Chiropractic Technique and Philosophy

2 page(s

Functional Language Instruction and the Writing Growth of English Language Learners in the Middle Years

In this article the authors report on the use of a scaffolding pedagogy (Gibbons, 2009), informed by systemic functional linguistics, to support the writing of English language learners in middle years curriculum learning. They focus on the work of one teacher and her English class across the first 18 months of a longitudinal design-based literacy research project, Embedding Literacies in the Key Learning Areas (ELK). This 3-year project was conducted in an Australian urban secondary school with 97.5% of students from language backgrounds other than English. A core aspect of the pedagogy implemented through the ELK project is the use of a shared metalanguage to make visible the patterns of language valued for discipline learning. Analysis of instructional materials, classroom discourse, and data on students’ achievement on standardized external and formative internal assessments of writing over 18 months indicates that growth in writing is related to pedagogical practices that include consistent use of a functional metalanguage in classroom modeling of exemplar texts and in feedback on students’ writing

Joint Construction in the SLATE project

This paper concerns pedagogical approaches to literacy implemented in the Scaffolding Literacy in Academic and Tertiary Environments (SLATE) project. In particular, this paper focuses on the Joint Construction step of the Teaching Learning Cycle (Rothery, 1994; Martin this volume). Through whole-text genre analysis (Martin and Rose, 2008), we will describe how the step of Joint Construction was adapted to an online learning context, in order to support the writing development of undergraduate applied linguistics students at the City University of Hong Kong. Our findings highlight that during online Joint Construction lessons, students were given explicit feedback and encouraged to seek clarification, raise queries, recast original contributions and respond to each other\u27s suggestions. These findings contribute to our understanding of interaction that targets the shared negotiation of meaning, and address the on-going challenge of developing pedagogic exchanges which offer explicit and effective support to students\u27 writing development

Jointly constructing semantic waves: Implications for teacher training

This paper addresses how teachers can be trained to enable cumulative knowledge-building. It focuses on the final intervention stage of the Disciplinarity, Knowledge and Schooling (DISKS) project at the University of Sydney. In this special issue, Maton identifies ‘semantic waves’ as a crucial characteristic of teaching for cumulative knowledge-building; and Martin explores a ‘power trio’ of intertwining linguistic resources which contribute to the creation of these waves. This paper draws on these complementary theoretical frameworks from Legitimation Code Theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics to explore their implications for teacher training. Specifically, it links one Year 11 Biology teacher\u27s experience of new metalanguage and explicit pedagogy, in teacher training, to first attempts at classroom Joint Construction, a form of collaborative text creation. This paper then raises important issues regarding collaborations concerned with classroom interaction and knowledge-building practices

Using historical evidence: The semantic profiles of Ancient History in senior secondary school

This paper presents findings from the Australian Research Council funded \u27Disciplinary, Knowledge and Schooling\u27 project (DISKS) which investigates knowledge-building practices in Australian secondary schools and gave rise to the ground-breaking notions of \u27semantic waves\u27 (Maton, 2013) and \u27power pedagogy\u27 (Martin, 2013). In this paper, we investigate student writing in senior secondary school Ancient History. We focus on how students use evidence in their responses to different types of exam questions. Our research question focuses on the extent to which key features of responses to short answer questions appear in extended responses and vice versa. This focus arose through findings that teachers in our study tended to view short answer questions as a \u27mini\u27 version of extended responses and prepared students accordingly. The similarities and differences are important to identify as extended responses make a significant contribution to the overall exam grade. To better understand the use of evidence in responses to different types of exam questions, the study draws on the dimension of Semantics in Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2013). We use the newly developed wording and clausing tools (Doran & Maton, 2018, forthcoming) to analyse the relative strength of context dependence in responses to Year 12 exam questions. Context dependence is particularly relevant to how students use evidence, as it involves relating the concrete particulars of specific historical artefacts, events, and the behaviours of historical figures to more abstract concepts in the discipline of history that are not bound to one historical setting. Our analysis tracks relative shifts in context dependence in student texts to generate semantic profiles of their exam responses. Findings show that although teachers may use the writing of short answer questions as preparation towards the high-stakes extended writing tasks, short answer responses are not \u27minature\u27 versions of extended responses. We argue that the differences are teachable and propose the use of model texts to make these features visible to students. Beyond the timeframe of secondary school education, learning to use evidence, particularly for the development of arguments, may provide a robust foundation for tertiary level writing tasks where students need to control degrees of context dependence

Using historical evidence: The semantic profiles of Ancient History in senior secondary school

This paper presents findings from the Australian Research Council funded ‘Disciplinarity, Knowledge and Schooling’ project (DISKS) which investigates knowledge-building practices in Australian secondary schools and gave rise to the ground-breaking notions of ‘semantic waves’ (Maton, 2013) and ‘power pedagogy’ (Martin, 2013). In this paper, we investigate student writing in senior secondary school Ancient History. We focus on how students use evidence in their responses to different types of exam questions. Our research question focuses on the extent to which key features of responses to short answer questions appear in extended responses and vice versa. This focus arose through findings that teachers in our study tended to view short answer questions as a ‘mini’ version of extended responses and prepared students accordingly. The similarities and differences are important to identify as extended responses make a significant contribution to the overall exam grade. To better understand the use of evidence in responses to different types of exam questions, the study draws on the dimension of Semantics in Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2013). We use the newly developed wording and clausing tools (Doran & Maton, 2018, forthcoming) to analyse the relative strength of context dependence in responses to Year 12 exam questions. Context dependence is particularly relevant to how students use evidence, as it involves relating the concrete particulars of specific historical artefacts, events, and the behaviours of historical figures to more abstract concepts in the discipline of history that are not bound to one historical setting. Our analysis tracks relative shifts in context dependence in student texts to generate semantic profiles of their exam responses. Findings show that although teachers may use the writing of short answer questions as preparation towards the high-stakes extended writing tasks, short answer responses are not ‘minature’ versions of extended responses. We argue that the differences are teachable and propose the use of model texts to make these features visible to students. Beyond the timeframe of secondary school education, learning to use evidence, particularly for the development of arguments, may provide a robust foundation for tertiary level writing tasks where students need to control degrees of context dependence