LITERACY AND EDUCATION

1. Literacy at School
De Silva Joyce, H. y Feez, S. (2016). Literacy at school. En Exploring
Literacies: Theory, Research and Practice. (pp. 127 – 181) Nueva York:
Palgrave Macmillan.

2. Two critical literacy-dependent transitions
● The first during the middle years of the primary school as teaching and
learning increasingly revolves around learning in the subject areas.
● The transition into the secondary school where the curriculum and the
school day is organised in terms of educational disciplines (Shanahan &
Shanahan 2014b).

3. National Reading Panel Report (2000)
United States-Five essential
components of reading
● phonemic awareness
● phonics
● fluency
● vocabulary
● comprehension
United kingdom
● word recognition
● comprehension
(Rose, 2006)

4. Phonemic awareness:
knowledge about how
to segment spoken
words into phonemes Phonics: the
correspondence
between phonemes
and the letters of the
alphabet

5. Australian Curriculum
Common Core State
Standards-USA
reading fluency and the ability to
comprehend and compose texts are
essential goals of literacy
instruction (Wheldall & Beaman
2011).

6. The emphasis on phonemic awareness and phonics
as generic threshold skills and in high-stakes testing can
leave the impression that, if these skills are addressed
successfully in the early years of school, all that is
required for students to achieve fluency, build
vocabulary and to comprehend what they are reading is
to provide them with further practice as they move
through the middle years and beyond.

7. Challenge for
literacy
researchers and
practitioners
is how best to integrate reading
fluency, vocabulary and
comprehension instruction, alongside
writing instruction, into sequences of
systematic and explicit teaching and
learning across all areas of the
curriculum.

8. Literacy development and LIteracy
Instruction
‘bringing together a connective web of theory and approaches’ (Gunn & Wyatt-
Smith 2011: 40).
● Frameworks that organise literacy elements: what of literacy
● Frameworks for designing comprehensive and integrated sequences of
literacy instruction, learning and assessment: how of literacy education

9. Frameworks for
integrating
literacy
elements: the
what of
literacies
education
A series of frameworks has been developed that can be used to
organise, in complementary ways, the array of literacy knowledge,
skills, resources, practices and demands that are characteristic of
school and post-school contexts.
Frameworks of this type can also be useful for navigating the vast
field of literacy research findings, based as they are on
understandings of literacy as being situated in, or an expression of
social contexts (Barton, Hamilton & Ivanicˇ 2000).
Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL): thinking about
the role of language in learning.
This theory has been productively applied to literacy research in
tandem with Vygotsky’s social theory of ‘the genesis of
consciousness’ (Hasan 2005b: 131; see also Hasan 2005/1995)
and Bernstein's sociology of pedagogy (Hasan 2005a).

10. From
inventories to
binaries
How to develop a framework?
organise the disparate elements of
literacy education in a list as an
inventory, or menu.
Snow et al. 1998: 2–3 argue that
‘effective teachers make choices’
from ‘a common menu of materials,
strategies and environments’.
● Skills
● practices
● modalities
● language features
● technologies

11. Inventories become intractable
● because the view of literacy that underpins an inventory is not always
visible.
● an inventory does not make visible the principles for selecting,
distinguishing, categorising and relating items, or for determining whether
the list is comprehensive, relevant to specific contexts or focused on one
area of literacy development alone.

12. Elements of literacy education as
complementary pairs
Literacy strategies:
as a means of consciously practising actions
that, once they become automatic, will evolve
into literacy skills (Afflerbach, Pearson & Paris
2008).
Literacy skills:
Literacy skills can also be related in terms of
whether they are constrained skills, learnt
comparatively quickly during initial literacy
instruction, or unconstrained skills that develop
more slowly throughout the school and post-
school years (Paris & Luo 2010).

13. Freebody et al.
(2013:304) make a
further binary
distinction:
● Generic: ‘foundational, stable literacy
resources that are recognisable across
the curriculum areas’
● Contextualised: ‘resources that are
specific to each curriculum domain’.

14. Graham and Perin (2007) have developed an inventory of 11 generic
interventions to support the writing development of adolescents.
● Instructional approaches (process writing, writing in the content areas).
● The explicit teaching of strategies and skills (writing strategies, sentence
combining, summarising).
● Scaffolding activities (pre-writing, inquiry and collaborative writing)
● Alternative modes of composing (word processing).
The meta-analysis by Graham and Perin (2007: 462) demonstrates that
instruction in sentence combining as a discrete generic skill enabling students
‘to construct more complex and sophisticated sentences’ makes a positive
impact on students’ writing.

15. From binaries to integrated relational
frameworks: and educational linguistics
● bricolage: used in the visual arts to describe a unified work created from a
variety of available elements.
● Kincheloe (2003) has used this term to describe educational research that
draws on multiple theoretical orientations, perspectives and frameworks to
enhance the rigour and impact of the research.
● Honan (2004: 37) uses the term bricoleur to describe literacy teachers who
routinely draw on ‘a variety of resources around them to create meaningful
assemblage of practices’ creating ‘a bricolage of practice that make
specific and particular sense for each group of students with whom they
work’.

16. The teacher bricoleur must
make selections from and
connections between:
● theories of language
and literacy
● literate contexts
● language features
● literacy practices
● teaching strategies
● classroom activities
In order to make professional
judgements in response to the needs of
their students, and the challenges of
their classrooms.

17. The four resources model
● It has been used for teachers as a framework for mapping, connecting and
reflecting on existing approaches, and for filling ‘the gaps in the map of
practices they have created’, in order to create a balanced literacy
programme.
● It is a ‘generic framework for reading and writing’ designed to address ‘the
confusion of necessity and sufficiency’ that has generated so many
unproductive literacy debates (Freebody 2004: 3–6; see also Chapter 1).

18. Literacy resources and practices into four
categories
● Resources for breaking the code are those that readers and writers use to relate the sounds of
spoken language with the graphic symbols (letters) that represent those sounds in written
language. These resources include punctuation, as well as formatting and layout conventions.
● Resources for participating in texts are those that readers and writers learn about and use to
comprehend and compose the meaning patterns of written and multimodal texts. These include
the conventional structures of texts used to achieve particular purposes (genres), as well as
patterns of cohesion, grammar and vocabulary.

19. ● Resources for using texts are those that readers and writers learn about so
they can use written and multimodal texts in context, to achieve and
respond to ‘social and cultural functions of various kinds’ (Freebody 2004:
7) in ways that reflect sociocultural expectations.
● Resources for analysing texts are those that readers and writers use to
investigate, critique, challenge and transform ‘the cultural and ideological
bases on which texts are written and put to use’ (Freebody 2004: 7).

20. The four resources model is a generic framework researchers can use to
navigate in a principled way the expanding literature and recurring debates that
continually push out the boundaries of the literacy terrain.

21. Types of literate practice
Unsworth (2001) has integrated several of these frameworks into a typology of literate practices as the basis
for developing literacy pedagogy that accounts for the complementary work of language and visual images
in texts across and within curriculum areas. This typology aligns with the four resources model and with
three dimensions of literacy education identified by Hasan (1996a).
● Recognition literacy (Hasan): attends to resources used for breaking the code.
● Action literacy-equated by Unsworth: ‘has the aim of enabling the pupils to do something with their
language’ (Hasan 1996a: 399).
In action literacy, students’ ‘learning and their doing’ are not ‘isolated from each other’, and all learnin is
‘harnessed to some act of meaning’ (Hasan 1996a: 401).
● Reflection literacy: literacy for producing knowledge, which students learn in order to question and
examine the norms and standards of current knowledge.

22. Three dimensions of literate practice
This is a combination of Unsworth´s (2001: 14-15) four resources model and
Hasan´s three facets of literacy:
● recognition
● reproduction
● reflection
Metalanguage is important for teaching all three dimensions of literacy.
The metalanguage Unsworth proposes is one that links the ‘visual and verbal elements of
texts’ with ‘how they make meanings and their relationship to the parameters of the
social contexts in which they function’, yet one that does ‘not make unrealistic demands
on teachers and students’ (Unsworth 2001: 16).

23. Curriculum Area Multiliteracies and Learning
framework (CAMAL)
The three dimensions of learning contexts in the CAMAL framework are based
on a description by Macken-Horarik (1996) of three domains in which learning
occurs – the everyday, specialised and reflexive domains (see Table 4.1).

24. Table 4.1 Domains of learning
Domain Type of learning
Everyday Knowledge learnt in the everyday domain is the commonsense and functional knowledge of everyday
life learnt through observation and participation. It is built on the shared understandings and
expectations of the home and community. What counts as everyday knowledge for different groups of
students varies and depends on their cultural and social background. Most classrooms include students
with diverse understandings of the everyday.
Specialised The knowledge of specialised domains builds on the diverse prior learning of everyday life but is learnt
in formal educational contexts. Specialised knowledge is learnt through conscious design and
intervention (Macken-Horarik 1996: 238), mediated by a teacher or instructor. Students are required to
reproduce and display this knowledge as they learn it. Applied specialised knowledge is technical but
practical knowledge used to carry out specific tasks. Theoretical specialised knowledge is the discipline
knowledge of experts and academic education.
Reflexive Knowledge in the reflexive domain problematizes, synthesises and critiques specialised knowledge. It
encompasses divergent, contradictory and competing views.
In the reflexive domain, we are dealing with the intersection of the everyday and the specialised in a
society which is culturally diverse and in which power is distributed unevenly. And it is here that we can
see how value-laden both discipline and commonsense knowledge are. (Macken-Horarik 1996: 239)

25. Table 4.2 A curriculum area multiliteracies and learning framework (CAMAL)
Dimensions of
context/Domains
Everyday Specialised Reflexive
Knowledge of content
(field)
Everyday knowledge Systematically organised
specialised knowledge
Transformative
knowledge
Pedagogy (tenor) Interactive teaching
to build on students’
existing knowledge
Direct teaching of
systematic specialised
knowledge
Collaborative reflection,
critique and ‘creative
application’ of the
knowledge (Unsworth
2001: 226)
Multilteracies (mode) Spoken language
images making concrete
and familiar meanings
narrative forms
Technical and abstract
language and
images ‘conventional
visual and verbal text
forms that construct and
communicate the
established knowledge
of the discipline area’
(Unsworth 2001: 227)
Visual and verbal texts
‘that deal with
controversial and
competing points of view’
(Unsworth 2001: 227).

26. Teaching about text in context
Literacy research has been helping teachers of literacy to make judgments
about what to teach. This includes judgements about which types of texts and
which varieties of language students must comprehend and compose
effectively to meet the literacy demands of specific areas of the curriculum.
Research on register and genre has been carried out in English-speaking
contexts in order to map in detail the literacy demands of school education.
Each genre is named for its social, or communicative, purpose and described in terms of
the stages that texts belonging to the genre typically go through to achieve their purpose.
The one-size-fits-all generic stage labels of introduction, body and conclusion are familiar
to many generations of school students.

27. Table 4.3 Genre example: exposition
Genre stage Traditional
stage
Purpose
Thesis Introduction Position statement and a preview of the arguments
Arguments Body Series of arguments each made up of a statement
of topic with supporting elaboration and evidence
Restatement of the
thesis
Conclusion A review of the arguments and restatement of position

28. This genre map has the
potential to support
systematic and explicit
literacy instruction that
develops students’ literacy
capacity cumulatively from
one year to the next.

29. Criticism about the use of genre to map
literacy demands of the school
● The first criticism is that teaching genre forces ‘the potentially creative
individual to conform to a restricting, constraining recipe’ but the counter
argument is that genre patterns have evolved over time because that
particular ‘way of achieving the goal has worked well in the culture’ and
these patterns are not arbitrary or prescriptive rules but ‘functional and
enabling’ (Painter 2001: 170).
● The second criticism is that teaching the genres of power denigrates other
non-mainstream genres and runs ‘the risk of subsuming non-mainstream
students into mainstream … cultural norms’ (Painter 2001: 170).

30. In response to the previous criticisms:
Those using genre approaches to literacy instruction are encouraged to
strengthen their pedagogy by including opportunities for students to exploit
creatively genre patterns they have mastered in their writing and to develop a
critical orientation to the use of generic patterns in texts they are reading.
Freedman and Medway (1994) make a further criticism saying that ‘there is no
adequate evidence that overt teaching of knowledge about genres makes a
difference to students’ progress as writers’ (Christie & Unsworth 2005: 225).

31. Teaching knowledge about grammar
This means learning about the grammatical patterns at the heart of textual
meaning-making.
● Lexicogrammar is the intermediate layer of language.
● Lexicogrammar organises meanings so that they can be expressed in
sounds and graphic symbols.
● Educational linguist working with SFL support the idea that the knowledge
students need for literacy development at school includes knowledge
about lexicogrammar, the way words are organised as clauses.

32. ● The explicit approach: emphasises instruction in traditional grammar, as a
means of error correction, in order to maintain perceived language
standards, most recently a feature of back to basics movements.
● The implicit approach treats grammar as knowledge that students gain
through engagement with reading and writing under motivating conditions,
for example, the conditions identified as optimal by proponents of whole-
language methodologies.

33. Which grammar should be taught? (Locke,
2010)
‘Rhetorically friendly grammars’, those ‘that show a close, dynamic connection
between the forms of grammar and the meanings they convey, including the
meanings we most often associate with discourse’ (Hancock & Kolln 2010: 35).
Myhill and her colleagues in the UK adopted this approach ‘to investigate
specifically complex causal relationships between pedagogical support for
teaching grammar, teacher subject knowledge and improvement in writing’
(Myhill 2010: 143–144).

34. Jones and Chen (2012) carried out a small study of primary and secondary
teachers to investigate their current level about grammar and the results
suggest that teachers’ knowledge about grammar is ‘piecemeal’ and that
teachers’ ability to translate the knowledge they do have into ‘effective
pedagogic practice’ is not consistent (Jones & Chen 2012: 150–154).3
Australian schools have demonstrated that teaching contextualised
functionally-oriented grammar in meaningful ways in the primary school can be
accessible, useful and enjoyable (Cochrane, Reece, Ahearn & Jones 2013,
French 2010, Williams 2004 and 2005a).

35. Grammar teaching that incorporates playful and game-based activities enables
children to push against the limits of meaningful and functional language use
and in the process to build new understandings about language. Such play,
following Vygotsky (1978) and Williams (1999), is at once serious,
collaborative, engaged, effortful and future-oriented.
In the grammar-based reading pedagogy designed in the 1920s by Maria
Montessori abstract language patterns and choices are contextualised and
made tangible and manipulable in games that involve dramatisation and coding
by shape and colour (Feez 2008).

36. The re-inclusion of grammar in the curriculum presents teachers with both the
challenge of building knowledge, expertise and confidence, and the opportunity
to use knowledge about language to support students’ literacy development
across the different areas of the curriculum.
In the context of the school subject English, Macken-Horarik (2012: 185)
argues that rather than providing teachers with ‘more grammar’, a more
productive and sustainable approach is to provide them with a ‘good-enough’
grammatics in the form of ‘an adaptive toolkit’ that they can use to assess
student’s literacy achievement across the multiple levels of language.

38. Teaching knowledge about spelling
● Spelling is an area of literacy education where research suggests teachers
lack confidence, knowledge and expertise (Adoniou 2014, Herrington &
Macken-Horarik2015).
● It tends to be taught in isolation from meaningful language use.
● Spelling programs in schools often involve students in memorising graded
spelling lists.
● Teaching students about morphemes can have a positive impact on their
spelling.

39. Intervention study in ten primary school
classrooms in rural Australia (Herrington &
Macken-Horarik 2015).
● Metalanguage for talking about morphemes and phonemes.
● Strategies for teaching children explicitly how to look inside words in order
to identify morphemes.
● Example words: native, nature, and nation. Morpheme nat.
● Findings: providing young children with knowledge about the relations
between morphemes and sounds results in improved spelling accuracy.
● Struggling spellers attended more closely to both phonemes and
morphemes.

40. Teaching knowledge about visual grammar
This visual grammar provides literacy educators with a metalanguage for
thinking and talking about the contextually-motivated meanings made by visual
images.
Multimodal texts include literary texts, such as picture books and graphic
novels, and texts in which language and image are used to apprentice students
into specialised knowledge (Callow 2013, Chan & Unsworth 2011, Painter,
Martin & Unsworth 2013, Unsworth 2010).

41. Unsworth and Macken-Horarik (2015: 56) describe a study in which primary
and secondary school teachers took part in a professional learning programme
to build ‘explicit knowledge about verbal and visual grammar as a resource for
text interpretation and text creation’. The professional learning was also
designed to build teachers’ expertise, or know-how, in applying this knowledge
in the classroom.

42. (Unsworth &
Macken-Horarik
2015: 62)
Students explored ‘the what, the how and the
why of choices in classroom discussions of
images and words in picture books’ , before
composing written responses interpreting
the meanings represented in the words and
images.

43. (Unsworth &
Macken-Horarik
2015: 56)
This study represents a first exploration of
‘the need for explicit teaching of written
interpretive responses to multimodal literary
texts, drawing on an articulated visual and
verbal grammatics appropriate to the
teaching of English in primary and secondary
schools’ .

44. Literacy and
the school
curriculum:
increasing
specialisation
Literacy development can be considered in terms of three
language learning processes (Halliday 2007/1981):
One is learning the language itself, whether a
first or additional language. From this perspective
language is what is being learnt, as learners expand the
meanings they can make through interaction, instruction and
use.
Another process is learning about the target
language, or language variety, and how it works. From
this perspective, language is the object of study, and a
specialist metalanguage is used to think and talk about it.
Finally, language is the primary medium or
instrument of learning; in other words, we learn through
language across all areas of the curriculum.

45. the Australian
Curriculum
ACARA 2015:
English
The Literacy Strand is interwoven
with a Language Strand: Concerned
with building students’ knowledge
about the English language, and a
Literature Strand with a focus on
students’ appreciation and creation
of literary texts (Hasan 1985).
Elements of the Language and Literacy Strands
reappear throughout the curriculum as general
literacy capabilities applicable to all learning areas
across the school years. Alongside common literacy
capabilities, which are portable from one learning
area to the next, each learning area also places on
students literacy demands which are
discipline-specific.

46. ● Yet for many students subject-specific literacy demands can become
barriers to learning and success at school. On the basis of design-based
studies in middle-years classrooms, Freebody and Morgan (2014: 53)
established, for example, that in Mathematics ‘what students found most
difficult was the language of mathematical problems, rather than the
mathematical and arithmetic concepts themselves’.
● Knowledge about the language used in each subject would help students
manage this type of difficulty. Once students know how to attend to the
specialist meaning-making of each discipline, they can learn to represent
discipline content in ways that are recognised and valued by specialists
in the field.

47. Shanahan and Shanahan
(2008: 43) propose a three-
level model of literacy
progression through the
school years represented
as a pyramid, with the base
of the pyramid accounting
for ‘the highly generalisable
basic skills that are
entailed in all or most
reading tasks’.

48. Martin (1993a: 167), for example, argues that, in order to prepare students for
the literacy demands of studying Science, ‘we have to be very clear about the
kind of knowledge science is trying to construct and also about the ways in
which scientists package this knowledge into text’.

49. Genre-based literacy education:
What teachers needed, according to Martin (1993a: 202) was ‘an understanding of the structure of the genres and
the grammar of technicality’ used in Science. To build this understanding, ‘the nature of disciplinary knowledge’
needed to be studied ‘from a linguistic perspective’ and the foundation for this work were the descriptions of the
key ‘genres students should master by the end of primary school’ (Rose & Martin 2012: 55–82), which included
factual texts and arguments.

50. Analysis of disciplinary literacy in the curriculum
areas of the secondary school, the apex of the
Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) pyramid, has
been an ongoing project in the field of genre
studies for two decades.
This work has been particularly
exhaustive in the context of Science
and History.
Exemplification of the contrasts between the
literacy demands of the sciences and the
humanities.
Other curriculum areas in which the literacy
demands have been described linguistically, with
a particular focus on writing, include English,
Mathematics, languages education, Music, and
Business Studies.
A feature of many of these descriptions is that they
describe the literacy demands of the subject areas
in terms of the way knowledge is represented in
language and image, and in other modalities
(Jewitt, Kress, Ogborn & Tsatsarelis 2001).

51. At the same time, these studies demonstrate that teachers need
knowledge about language to transform what is known about
discipline-specific literacies into pedagogy.
The transformation of knowledge about subject-
specific literacy demands into pedagogy, and
the associated professional learning demanded
of teachers, can be studied using a system of
principles devised by Bernstein (2000).
https://vimeo.com/240611166
These principles are used to analyse how
educational knowledge, typically produced in
universities, is relocated, or recontextualised, in
school classrooms as pedagogic discourse, which is
at once regulatory and instructional. This system of
principles distinguishes between everyday
commonsense knowledge and abstract specialised
educational knowledge, and between visible and
invisible pedagogies.

52. The crucial shift in the middle years
Some children, grow up in contexts where steps they
have made into abstract and specialized meaning-
making do not align neatly with the literacy demands of
school because the language or dialect used for
everyday talk in their home is different from the
language used at school (Hasan 1996b, 1996c).
Links between children’s home circumstances and
literacy achievement at school were investigated as part
of a longitudinal study by Hill, Comber, Louden, Rivalland
and Reid (2002).
Those who did not achieve substantial growth came
‘overwhelmingly from schools serving families living in
poverty’ (Hill et al. 2002: 5).

53. The crucial shift in the middle years
It was harder for late starters to catch up, if their life
circumstances were difficult, and early progress did not
guarantee later success. Children achieving at lower
levels benefited, not from one-size-fits-all approaches,
but from teachers with a broad repertoire of pedagogic
and communicative strategies who were responsive to
each child’s particular needs.
For some children, this transition can be difficult.
Children who have already engaged with a wide variety
of texts, including both stories and information texts,
are more prepared for this shift in orientation.
Research has confirmed that direct, systematic literacy
teaching is equally necessary for children in the upper
primary years as it is in the early years, if children are
to be prepared for the literacy demands of secondary
school (Sanacore & Palumbo 2009).

54. Literacy across the
secondary school years
A corpus of 2,000 texts produced by
primary and secondary school
students was used by Christie and
Derewianka (2008: 5) as the basis for
‘a comprehensive and systematic
study of [writing] development from
childhood through to adolescence in a
range of curriculum areas across a
variety of genres employing all three
metafunctions’.
● These texts were written in the context of three contrasting curriculum
areas, English, History and Science.
● To be successful in each of these subject areas, students were required
to use written language in different ways to make different types of
meanings. Each representative text was analyzed in detail and described
in terms of the language resources the writer deployed to compose the
text.
● This tracking revealed that learning to write at school followed a broad
trajectory of four stages, which are subject, of course, to individual and
social variation.

55. Literacy across the
secondary school years
Each phase is described in terms of the
types of meanings most commonly made
by students of that age in their writing, and
the language resources they deploy to
make those meanings.
These meanings include the purposes the
students achieved in writing (genres), as
well as how experience and logical
relationships were represented (ideational
meanings realizing field), how language
was used to interact and evaluate
(interpersonal meanings realising tenor)
and how the text was organised to be
cohesive and to guide the reader (textual
meanings realising mode).

56. Literacy across the
secondary school years
The phases identified by Christie and Derewianka (see Table 4.4) echo the three-
stage linguistic model of learning proposed by Halliday, while also providing a
detailed linguistic description of how those stages are manifested in student
writing. Specifically, detailed descriptions of each phase provide insights into the
grammatical development required of students, if they are to transform the
everyday (commonsense) knowledge of home and community into the specialised
(uncommonsense) knowledge of the school (Bernstein 2000).

58. The detailed linguistic description of the trajectory of writing development
across the school years developed by Christie and Derewianka (2008)
represents a valuable resource for literacy educators from several
perspectives:
● Because it reveals the linguistic resources students need to control at each phase
of schooling, differentiated according to subject area, it can be used to guide the
development of subject-specific writing programmes.
● It can also be used diagnostically to determine the specific knowledge about
written language needed by individual students facing barriers to writing
development in different subject areas at different stages of schooling, thus
enabling the development of targeted and differentiated programmes.
● it provides researchers with benchmarks that can be applied and tested in diverse
educational settings.

59. Literacy outside
school
Students are also engaging in parallel literacy
practices outside the school. The intersection, or
otherwise, between students’ literacy development at
school and their parallel literacy practices outside the
school is a terrain that deserves the attention of
researchers.
How this is executed in practice continues to deserve
attention.
The gap between literacies outside the school and the
literacies rewarded at school has become even more
complex with the advent of digital technologies.
It is mediated not only through print, film and
television, but also through sound, image and
written language in interactive multimedia
environments.

60. ❖Students might encounter and seek out related content, whether about:
fictional characters scientific knowledge, or an advertised product.
❖ Represented in:
● print and image, in
● books, graphic novels, comics, on television, in film and
in interactive
● digital environments.
Communicate in:
● Text and image through email
● messaging
● blogs and other varieties of social media
The ways so many school-age
students immerse themselves in
digital media have led some to
label them ‘digital natives’
(Prensky 2001, Zevenbergen
2007).

61. The digital native tag has been questioned by Bennet, Maton
and Kervin (2008): naive attempts to close the gap between
students’ perceived immersion in digital media and
classroom literate practices.
❖ Levels of digital immersion and skill among young
people are not universal or uniform, so there is a
danger that ‘those less interested and less able
will be neglected, and … the potential impact of
socioeconomic and cultural factors will be
overlooked’ (Bennett et al. 2008: 779)
Much interactivity in screen-based environments is shallow,
random, passive, indiscriminate and uncritical, and may not
apply to the learning of educational knowledge.
Engaging and motivating for many, but
not for all students. The evidence that
this type of interactivity supports the
effective learning of educational
knowledge remains inconclusive.

62. Students do not necessarily recognise
digital communication as literacy.
Yet, a significant number of students
write journals and music lyrics, not
only electronically but also by hand.
The most prolific out-of-school
digital writing undertaken by
students, however, is blogging.
An online journal that contains entries, or posts, presented
in reverse chronological order’, (Adlington, 2014: 2)
Teachers can provide students with:
o knowledge about specialised blogging
skills such as designing non-linear
spaces composed of both verbal and
visual texts (Kress & van Leeuwen
2006),
o designing hypertextual relations for
multilinear reading by embedding video
and links (Djonov 2008),
o inviting reader coauthorship through
comments,
o and tagging to enable simultaneous links
to multiple blog posts organised in
logical ways (Adlington 2014).

63. Literacy outside
school
The online communication and multimodal
performance texts favoured by many young people
are particularly well-suited to the domain of human
experience that Humphrey (2010) describes as the civic
domain.
The civic domain is an additional domain added to the
three domains of learning identified by Macken-
Horarik (1996) – everyday, specialised and
reflexive.
A space for debate on issues of public
concern, oriented to social action and
change Humphrey 2010) and making the
world a better place.

64. Humphrey (2010) analysed the stories
and persuasive texts composed
by a group of adolescent activists in
support of refugees.
The activists wrote texts that included speeches, blogs,
essays and letters written to politicians. These texts were
less stable structurally than the equivalent texts valued
at school, and they foregrounded interpersonal meanings
more than would be appropriate in educational contexts.
Nevertheless, the young writers skilfully used rhetorical
resources to build solidarity with their audience and to
appeal to shared values and emotions.
Students need to build a critical orientation to texts that use
emotion to persuade, and that literacy activities at school
must not intrude into young people’s personal out-of-school
Communication.
Nevertheless, her study does open up a space in which teachers
can ‘broaden the range of resources beyond those of the
academic domain’ and ‘develop literacy pathways which enable
young people to engage with, and perhaps subvert the
discourses of power’ (Humphrey 2010:18).

65. Comprehensive literacy
teaching frameworks:
the how of literacy
teaching
Effective teachers of literacy have been
identified as bricoleurs who select and
connect elements of content on the
basis of their students’ current levels of
development, and who then strive to
fashion these into a balanced and unified
teaching programme. To be able to do this,
teachers need knowledge about pedagogy.
Over recent decades practice-based research has
expanded the knowledge about literacy pedagogy
available to teachers

66. The macro and
micro levels
Effective literacy pedagogy, according to
Hammond and Gibbons (2005: 9–10), interweaves
two levels of practice: the pre-planned macro level
and the contingent ‘micro’ level.
“It is this combination of the pre-planned and
the contingent that enables teachers to provide
new learning challenges for their students,
while at the same time providing necessary
support for meeting those challenges”.
(Hammond & Gibbons 2005: 11)

67. The macro and
micro levels
The distinction between the pre-planned and
contingent levels of pedagogy emerged from a
three-year study undertaken by Hammond and
Gibbons (2005).
They documented, from a sociocultural
viewpoint, the pedagogical practices used by
teachers to support students who speak
English as an additional language (EAL) in
mainstream classrooms in Australian schools.
While these students had developed basic
Interpersonal communication skills (BICS) in
English, they were still developing cognitive
academic language proficiency (CALP).
Pedagogic practices used to support EAL
students and students at-risk in mainstream
classrooms are ‘also good for the wider student
body as a whole’ because ‘in one sense,
Academic English is nobody’s mother tongue’
(Miller 2015 emphasis.

68. They provided students with
the type of support,
Hammond and Gibbons
called scaffolding, a term
derived from interpretations
of Vygotsky’s (1978) theory
of learning.
A task based on academic language
commensurate with the students’ stage at
school, while also providing them with the
support they need to be able to complete
the task successfully and to undertake
similar tasks independently in the future.
Message abundancy occurs when the same or similar information is represented in a
variety of ways generating a ‘cross-calibration’ of multiple modes with augmented potential
for insight (Butt 2004: 233). This might include hands-on activities, spoken language,
written notes and visual support such as images, diagrams or maps, or other ‘modalities of
practice’ (Rose & Martin 2012: 304). Teaching resources also included ‘texts or artefacts
that were pivotal across sequences of lessons

69. ● Genre-based
pedagogy
Since the 1980s, educational linguists have worked with
teachers to research and refine cyclical patterns of literacy
teaching and learning designed to guide students towards
successfully writing ‘the genres of schooling’ (Rose & Martin
2012: 308).
These pedagogic patterns, also known as curriculum genres
(Christie 2002), are a sequence of stages teachers can use to
plan the selection and sequencing of literacy teaching
activities at the macro-level. The stages are represented as a
cycle ‘which could be entered at different points’. Specific
stages can be recycled ‘depending on the needs of the
students’ (Rose & Martin 2012: 63).
The first of these linguistically-informed learning models was
designed in Australia as an alternative to process writing.
Process writing is an approach to early writing development
that focuses on writing processes rather than writing
Conventions.

70. ● Genre-based
pedagogy
Children choose their own topics, plan and draft their own writing,
share it with classmates and the teacher during writing Conferences,
then use this feedback.
Process writing, however, does not provide students, especially
those whose home language does not match the language of the
school, with the instruction and support they need to be effective
writers in the learning areas.
Genre pedagogy was designed to address this problem with the
aim of making ‘the distribution of knowledge in schools more
equitable’ (Rose & Martin 2012: 5).
When applied to the teaching of writing, interactive guidance
takes the form of teaching students about the purpose, stages
and language features of a genre, then giving them opportunities
to deconstruct prototypical model, or mentor, texts before
students jointly construct another text of the same genre, with the
teacher acting as guide and scribe.

71. ● Genre-based
pedagogy
A feature of genre-based pedagogy is the shifting relations between
teacher and students at each stage of the cycle (Martin 1999). At the
beginning of the modelling stage students are given opportunities to
display their current level of knowledge, to engage with a context in
which the target genre is used and to build knowledge of the topic.
Next, the teacher takes an authoritative role, providing direct
instruction and practice in the knowledge and skills students need to
write texts of the target type successfully. In the joint construction
stage the students contribute ideas while the teacher as scribe
interacts with the students to elaborate their ideas in ways that
match the demands of the writing task.
During students’ independent construction of a text, the teacher
provides support only as needed, for example, in writing
conferences, but reclaims an authoritative role when assessing
student achievement and providing feedback.
Once students know how to write a text in a particular genre, they
explore critical and creative adaptations of the genre pattern in
different contexts..

72. ● Genre-based
pedagogy
Scaffolding Literacy (Axford et al. 2009) has been renamed
Accelerated Literacy (Cowey 2005), and has been adapted for
EAL learners (Adoniou & Macken-Horarik 2007). It is also the
forerunner of the Reading to Learn pedagogy (Acevedo 2011,
Culican 2005, Rose & Martin 2012).
This family of pedagogies is distinguished by the attention paid
to the design of the teaching sequences, the activities that make
up each sequence and the micro-level interactions through
which the scaffolding is achieved.
To implement these pedagogies effectively, teachers must
participate in intensive training.

73. ● Expanding
literacy
teaching
repertoires
Derewianka and Jones (2012), Brisk (2015) and Gibbons (2009)
have drawn on years of classroom-based practice and research to
provide teachers with model texts relevant to the curriculum, an
accessible metalanguage for talking about the purpose, stages and
language features of different types of texts, and a rich repertoire of
teaching activities and resources for teaching about language at
whole text, paragraph, sentence and word levels. Brisk (2015) is
particularly concerned with using genre-pedagogy and knowledge
about language to support EAL students learning to read and write in
the curriculum areas. She demonstrates how the use of the students’
first languages can be integrated productively into cycles of teaching
and learning to build students’ knowledge of academic literacies in
English.

74. ● Expanding
literacy
teaching
repertoires
Recently researchers studying the implementation of genre-based
pedagogies in classrooms have been concerned with extending the
language knowledge and teaching repertoire of teachers so they
move beyond a ‘focus on the formulaic structure of narratives,
procedures and persuasive writing forms’ (Freebody & Morgan 2014:
68).
One way of addressing this issue is to pay
attention at sentence level to language used to
express particular domains of meaning of
significance to specific disciplines, but ‘always
contextualised within the study of the relevant
text’ (Love et al. 2014: 46).

75. ● Expanding
literacy
teaching
repertoires
A further addition to the genre-based teaching repertoire is a
teaching sequence that has become known as the ‘semantic wave’
(Maton 2014).
In a study of knowledge-building practices in secondary classrooms,
Macnaught, Maton, Martin and Matruglio, (2013: 50–51) observed
a pattern commonly used by teachers in which they moved ‘from
generalised, abstract and highly condensed meanings, often in
technical language, towards more context-dependent and simpler
meanings, often in everyday language’, which they achieved by
‘unpacking’ the technicality into ‘more familiar commonsense
language for students’.
The next step, during joint construction activities, is to guide students as they
repackage the commonsense meanings into the dense specialised abstract
language of the discipline.
This type of teaching requires skill and is ‘strongly dependent on shared
metalanguage, supportive rapport between the teacher and students (and
between students themselves), and careful mediation of students’
suggestions’ (Macnaught et al. 2013: 62).

76. ● Expanding
literacy
teaching
repertoires
A pedagogy of multiliteracies is ‘more appropriate for
today’s world of change and diversity’, according to
Kalantzis and Cope (2012: 188).
These authors describe literacies as ‘multimodal
designs for meaning’ that ‘bring together written, visual,
spatial, tactile, gestural, audio and oral modes’ in fluid
and dynamic ways. The pedagogy they advocate is a
design pedagogy that accounts for meaning-making as
an ‘active, transformative process’ (Kalantzis & Cope
2012: 173–188).

77. Conclusion
In this chapter the journey has taken us into the years of
schooling, where students are, ideally, apprenticed into the
forms of discourse that will enable them to succeed across the
school disciplines. All children deserve to succeed, and this
means understanding that not all children begin their school
life on the same footing, and that some may need
compensatory pedagogic interventions to bridge the distance
between the language(s) of the home and the language(s) of
school. Sharing knowledge about language and how it is used
to build discourse for different purposes is the fundamental
task of education because ‘language is the essential condition
of knowing, the process by which experience becomes
knowledge’ (Halliday 2004/1993: 328).
We share the vision of Palinscar and Schleppegrell (2014: 617) ‘that children develop and hone
the use of metalanguage as a tool in the context of lively discussion, argumentation, and
collaborative talk about text’, made possible through explicit, visible pedagogies that are
informed by the wealth of research into literacy in the classroom, a fraction of which has been
reviewed in this chapter. Ideally, language and literacy learning at school successfully equips
students to participate in tertiary education and the world of work, as well as to contribute, as
citizens, to the community and a civil society. We will explore the degree to which this occurs for
different groups of students in the next chapter as we continue our journey into contexts beyond
the school.