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What do we see when we observe an excellent English lesson? What's going on in the room? Perhaps what stands out is a collaborative making of meanings inspired by stimulating texts. Perhaps what's most important is an ever-deepening knowledge about, and facility with, the many ways that language works. Maybe what we're seeing is a carefully sequenced preparation for future hurdles to be negotiated. Or a blend of all three. And perhaps, as this story suggests, there is more. Perhaps every English lesson is affected in all kinds of subtle and sometimes invisible ways by unconscious fears and desires and by half-remembered histories, the territory towards which a story -- more easily than a piece of non-fiction -- can gesture.

Subject English is a knowledge structure that is hard to discern for many students and even teachers. The abstractions that underpin analysis and interpretation of texts can be fuzzy, even invisible. Furthermore, traditional knowledge is inadequate when it comes to websites, graphic novels and films. What guiding abstractions are relevant in studies of digital multimedia and canonical works such as novels? If we are building a knowledge structure for a twenty-first century discipline, can concepts embedded in the curriculum be rendered not just visible but accessible? This challenge is one faced by teachers at all levels of schooling. This paper draws on findings from a small research project investigating secondary teachers' work with textual concepts in New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory schools. It builds on case study data from ten teachers who incorporated concepts like 'representation', 'point of view' and 'character' into units of work they implemented with Year 9/10 students in 2019. We interviewed teachers about the affordances and challenges of textual concepts and explored what they had learned with key students. Early analysis of the data reveals significant shifts in the understandings of some teachers and students and lines of inquiry for future research. Most striking are findings related to conditions necessary to creation of deep knowledge in English, including: active support from school leaders; willingness of teachers to grapple with challenging concepts and use them to design units of work; links between key concepts; essential questions and assessment tasks; access to professional dialogue; and contexts that encourage transfer of learning by students. The implications of our findings for future-oriented research in English are reviewed in the conclusions.

This paper takes up the sea-faring metaphor at the centre of this special edition and asks what kinds of navigational tools (metalanguages) are necessary to steer English through the digital seas of contemporary communication. Much of this territory is yet to be mapped and the disciplinary "boat" is buffeted by contrary winds such as pressures for improved outcomes on the basics and development of 21st-century digital skills. The role of grammar as a navigational aid is complicated by these competing pressures. Alongside developing metalanguages to explore digital literacy practices in Web2, in multimodal texts like picture books, websites and social networking sites, teachers are being asked simultaneously to prepare students for national testing regimes which assess children's abilities to identify the correct verb, to underline the pronouns and to punctuate sentences in language convention tests. What kinds of grammar will enable us to manage such seemingly incongruous purposes? How do we make use of tools to improve students' writing without succumbing to reductionist models of language? What kinds of "stretch" do available grammars need if they are to prove useful as tools in this environment? In this paper, I draw on a range of students' verbal, visual and multimodal texts to investigate the issues facing adaptations of grammatically informed metalanguages in English. I attempt to show how such metalanguages will need to accommodate and account for verbal texts produced by students for assessment and multimodal texts produced by young learners in less formal, even play, situations. Basing my account on Halliday's notion of "grammatics", I argue that any navigational toolkit needs to make space for both convention and innovation, but that this process requires careful thinking, dialogue across different grammars and substantive research into semiosis in school English. (Contains 4 figures.)

This article investigates the potential of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) for exploring students' achievements in writing, thus moving beyond "deficit models" of grammar in school English. It considers the semantic features of successful interpretations of examination narratives, using what I call the "symbolic reading". Halliday has suggested that we need to distinguish between grammar and grammatics, with the grammatics viewed as independent from but sensitive to language in use. In this article, I apply his notion of grammatics to analyze the linguistic basis of students' interpretive achievements. The article investigates three aspects of A-range interpretations of different narratives. These symbolic readings indicate a preference for relational transitivity of a synoptic kind, an ability to reformulate story significance through elaboration and rhetorical "spans" between material semiosis (in Theme) and abstract significance (in New). The analysis brings to light what often appears entirely intuitive on the part of successful English students but is nevertheless crucial to their success in examination English. The final section of the article considers some implications of the grammatics for teachers who want to prepare their students to read unfamiliar narratives symbolically. (Contains 2 tables and 1 footnote.)

English is an already crowded curriculum and the incursion of multimodal literature puts it under increased pressure. How do teachers and students learn to understand and deploy tools of analysis that shed light on verbiage and images without becoming entangled in a complex and crowded analytical language? Is it possible to develop a metalanguage that relates meanings made in one mode to those in another--to enrich literary interpretation without overwhelming students' appreciation of literary texts? An adequate response to this question calls for an epistemological stance and metalanguage that accepts "polysemy" (multiple meanings); that reads choices as "motivated" by higher order concerns; and that is "relational" in its approach to analysis. This paper explores the potential of systemic functional semiotics (SFS) for addressing such requirements. Drawing on data collected in the final year of an Australian Research Council project (DP110104309), it considers three principles of SFS informing the metalanguages used by two secondary teachers in their work with students on literary picture books and fiction films. Halliday's principle of metafunctions (three major kinds of meaning) enabled the teachers to explore different meaning frames in interpreting images and language; the principle of system (contrasting options for meaning in a given semiotic environment) allowed them to open up the idea of choice for students in analysing texts; and the principle of stratification made relations between meaning, function and form easier to unpack in classroom discourse. The affordances of such intellectual tools in SFS are observed in students' oral and written responses to literary picture books and in teachers' accounts of what they taught and what they learned from their classroom interventions. The paper interleaves reflections on each aspect of SFS with interview accounts of how the metalanguage was used to enhance literary interpretation of selected students. The final section of the paper highlights implications of this case study work and possibilities for future research into the relationship between metalanguage and processes of metasemiosis in literary interpretation. It turns on the question of whether the analogic power of concepts like metafunctions, system and stratification gives students portals to literary meaning that enrich (without crowding) interpretive work on multimodal texts.

As well as maintaining the central role of literature, the new Australian Curriculum: English emphasises the multimodal nature of literacy and requires students in primary and secondary schools to develop explicit knowledge about visual and verbal grammar as a resource for text interpretation and text creation. This study investigated the use of visual grammatics in interpreting picture books by students across Years Four, Five, Seven and Ten following an intensive professional learning programme undertaken by their teachers. A proposed framework describes variation in students' interpretive stance from tactical to diegetic to semiotic. Levels of student semiotic understanding are differentiated and differences between students' oral and written interpretations are discussed in relation 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.

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.

At a time when political leaders and media pundits seek to narrow the English curriculum and reduce its knowledge structure to the "basics," it is helpful to revisit the potential of different approaches to learning in English that have evolved over time. In this paper I reflect on the semantic features of personal growth, cultural heritage, skills and cultural analysis models of English and exemplify their uses for engaging students with challenging texts like "Macbeth". Following this, I return to case study material collected during the classroom work of one teacher and his Year 9 students, and reinterpret their texts in the light of these four models of the discipline. The development of students' work over time reveals how this teacher drew on the meaning potential of each model and demonstrates the power of a principled and recursive use of these in classroom teaching.

Garth Boomer's thinking influenced many of those working in school English during the time he was alive. The ripple effects of his legacy continue to be felt. For the author, it is Boomer's interests in metaphor and meaning that resonate most. The use of tropes and figure is a distinctive feature of his writing and offers a rich allegorical resource for current reflections on curriculum. In this paper, the author explores the potential of metaphor for thinking in new ways about the relationship of grammar to key issues facing school English. Drawing on key figures in Shakespeare's play "The Tempest", the paper makes use of an old association between the word "grammar" and the practice of magic.

At the dawn of a national curriculum for English in Australia, grammar has appeared without any serious interrogation of the terms of its re-entry and against ambiguous evidence about its value for teaching writing. What kinds of knowledge about language do teachers need in rhetorically productive teaching? This article investigates the potential of Halliday's notion of grammatics for understanding students' writing as acts of meaning in context. Drawing on systemic-functional linguistics, I show how teachers can assess writing achievement using "big picture" tools like genre, register and "small picture" tools like Expansion. I apply these tools to two student texts that call for attention to creative uses of language and to excursions and to difficulties with logic and coherence. The paper concludes that a "good enough" grammatics will enable teachers to recognize playful developments in students' texts and also to foster their control of literate discourse.

A curriculum is a knowledge structure outlining what is to be learned in what order. The Australian curriculum for English emphasises creation of a "coherent" and "cumulative" "body of knowledge about how the English language works", with learning that is "portable and applicable to new settings across the school years and beyond" (National Curriculum Board, 2009, p. 9, emphasis added). But what happens when those charged with implementing curriculum cannot agree on "what counts"? This article reflects on key differences between stakeholders about disciplinarity in English, drawing on sociological categories of Bernstein and Maton. The fourth challenge facing implementation is "face validity". The creation of a viable knowledge structure for English makes it crucial that teachers and professional bodies find it acceptable. The article concludes with a heuristic figure for representing key parameters of knowledge structure in English and a proposal for interrelating these so as to optimize implementation of the curriculum in Australian classrooms. (Contains 1 figure.)

This paper considers the development of voicing in the writing of secondary English students influenced by post-structuralist approaches to literature. It investigates students' growing capacity not only to voice their own responses to literature but also to relate these to a range of theoretical discourses. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, we explore the development of voicing in students' writing in three key assessment tasks in a Queensland Literature Extension course. We argue that students' growing capacities to handle the demands of reflexiveness in this course are manifested in their expanding repertoire of choices related to control of stance, orientation to reading, type of address and orders of voicing. By the end of their course in literary theory, students are producing texts that integrate personal and impersonal forms of voicing, exploiting the potential of projection for embedding and for complex iterations of voice and stancing their proposals in authoritative and independent ways. Drawing on extracts from representative student work from this course, we characterize these developments in voicing as a movement towards greater polyphony (or multivoicedness). Our analysis of the expanded repertoire of choices for voicing in students' texts provides evidence of the power of a well-structured introduction to post-structuralism in senior school English. (Contains 4 tables and 4 figures.)

This paper reports on research into the literacies of pre-service teachers and the implications for both mapping and developing students' literate competences. The research focussed on two questions: (1) If tertiary literacies are multiple, how do we bring these into relationship with one another and with the different discourse domains of professional life? (2) What does development "look like" in a multiliteracies environment? The research investigated the linguistic challenges of all assignments undertaken by 11 students in the first 18 months of teacher education and this paper considers how one student negotiated the challenges of three of these. Drawing on tools of "register" and "genre" within systemic functional linguistics, our paper explores the genesis of a model to encompass a wide range of assignment tasks related to academic, everyday and professional discourses of teacher education. Following this, it applies genre and register analysis to the writing produced by one student and reflects on the implications of her negotiation of these tasks. A dialogic model of development is proposed which images learning as an ability to shunt between the register demands of different domains. The student integrates sometimes competing meaning potentials through the production of a text in a particular genre. Development is construed in terms of this dialogue. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential of the framework for both including the diverse literacies of teacher education and for exploring the kinds of learning that occurs at the intersection of (often competing) discourses.

Discusses analytical challenges of multimodal texts as they contribute to production of racial anxiety about asylum seekers. Building on a recent article that discussed the lexical manifestations of increasing racial hatred towards refugees, focuses on the children overboard affair in Australian news. (Author/VWL)