar. The study findings suggest that the type of student dialogic interaction that supports learning can emerge when students are engaged in games-based learning activities. Moreover, this kind of student dialogic interaction, scaffolded by multiple semiotic resources, can support young students' gradual development of knowledge about language and their developing metalinguistic understanding. A refined framework for how the young students in this study appeared to develop their metalinguistic understanding is proposed. The thesis suggests that further research into the possibilities afforded by a games-based approach to developing students' knowledge about language is warranted

Multiliteracies, Metalanguage and the Protean Mind: Navigating School English in a Sea of Change

Textuality is 'core business' in school English but its nature is increasingly problematic, especially within a multiliteracies context. Understanding how texts work puts pressure on our metalanguages, making them strange. In this paper, I explore this issue through a seafaring metaphor, picturing English as a ship we are steering through uncertain waters where films, posters and video games jostle Shakespeare's plays and contemporary novels, all demanding analysis. What kinds of tools will serve our navigational needs as we journey across a sea of change? What instruments will bring stability in troubling cross currents? Teachers need access to a metalanguage adequate to four coordinates of the new territory: diversities, hierarchies, innovation and convention. Not any metalanguage will do here. In order to work productively with the tensions introduced by these different parameters, we need a protean mind. The protean mind is alive to changes of form and also to continuities within these. It is sensitive to the realities of institutions and the possibilities of new semiosis. In this paper I consider the impact of multiliteracies on three senior assessment tasks. I consider what kinds of metalanguage will be needed if we are to deal productively with the demands of such tasks and what they imply about the pressures of diversities, hierarchies, innovation and convention. I argue that any metalanguage we develop will only 'hold' through these pressures if we can make our navigational tools adequate to the realities and complexities of multiliteracies

Multiliteracies and 'Basic Skills' Accountability

The term 'multiliteracies' has become part of the lexicon of change in school English in Australia. It is an acknowledgement of the diverse modes of communication now swirling in the broader social world and the need to teach for and with these modes in classrooms. Working as they do at the interface with the broader communicative environment, many English teachers have incorporated new modes of communication into their classrooms. Many whose classrooms I visit will begin a Shakespeare unit with Baz Luhrman's film 'Romeo and Juliet' rather than the print version of the play script, will analyze the appeal of a website as well as the art of characterization in a novel and most will be more familiar with the Homer of 'The Simpsons' than with the Homer of the 'Odyssey'