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This paper reflects on the influence of Halliday's work in the way three educators conceive and conduct their teaching of English for academic purposes in various degree courses at the same university in Australia. Several 'big ideas' from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) are considered within the general aim of helping students master the specific forms of writing used to assess their learning. Each vignette of teaching practice focuses on an aspect of literacy and language that has proven difficult for the students. Each also draws on SFL to identify the nature of the problem and design a teaching intervention, to enable students to improve their academic writing and learning. The point of departure in each case is a specific assignment that students need to write, which is described as a genre, as defined through careful linguistic analysis. Attention to linguistic detail in specific forms of communication is presented as an effective form of learning support in tertiary education, especially for students making a major transition into new ways of working in specific disciplinary contexts. The fundamental value of SFL is recognised for its capacity to define both what and how to teach, whenever there is need to pay close attention to students' language development.

This chapter explores the trajectory of development in literacy practices and demands as students progress from late primary through the first four years of secondary school in Australia. It presents a case study located in one particular secondary school and its feeder primary school. We draw on data collected in class observations, student work samples, and interviews with students and teachers to explore the curriculum as it is enacted. The data set reveals several patterns, including disciplinary differences in the reading and writing practices of students, a future-oriented approach to teaching literacy as preparatory for student needs in future schooling and testing, and an explicit focus on teaching certain elements of writing. Analysis also reveals an apparent difference in focus on the teaching, learning, and practising of writing across subjects and years. These findings point to important avenues for future research as well as the urgent need to consider an integrated language pedagogy which is able to account for language choices across modes of speaking, reading, and writing that have fidelity to the disciplines rather than viewing these aspects of language use separately.

This paper arises from research undertaken by educational semioticians and science educators investigating the use of student generated digital artefacts as assessment tasks in pre-service science teacher education. Part of a broader shift toward student-generated media in tertiary science, the use of such tasks is driven by the need to deepen pre-service primary teachers' understandings of content and to foster enthusiasm for teaching science. However, the tasks are challenging as students must demonstrate both content and meta-semiotic knowledge in these brief digital standalone presentations. In the paper, we draw on artefacts, interviews and assessment practices to demonstrate these challenges. We identify what have emerged as key semiotic understandings necessary to complete a successful response to the task, arguing that these include multimodal understandings as well as knowledge of disciplinary specific representational practices. We describe an intervention informed by functional social semiotics and scaffolded literacy approaches with key features including use of an exemplar text for deconstruction and an explicit instructional sequence with a tailored assessment rubric. The paper reports both theoretical and practical insights and seeks to contribute to emerging analytical frameworks as well as multimodal literacy assessment.

Project: Improve the quality of classroom talk in a small one-teacher school over a year-long period.

While it is acknowledged that mastery of constrained literacy skills is a predictor of later literacy proficiency, Paris (2005) observes that no research has found it to be a causal relationship. That is, no correlation exists between early mastery of skills such as phonic knowledge and later literacy achievement. Of course, mastery of the constrained skills is necessary, but only in that it allows us to develop increasingly unconstrained, complex and contextualised skills for living rich literate lives.

Assessments in tertiary science subjects typically assess content knowledge, and there is current need to both develop and assess different forms of knowledge and skills, such as communications and digital literacies. A digital explanation is a multimodal artefact created by students to explain science to a specified audience, which is an alternate form of assessment that has potential to develop and assess these other important forms of knowledge and skills. This research draws from perspectives in multimodality, educational semiotics and science education to gain a better understanding of digital explanation as a form of assessment in university science. Data sources include digital artefacts (n = 42), task descriptions and rubrics and pre-/post-interviews (n = 21) with students who created them as a task in a university science subject. Analysis involved identifying the range of media resources used across the data set, seeking patterns in how multiple resources were used and exploring students' perspectives on the task, including their design decisions. A more detailed look at artefacts from three different science learning contexts illustrates that students base their design decisions on the content knowledge being represented, their technical capabilities to generate them and how to engage the audience. Students enjoy this form of assessment and feel that the tasks allowed them to demonstrate different sorts of capabilities than are normally assessed in their subjects. Recommendations for instructors provide guidance for considering this sort of task in tertiary science contexts.

Language is at the heart of the learning process. We learn through language. Our knowledge about the world is constructed in language-the worlds of home and the community, the worlds of school subjects, the worlds of literature, the worlds of the workplace, and so on. It is through language that we interact with others and build our identities. Teachers' explanations, classroom discussions, assessment of student achievement, and students' understanding, composition, and evaluation of texts are all mediated through language. In this book, we will be exploring how an explicit understanding of how language works enables students to make informed choices in their use and understanding of texts.As educators, our job is to make sure that all students have a good command of the language needed to succeed in school and beyond. In order to do this, teachers need to know about language and how it works. This book is intended as an introduction to the language that students encounter in the various curriculum areas as they move through the years of schooling, and it will enable teachers to:plan units of work that are sensitive to the language demands placed on studentsdesign activities with a language focusselect texts for reading at an appropriate levelanalyse texts to identify relevant language and visual featurescreate teaching materials that integrate an awareness of languagehelp students to access meanings created through a variety of media (written, spoken, visual, multimodal)provide explicit support in developing students' writing and composingassess students' written workextend students' ability to articulate what they are learning.New to this EditionSubstantial revision and extension of all chapters.New Chapter 10 addressing inquiry genres and mixed genres.Section on the language challenges of middle and senior secondary.Additional activities.Language development from the early years through to late secondary.Increased emphasis on the multimodal nature of contemporary

The Literature strand of the Australian Curriculum: English (Australian Curriculum Assessment & Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2013) plays a key role in enriching students' Iives and assisting them to understand what it means to be human. Importantly, when responding to and composing Iiterary texts, students are also developing valued intellectual skills and dispositions including predicting, analyzing, using evidence to argue, hypothesizing, speculating and imagining. This chapter demonstrates how literature can be used to support students' engagement with language and other forms of meaning making and to develop their literacy skills at the same time as they acquire key understandings in the curriculum area of History (ACARA, 2015). Drawing on the teaching and learning cycle introduced in Chapter 3, we describe in detail a unit of work for lower primary classrooms, in which students encounter and create multimodal texts as they explore differences in family structures and family members' roles and responsibilities over time. The unit incorporates a number of useful strategies that can be adapted for use with different groups of students and for a range of texts and curriculum areas.

Research into classroom talk has a rich history in Anglophone countries. In the United Kingdom, notable examples include Britton's (1970) exploration of the relationship between talking and thinking; Barnes and Todd's work on exploratory talk (1977) - work subsequently further developed by Mercer (2000); and the recent emphasis on dialogue in pedagogy (Alexander 2008; Wegerif 2011). In North America, Cazden's (2001) research has shaped understandings regarding the centrality of language in learning and its role in constructing knowledge in classrooms. Wells' (1999) pioneering work in psychology and linguistics in dialogic inquiry has inspired many; and Resnick, Michaels, and O'Connor (2010) have proposed the notion of 'accountable talk' as a means of achieving productive classroom discussion. In Australia, Christie's (2002) work, with its descriptions of curriculum genres, has highlighted the structured nature of classroom interactions, while Hammond and Gibbons (2005) (Hammond 2014) have addressed the role of talk in mediating pedagogical practices that both challenge and support students in their engagement with curriculum concepts. The papers in this Special Issue build on such traditions to focus on the place of talk in learning, and its relationship to literacy education.

The inclusion of the Knowledge about Language strand in the recently introduced Australian Curriculum: English (AC:E) is both promising and challenging. For the first time, students across primary and secondary years of schooling are expected to develop 'a coherent, dynamic, and evolving body of knowledge about the English language and how it works' (ACARA 2009). Yet, it has been documented that teachers are not well equipped with their linguistic and pedagogic knowledge to translate that knowledge into productive pedagogic practices (Hammond and Macken-Horarik 2001; Jones and Chen 2012). This challenge is confounded by the debate regarding what constitutes an appropriate pedagogy for contemporary grammar teaching. Grammar teaching bears the weight of its own history of practices that were often decidedly 'undialogic'. Unless new ways of fostering the development of students' knowledge about language are developed, the potential of the innovative English Curriculum risks being undermined. In this study, we consider what dialogic teaching principles (Alexander 2008) might offer an engaging, productive pedagogy for grammar teaching. We offer a linguistic account of the dialogic principles as they are enacted in this classroom. Thus providing insights into the complexities of the principles in action. We also argue for knowledge of classroom talk as a resource for engaging learners with grammar and for fostering the metalinguistic understandings imagined in this curriculum reform.

The paper will briefly discuss the recent Australian curriculum reform with respect to the explicit teaching about language and some of the challenges inherent in the processes of implementing a grammatics. It then describes recent work with teachers as they engage with the functionally oriented English curriculum, in particular one teacher's work as she redesigns her pedagogy to accommodate the new curriculum in the early years of school. The paper argues the importance of teacher's pedagogic knowledge in the successful implementation of a grammatics curriculum but suggests that we do not fully understand the nature of such knowledge, how it interfaces with other forms of knowledge (about language and about curriculum) in the production of teaching "expertise" and how such expertise is enacted for different age groups of learners.

The new Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2012) has considerable implications for teachers' knowledge about language (KAL) and pedagogic practice. To successfully implement the functionally oriented model of grammar proposed by the Curriculum, many teachers will need to expand their expertise in grammar to understand 'the structures and functions of word- and sentence-level grammar and text patterns and the connections between them' (ACARA, 2009. p. 7). They will also need to apply that knowledge to enhance their students' learning outcomes. This paper describes a small-scale research project involving a group of primary and secondary teachers in a targeted professional learning program. The initial findings have implications for theory and practice. In terms of theory, the research provides one of the first studies of the implementation of the new Curriculum. The case study reported underscores the importance of the implementation phase for the Curriculum and of the need for appropriate professional learning programs. The paper argues that such programs must go beyond a 'train-the- trainer' or 'one size fits all' model. They must be nuanced enough to account for the range of teacher needs in terms of linguistic knowledge and the contexts in which they will enact the Curriculum.

Teaching Language in Context takes the purposes for which language is used in different content areas as the starting point for teaching literacy. It recognises that students' understandings are constructed in language and that each area of the curriculum uses language in a different way. Success in each subject requires students to acquire the specialised language of the curriculum area; that is, the genres and language features through which the content is expressed. In order to successfully develop students' language for curriculum success, teachers must identify the language demands of the different curriculum areas. This textbook supports pre-service teachers to do this while familiarising them with the different curriculum areas.

Comprehension is generally considered to be an essential skill required in all learning areas. The Australian Curriculum argues that much of the explicit teaching of literacy occurs in the English learning area, and is strengthened, made specific and extended in other learning areas as students engage in a range of learning activities with significant literacy demands (ACARA, 2012, p. 9). This has important ramifications for all teachers because they are charged with the responsibility of ensuring their students acquire the literacy skills necessary for success in the discipline areas. Despite this, comprehension means different things to different people. This paper reports on an action research project investigating teacher and student understandings of comprehension in the middle school years Specifically it asks the question: What counts as comprehension in teacher practice? After considering teacher and student perceptions of what comprehension is in different subject areas in Years 5, 7 and 9, strategic professional development seminars have been developed and implemented. These seminars are aimed at introducing teachers to current ideas about comprehension and providing them with practical, achievable strategies to use in the classroom.

Technologies such as interactive whiteboards, laptops, wireless connectivity and personal communications devices mark the educational zeitgeist. Their proliferation in schools is an emergent theme in educational research, yet, the impact on pedagogic discourse is less understood. This paper reports on a case study of one teacher’s work to integrate an interactive whiteboard (IWB) into a new purposebuilt teaching space. The case study is part of a larger project-in-progress which seeks to record and understand how primary school teachers use new technologies in their daily literacy sessions. Treating the literacy session as an instance of a curriculum genre (Christie, 2002), the paper describes the unfolding pedagogy as teacher, students and technology interact in the construction of literate knowledge.

For some time teachers have been identified and even vilified as impediments to technology uptake in classrooms. It has been demonstrated that the purchase and installation of modern (and often costly) technology is no guarantee that teachers will use it to facilitate and improve learning. We argue that it is no longer appropriate to blame teachers for their slow uptake of technology. Instead it is important that we investigate and understand the ways that technology innovations fit (or mismatch!) with the culture of schooling and established pedagogical practices of teachers. ICTs have made their way into classroom literacy sessions with varying degrees of ‘success’. The literature provides us with conflicting opinions about whether, how and why technology should be used in literacy teaching. While technology is said to have considerable potential to enhance literacy education, the focus on technology alone for too long has dominated research in educational settings. It is necessary to reframe the issue to consider the teaching of literacy first and the technology as a ‘tool’ to mediate pedagogical practices in the complex social world of the modern classroom. This paper examines the literacy teaching practices of three teachers as we explore the nature of pedagogy in classroom environments where newer technological tools are featured. The synergy between the technologies, school culture and literacy pedagogy is explored using Activity Theory (Engestrom, 2001). This theory offers useful insights into the complex relationships between teachers, their pedagogic goals and the technological tools available.

This paper addresses the current resurgence of interest in classroom talk and its place in pedagogy; in particular the role of teachers in shaping students’ learning through the design of classroom interactivity. The importance of teacher agency with respect to pedagogic design is highlighted in recent studies of pedagogy in the UK (Alexander, 2008; Mercer, 2008) and in linguistically oriented studies of pedagogic discourse undertaken in the Australian context (Christie, 2002; Jones, 2005). The paper presents a case study of classroom talk to explore how such work might be brought into alignment in order to shed further light on the construction of educational meanings through oral language. In doing so, the importance of understanding pedagogy as the dynamic construction of learning contexts through interaction and over time is highlighted.

This paper explores the implementation and the use of the Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) in literacy teaching in an Australian primary school. A socio-cultural approach (Vygotsky, 1978) and Activity Theory (Engestrom, 2001) are used to explore the integration of the IWB in the literacy classroom environment where the individual, classroom and the whole school contexts are considered. A socio- cultural conceptualisation of technology allows us to view the IWB as a tool that can be used to enhance teachers’ pedagogical practices. The paper is based on a case study in an independent primary school located in a South - Western suburb of Sydney.

The federal government’s pledge for increased access to computers for students has been held up as “groundbreaking reform” as “digital schools” become a reality for more students. However, access to technology remains uneven across schools, student competency levels differ and teacher expertise varies considerably. Incorporating new technologies such as laptops, wireless connectivity, smartboards and mobile communication devices into interactive practices frequently requires rethinking configurations of curriculum, bodies and space. Teachers are experts in pedagogy, but not necessarily in technology. It is vital that teachers are acknowledged for the considerable knowledge they have about their profession – what constitutes ‘good’ pedagogy, the nature of learning and ways to engage students in the classroom. While there appears an ever-increasing range of technologies to incorporate within classroom learning experiences, many teachers know technology use alone is not a substitute for good practice. As such, it is important that teachers articulate clear reasons and purposes for technology integration in connection with curriculum goals and student learning gains. This paper reports on the initial stages of one project aimed at supporting teachers to do so.

Schooling, for many, remains a major site for successful apprenticeship into academically valued discourses. Such discourses require learners to manage shifts in language use from that which construes material, embodied contexts to that construing disembodied, virtual contexts (Hasan, 2001). Responsibility for mediating these shifts for young learners lies, for the most part, with teachers in their decisions concerning the framing and classification (Bernstein, 1990) of contexts. While linguistic analysis provides a rich picture of situated mediating practices, classification and framing are also relevant to relationships between and within pedagogic spaces and geographical locations - aspects of setting over which teachers may have little agency. This chapter draws on a case study of a small socially disadvantaged school to explore the negotiation of interpersonal and e>..-perienrial meanings (O'Toole, 1994; Martin and Rose, 2003). It is suggested that, in this setting, patterns of communicative choices 'conspire' with panicular spatial arrangements in the replay of broader social relations.

This paper reflects upon the implementation of the current NSW English primary Syllabus (Board of Studies, NSW, 1998); in particular those aspects to do with oral interaction. It demonstrates how official curriculum is read varyingly in classroom settings with the result that learners are positioned differently in respect of the communicative resources necessary for schooling success. Such readings are shaped by teachers’ beliefs about language and learning and features of the local context including its ‘distance’from the site of syllabus development. It is argued that closer attention to syllabus implementation in local settings and to relationships between local and official sites is important in understanding the distribution of curriculum knowledge.