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We report in this paper on one aspect of a project designed to support teachers with the demands of the Language strand of the Australian Curriculum for English as this guides their development of a coherent account of knowledge about language and their implementation of this in building their students' literacy repertoires. We map the changing orientations of two teachers across the transition years, as they build their personal understandings of language as a resource for meaning and translate this into curriculum and assessment practices designed to strengthen their students' written persuasion. Through this mapping, we identify professional achievements and remaining challenges for the sustainable development of a "grammatics good enough" for the work of devoted teachers, who, without the opportunity to re-train as linguists, seek to build and implement their knowledge about language at the chalkface. Finally, we identify challenges that remain for the sustainable building of both teacher "knowledge" and "know-how" to ensure the kind of continuity and cumulative learning about language required for student success in persuasive writing, both in the transition years and across the years of schooling.

In this paper I argue that an understanding of the role of language and literacy in learning disciplinary content should be a key component of the pedagogical content knowledge covered in the preparation of high school teachers. I identify three components of this "literacy pedagogical content knowledge" (LPCK): knowledge about how spoken and written language can be best structured for effective learning; recognition that subject areas have their own characteristic language forms and hence entail distinctive literacy practices; and capacity to design learning and teaching strategies that account for subject-specific literacies and language practices. I outline how this concept of LPCK has been incorporated into a teacher education program, focusing on prospective teachers' reflections of how spoken language in their high school classrooms contributes to the more literate forms of reasoning valued in various subjects. (Contains 1 figure.)

The international marketing of school education has gathered momentum in the Asia Pacific region, where an English medium education is prized by many parents. This paper investigates the responses of a group of teachers in Australia to the needs of international students in their school. The analysis of a 1 h professional discussion between four teachers in one school context shows a range of diverse opinions and attitudes. In particular, an APPRAISAL analysis [Martin, J. R. (1995). "Reading positions/positioning readers: Judgement in English." "Prospect", 10(2), 27-37] of this discussion points to the ways in which the teachers across the key discipline areas to which international students are attracted, position themselves in relation to their roles and responsibilities towards these international students. The analysis reveals that the subject specialist teachers, while concerned about the educational needs of these international students and aware they have particular linguistic and learning needs, do not accept responsibility for teaching language in their specialist subjects. Furthermore, across the phases of the discussion, there is little shift in the stances of some of the specialist teachers as they engage with each other and with the ESL teacher, suggesting the need for more productive conversational strategies. We conclude by identifying a number of factors that need to be accounted for in such professional discussions if ESL teachers are to effectively assist specialist teachers in supporting international students in meeting the language, as well as academic demands of their specialist areas.

This article describes a theoretically informed methodology for eliciting the voices of adolescent boys identified by their teachers and parents as reluctant leisure time readers. Similar methods have also been used to draw out the voices of the boys' parents to understand their efforts to guide and maintain their sons' literacy practices, within the context of one middle class Australian school community. The concept of "voice" in our research of boys as capable but differently committed leisure time readers is informed by a socio-cultural theory that foregrounds the processes of enculturation, appropriation, and agency as fundamental to identity formation. In this regard the varied ways in which the boys in the study have taken up the reading practices valued in their families is illustrative of the mutuality of individual agency and cultural processes. In describing both the theoretical and conceptual framing of a methodology designed to investigate in particular those boys who have resisted their families' reading dispositions we hope to highlight how individuals struggle to construct new values within patterns of cultural practice. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

This paper draws on Bernstein's (1996) notion of "framing" to examine the variables which control the communication made possible in on-line discussion in one school context, and the particular "forms of pedagogic consciousness" (Bernstein, 1996) that are produced as students and teachers negotiate meanings around a literary text. Using genre analysis (Martin, 1992) I examine how students variously contribute in the collaborative construction of an online Discussion genre. Using APPRAISAL analysis (Martin, 2000; White, 2002), I then identify how online interactants variously negotiate their judgements, feelings and appreciations of various aspects of the literary text being discussed, and of each other's contributions, such that certain forms of reasoning around text are privileged over others. In so doing, I identify how different students have access to different forms of expertise in online discussion, with some students being more able to produce the "legitimate forms of communication" (Bernstein, 1996) in the online environment. I conclude by suggesting that, without a close examination of how online discussions are "framed" as emerging electronic genres, educators run the risk of validating a new mode of structural inequity and disadvantage.

In this article we describe the leisure reading practices and attitudes towards reading of two cohorts of teenage boys and their parents from one educated, middle-class school community in Australia. Leisure reading refers to free choice or recreational reading across a range of genres (e.g., fiction/nonfiction) and modes (e.g., print/electronic). First we make explicit the cultural practices in one community that contributed to differential reading formations of boys who are capable readers, and second, we highlight the boys' increasing sense of agency and their selective appropriations of their families' leisure reading dispositions. In so doing, we respond to concerns raised in the research literature regarding the challenges educators and parents face in maintaining teenage boys' engagement in reading a wide range of texts. Drawing on a sociocultural perspective, we compare the patterns of reported leisure reading of teenage boys identified as "able and committed readers" with boys identified as "able and reluctant readers." Using a model based on Rogoff's (1995) concept of guided participation, we compare the boys' attitudes towards various forms of reading and their parents' reports of family reading practices designed to guide boys into valued forms of leisure reading. We found that despite the similar ways in which both cohorts of boys had been supported as "cultural members" (Rogoff, Goncu, & Mosier, 1993) in developing valued reading practices in the home, the committed readers "took from" (Heath, 1983) their families' reading dispositions in very different ways than did the reluctant readers. A complex portrait of individual choice around reading emerges from our data. Our analytical model of guided participation provides a valuable framework for educators to examine the social formation of other sorts of readers across a range of cultural contexts.

The authors of this article coordinate and teach different core subjects within a course of preservice teacher education in the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia. Both subjects are obligatory, and are taught to the same cohort of students. The first author coordinates the subject Learning and Teaching; the second author coordinates Language in Education. Each author (as a member of a design team) independently developed an interactive CD-ROM to be used as a fundamental component of subject content and delivery. Even though each author was motivated by a similar philosophy of worthwhile learning and teaching, differences both in teaching purpose for the subject and in interpretation of the nature of desired learning generated two strikingly different products. In this article, the two multimedia products--Quality in Learning and Teaching (QuILT) and Building Understandings in Literacy and Teaching (BUILT)--are compared to illuminate the influences of teaching purpose and learning goals on the creation of educational multimedia. These major design issues are complemented by an overview of the manner of use of each program within the teacher education program, and faculty and student reactions to program implementation. Finally, implications are provided to guide other educators who wish to produce multimedia for teacher professional preparation. (Contains 2 figures.)

Interviews with three teenage boys and their parents in a middle-class community explored why the boys self-identify as reluctant readers, resisting approved forms of literacy. They pursue types of reading that contribute to their construction of masculine identities; their parents' attempts to influence reading are conditioned by traditional notions of literacy. (Contains 44 references.) (SK)

State and national curriculum authorities are increasingly encouraging students and teachers to use asynchronous online discussions to communicate both with known and unknown participants. In this paper, we offer a contribution towards the development of a framework that may help teachers design and manage those online discussions concerned with expressing ideas and discussing alternative views about texts in subject English., Introduction Asynchronous online discussion has been lauded as a powerful communication tool in education, particularly in adult, tertiary and distance education contexts (see, for e.g., Coffin, Hewings & Painter, 2005), [...]

This paper reports on the first stage of a research project investigating the leisure reading practices of boys identified as `committed' (Millard 1997) readers. The boys' constructions of themselves as readers, as reported in a questionnaire, are examined here in terms of Luke's (1995) four reading practices (which are themselves derived from Freebody and Luke's 1990 notion of reading roles): decoding, semantic, pragmatic and critical practices. The analysis indicates that while these boys are clearly aware of their reading competence in terms of decoding, semantic and pragmatic practice, their discursive comments do not make reference to critical practice as a valued component of competent reading. The insights of these boys into their own reading practices, and their family's contribution to these practices, provides educators with a potentially useful basis for evaluating approaches to reading for leisure amongst a wide range of boys., Introduction In 1981 a National survey of the reading habits and attitudes of Australian adolescents was conducted by Rhonda Bunbury (1995; `Children's Choice' contains the report). Bunbury and her team [...]