Pre-service teachers linking their metalinguistic knowledge to their practice: A functional approach

Existing work in Anglophone countries has raised concerns regarding teachers’ knowledge about language (KAL); this may well be an issue in other countries also, with notable exceptions such as Finland. In Australia, with the introduction of the new Australian Curriculum, the question of teacher KAL has become crucial. Teachers, both practising and pre-service, generally have some knowledge about language as an object, usually including the text structures of particular school genres and information about sentence structure and word classes. This knowledge may be based on traditional grammar and may not be well applied above the sentence level. Teachers may also have an intuitive knowledge of discourse structures and are beginning to reflect on their own discourse using understandings of dialogic teaching. This paper provides an example of how first-year pre-service teachers (PSTs) were introduced to KAL at both the grammatical and the discourse levels, as part of an introductory unit on spoken language. A range of approaches was used, including a functional view of discourse. The PSTs then applied their KAL by putting it into a context that was meaningful for them: discussing their own practice. The paper gives an illustration of some of the work they produced that demonstrates their emerging understandings

Supporting Less-Proficent Writers through Linguistically-Aware Teaching

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis (Routledge) via the DOI in this record.Whilst historically there has been a widespread consensus that teaching grammar has no impact on students’ attainment in writing, more recent research suggests that where a functionally-oriented approach to grammar is meaningfully embedded within the teaching of writing, significant improvements in writing can be secured. A recent study ((Myhill et al 2012), using a functionally-oriented approach, which found a statistically significant positive effect of such an approach, also found that the approach appeared to benefit higher-attaining writers more than lower-attaining writers. The study reported here set out to investigate specifically whether functionally-oriented approach to teaching grammar in the context of writing might support less proficient writers. A quasi-experimental design was adopted, repeating the principles of the parent study but with the intervention adapted to meet the identified writing needs of less proficient writers. The statistical analysis indicated a positive effect for the intervention group (p<0.05), and an effect size of 0.33 on students’ sentence structure and punctuation. The study demonstrates that explicit attention to grammar within the teaching of writing can support learners in developing their writing, but taken with the parent study, it also highlights that pedagogical choices need to be well-matched to writers’ needs.This parent study referred to in this article was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.Funding Agency under Grant ES/FO15313/1. The study reported in this article was funded by Pearson

Testing the waters: Exploring the teaching of genres in a Cape flats primary school in South Africa

Twenty years after democracy, the legacy of apartheid and hitherto unmet challenges of resourcing and teacher development are reflected in a severely inequitable and underperforming education system. This paper focuses on second language writing in the middle years of schooling when 80% of learners face a double challenge: to move from ‘common sense’ discourses to the more abstract, specialised discourses of school subjects and, simultaneously, to a new language of learning, in this case English. It describes an intervention using a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) genre-based pedagogy involving 72 learners and two teachers in a low socio-economic neighbourhood of Cape Town. Using an SFL analytical framework, we analyse learners’ development in the information report genre. All learners in the intervention group made substantial gains in control of staging, lexis, and key linguistic features. We argue that the scaffolding provided by SFL genre-based pedagogies together with their explicit focus on textual and linguistic features offer a means of significantly enhancing epistemic access to the specialised language of school subjects, particularly for additional language learners. Findings have implications for language-in-education policy, teacher education, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in multilingual classrooms

What, why and how–the policy, purpose and practice of grammatical terminology

© 2018, © 2018 National Association for the Teaching of English. This article critically examines the literature around grammar and grammatical terminology. It is essentially a critical consideration of the debates in England and Wales in four main parts. Part 1 considers debates in policy, the “What”, i.e. grammatical terminology from the perspective of national policy as defined by the English National Curriculum for Key Stages 1 and 2, and the Key Stage 2 “Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling Test”. Part 2, Debates in Purpose, examines the “Why”: it views grammatical terminology through a more theoretical lens which considers the potential purpose and value of explicit grammatical terminology in the classroom. Part 3 touches upon Debates in Practice, the “How”, examining what is already understood about the teaching of grammatical terminology in terms of grammar pedagogy, language acquisition and word learning. While each part has a distinct focus, the field is complex with overlap and interrelated issues. The final part looks briefly at teacher and pupil perspectives

School Discourse: Learning to write across the years of schooling

A1 - Research Book