english essay 2

Relevant reading

Week 1

Defining terms

In getting started with our exploration of English, it’s important to understand some of the key terms that underpin this curriculum area.

You may hear this area referred to as language, literacy, multiliteracies, and so on – and in the past, some of these terms have been used interchangeably (for example, you’ll notice as you read that some texts refer to the subject area as ‘literacy’, not English). With the arrival of the Australian Curriculum: English, a common language is developing.

Generally speaking, we now use ‘English’ to refer to the curriculum area, and the subject. Within the Australian curriculum, English is divided into three strands: language, literature, and literacy. It’s important that you familiarise yourself with these strands and what characterises each strand - noting how they are different, and in some instances, how they are similar.

Pay particular attention to the similarities and differences between language and literacy, as these strands can be easily confused. You will find useful elaborations of each strand within the curriculum.

A sociocultural perspective on language and literacy

Of course, understanding the terminology of subject English is only a first step; in the weeks ahead your understanding of the ways in which students engage in the practices of English, and how they acquire the skills and knowledge of language, literacy and literature that enable them to participate in schooling, and in society more broadly will be challenged and deepened.

It’s important to recognise that this development doesn’t take place in isolation; rather, our language development is always linked with the world around us, and the ways in which we are required to use our language skills for particular purposes.

Seely Flint, Kitson, Lowe and Shaw (2014) encapsulate this idea very effectively in stating that “any time people are engaged in reading and writing events, they are constructing social relationships with others… literacy development is socially situated” (p. 12, emphasis added).

To find out more about this idea, watch this week’s podcast in which Associate Professor Tim Moss explores the sociocultural perspective on language and literacy.

This perspective underpins contemporary theory and practice related to English teaching and learning, and will be explored in greater depth in the weeks ahead.

Teachers lecture

Language and Literacy: A sociocultural view

Hello and welcome to this podcast where I’ll be exploring very briefly what we might think of as a sociocultural view of language and literacy. This is a complex concept which you will certainly read a lot more about in the weeks ahead but it is also foundational in that understanding this idea helps us understand a lot more about how language develops, how we develop knowledge and skills as users of language and why we aren’t all the same in terms of proficienciesin this regard. To start us off, I’d like to consider the words of the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who so wonderfully wrote that, “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” For many of us, I think this is true. We communicate with each other, we understand our experiences and we share our knowledge through language. It both extends our world and constrainsit. It’s how we expand our knowledge but it’s also where our knowledge can end because if we can’t describe something in words, how can we truly know it? How can we share our knowledge and our experience of something with other people if not through the use of words, and it’s this relationship between language and the world that’s explored in a sociocultural view. This view essentially suggests that unless we possess certain knowledge that goes beyond knowledge of language itself, we can never really be truly literate and that language therefore doesn’t exist in isolation. So let me give you an example. The word googly, not Google. We’re not talking about googling things. We’re talking about the word googly. It’s a very simple word. I’m sure you can sound it out and if I tell you that it’s a noun then it’s going to tell you a little more about what it does and what it is. It describes a thing. But what does it actually mean and how do you know this? Well, in order to figure that out for myself, I went and had a look at a list of terms which told me that a googly is a pitch which is thrown with baseball’sscrewball grip but reverse finger spin so that it looks like a leg break that should move across and away from the batter but it actually moves in the opposite direction,so it moves into the batter like an off break after it bounces. Now depending on your sociocultural knowledge,so your knowledge of the world and culture and the things in it, that might help to make more sense of the concept of a googly or it may not help you at all. If you were able to see a diagram of say a set of fielding positions in a particular game, that might help to make a little more sense, particularly if that diagram was labelled and it told you that leg and off actually referred to sides of a cricket pitch. But, of course, that diagram itself also makes certain assumptions about the viewer’ssocial and cultural understanding and if you don’t possessthat same social and cultural understanding you might have difficulty in interpreting and reading, even that diagram. Because firstly in both the googly example and the diagram you need to know that both of these examplesrelate to cricket. If you didn’t have any knowledge of cricket, you wouldn’t be able to make sense either of the definition or of the diagram. The diagram doesn’tsay it’s cricket related. It assumesthat you know that. So what happens then when we make assumptions about the experiences our students have or had? What happens when we don’t take into account where our students are at? We can’t assume for instance that every child is read to at home and therefore knows how to turn the pages of a book. We can’t assume that print means anything to students. We can’t assume that just because all of our studentslive in the same area, whether that’s a town, or a suburb or a state that they have the same social and cultural understanding of each other and the same understandings as we do. So this is really what we mean by taking a sociocultural perspective on language and literacy. It’s about adopting that awarenessthat just because we all speak the same language that we have the same degree of understanding and knowledge. That’s not, of course, necessarily the case. Language is social and our social experiences vary and therefore our language skills and our language knowledge also varies. It’s about not taking for granted that what it means to be literate is always about being literate in a particular time and a particular place and as that time and place change so too do the demands made upon our knowledge and our understanding of language. So to finish, I’d like to suggest that while Wittgenstein was absolutely correct that the limits of our language are the limits of our world, I would suggest that we might just as logically think of this statement in reverse. Perhaps, as well as the limits of language being the limits of our world, the limits of our world might also be the limits of our language. I look forward to considering this with you in the weeks ahead in terms of what this might mean for us as teachers and particularly teachers working in the 21st Century.

Readings

Chapter 1: Examining literacy in the twenty-first century, pp. 2-26, of your eText provides a useful discussion of literacy practices, with particular attention given to the contemporary context.

In working through this chapter, you'll find the section describing the six guiding principles to be relevant for understanding the sociocultural view of language and literacy, and also for Assessment Task 1.

The Literacy iStudy Version 1 has also been made available as an additional resource.

Week 2

As you will recall from last week’s materials, in this unit we adopt a sociocultural perspective of language and literacy development. Essentially, this means we recognise that what it means to be literate will only have relevance within a particular social and cultural context. We are literate in a particular place, at a particular time.

This week, we begin to explore language, literature, and literacy in the contemporary world – what it means to be literate in this time and place. This will involve exploring what it might mean to ‘be’ literate in a little more detail, focusing specifically on the knowledge and skills involved in making meaning through language. We will also explore the literacy demands of contemporary society, including notions of multiliteracy, and multimodality.

Being literate

Before we can explore the kinds of demands that contemporary society makes of us, in terms of our language and literacy skills and knowledge, it’s important that we first unpack these skills and knowledge. What is it that we do, when we are engaged in interpreting (and creating) texts? What do we need to know, and be able to do, in order to participate in a world surrounded by language?

The first podcast this week is an overview of specific knowledge necessary to be literate. The second podcast looks more closely at the skills required to be literate in the 21st century.

Note that while the model presented within the podcasts represents contemporary thinking on literacy practices, our understanding of this aspect of language learning continues to develop as our ways of engaging with text and language change.

Teacher lecture

Being literate: Knowledge

So last time, we explored the idea that we are always literate in a particular culture and a particular society at a particular point in time and that the skills and knowledge we need to be literate are always changing and developing.  So in this podcast what I’d like to explore is the knowledge that we use in order to be literate in contemporary Australian society.  What does it mean to be literate here and now?  And in doing so, I’m going to be focusing largely on reading.  What are the skills and the knowledge that we draw upon in order to read?  But I’d like you to be thinking about how these same skills and knowledge might also apply to writing, speaking and listening because these are all different ways of using and interacting with language.  

So let’s start with a really basic question.  What is reading?  Well, according to Winch et al, reading is essentially a process of constructing meaning. In the case of reading, this process is focused on constructing meaningful text and this text could be written, graphic, digital, anything you like.  It’s important to note that this act of constructing meaning is always done for a particular reason.  It’s a purposeful act.  Now that purpose might vary.  Sometimes you might be reading for enjoyment.   Sometimes you might be reading for information. You might even be reading because you need to write a university assignment.  Whatever else might be your particular reason, but there is a reason for engaging in that act.  And to make that meaning, we draw on knowledge, so we actually need to know some things.  Those things are more than just knowing the sounds that each symbol on a page represents.  That’s really important.  That’s part of reading.  But if that’s all we do, would you say we were really  achieving meaning or understanding?   Essentially, we think about reading in current literature as an interaction between the meaning we bring to a text and the meaning we take from a text.  So reading is essentially a kind of problem solving exercise with the problem being those squiggly lines and symbols that we need to make sense of and our preferred solution to that problem being meaning.  So let’s unpack in a little bit of detail some of these ways in which we use our knowledge in interacting with text to make meaning.    The first way we do this is through our knowledge of grapho‐phonic information.  So grapho‐phonic information refers to knowing the sounds that are associated with a particular symbol.  Grapho meaning sign and phonic meaning sound.  I’d like you, as an experiment here, to say the first letter of the alphabet.  So, in one sense that’s really easy but then you need to think about it.  Is it ay, is it ah, is it a?  So it’s about knowing, not only one letter and one sound in terms of our knowledge of grapho‐phonic information, but all of the possible combinations of letters and sound.  So we have to know that a could be any of a range of sounds.  It could be a like apple, cat, can or it could be ay like cane.  It could be ah like path.  It could be e like any.  So a, although it seems simple can produce at least four different kinds of sounds so we need to know that and we need to know when to use each and then we need to learn about the other symbols and the other letters that tell us when to produce a blended sound and how those blended sounds go together to make up words.  So this is all essentially phonemic awareness; the ability to hear, to divide up and to manipulate the sounds of speech.  This is where phonics is relevant.  Phonics being an approach to the reading and spelling and so on through that grapho‐phonic relationship.  And that’s one way that we problem solve when we read.  But let me give you another problem to solve.   I’d like you to write down or say the word that the letters r, e, a, d go together to produce.  Say it aloud.  What’s the word?  My question is: did you say read, like knead, bead, plead?  Or did you say read like head, lead, instead?  I feel a bit like Dr Seuss!  And how do we actually know which is which?  We need other clues.  We need other information and other kinds of knowledge to give us the clue to the meaning.   The first other clue that we use is the grammatical structure of language.  So we need knowledge of grammar and our knowledge of the kinds of cues and we carry in our brains the intuitive and innate understanding of the grammatical structure of language and the types of words that occur and the order in which they might occur.  So here’s another example for you. If I say the sentence “It (something) across the garden”, how do you know what’s missing?  Well, our knowledge of grammatical structures tells us that what’s missing is a particular type of word and that that type of word is what we call a verb.  And it’s because of that grammatical awareness that we are initially able to refine our capacity to solve this problem.  So “It (blank) across the garden”. We know that “It yellow across the garden wouldn’t make sense.”  “It chicken across the garden” also doesn’t make sense.  “It however across the garden” still not working.  But “It flew across the garden” does make sense.  That’s the only word so far that that makes sense from a grammatical perspective and we understand that intuitively even if not explicitly.    Of course, there are certain verbs here that aren’t going to fit.  We probably wouldn’t say “It swam across the garden”, for instance, unless the garden was flooded and that brings us to the third kind of information and the third source of knowledge that we need to draw upon to help us decode and make meaning from text.  And that’s what we call semantic knowledge so a text also contains within it or requires certain semantic knowledge or information and that’s what enables us to predict the text based on our understanding of and our familiarity with the topic.  So let’s have a look at another example.  And I’m going to give you a range of alternatives here, all of which are correct, grapho‐ phonically all of which are correct from a grammatical point of view so we need something else to help us make sense.   If I say “The brontosaurus is a type of dinner”, probably possible but unlikely. “The brontosaurus is a type of diagram.” Again probably not quite right.  “The brontosaurus is a type of digraph.”  Also, not really going to work for us.  “The brontosaurus is a type of dinosaur.”  Now that makes sense because we understand it from our knowledge of the world around us.  So even though a range of possible words could be correct from a grapho‐phonic perspective and as far as syntax and grammar is concerned only one word in that situation is correct semantically.  Only one makes sense we considered in terms of our knowledge of our world.   And then finally, depending on the type of text we are attempting to construct meaning from, we can use the presence of visual and pictorial information to construct meaning.  So visual elements might include pictures, diagrams, icons, choice of font or page layout or a mix of these different things. Those elements can repeat the information that’s there in the print, they can add to what the print says or they could provide different kinds of information and perhaps even contradict what’s there in the print. So not only do we need to understand images, we need to understand how they relate to printed text as well.  So to sum up this brief exploration of being literate in order to read and actively construct meaning from a text, we bring certain things to that interaction, that experience of reading.  Some of these are things that we need to know and these things go beyond knowledge of letters and sounds to knowledge of language and knowledge of the world around us.  Next time we’re going to consider the next step and that is the skills that are required to be literate, particularly in the here and now.  

Lecture part 2

Being literate: Skills

So this podcast picks up exactly where we left off at the end of the previous podcast where we were exploring the knowledge required to be literate.  So if you haven’t yet listened to or accessed that podcast, I’d suggest you go there first then come back here when you have finished that.    What we are going to be exploring here is the idea that in the same way that we need particular kinds of knowledge in order to be able to make meaning from a text, or indeed to construct our own texts, we also need to draw on particular skills and like any skill, we acquire these skills through application and we refine them through practice.  So the more we use them the more proficient we become.  And in literacy terms we describe these main skills as effective literacy practices.  And we really draw heavily here on the work of two Australian researchers, Peter Freebody and Allan Luke, who carried out some really influential work late in the last century in order to describe these practices and to try to map them in some way.  What they developed is now known really widely as the four resources model and the four resources model suggests that when we are making meaning through language, we are engaged in four things and that each of these things draws upon specific skills.  You are going to be exploring this model in much more depth in the readings for this week so for now I’ll just give you a quick overview of each of those four resources. The first resource that we draw upon when we are making a meaning from a text is our skills in code‐breaking.  So this is where we are actually practising that knowledge around the letter sound relationships of a text and decoding the symbols that are there within that text.  So what are the patterns of a text?  How do I crack that code drawing on skills that allow us to do that?    The second is text‐participant and these are the skills that enable us to actually participate in constructing meaning from a text based on what the text says but also based on our knowledge of the world so this is that interaction, the knowledge we bring to a text and the knowledge we take from it, so what’s the text trying to say to us and what does it actually mean and the set of skills and practices that enable us to make meaning.    Third, we have text‐ user and text‐user is something that’s really important for us in terms of not only reading but also writing and you’ll find this comes up a lot these days in the context of things like Naplan.   So when we’re talking about the text‐user resource and the skills involved in that, those are the skills that enable us to use particular texts to achieve particular social purposes and also the understanding and the capacity to put into practice our knowledge of this structure of texts and the way they are used in different social situations and how that might affect that structure.  So think about a recipe and how a recipe is similar to and different from a train timetable and how a train timetable might be similar to and different from a movie or a song or a novel or a piece of persuasive writing.  So the kinds of things we are drawing on here relate to the ways in which texts are constructed to achieve a purpose and how we can actually approach a text with a particular purpose in mind.    And then next, finally, but really importantly, we have the text‐analyst role and these are the skills really of critique, analysis, reading and critical thinking.  And this is about the ways in which readers identify and critique the assumptions in a text and how that text positions us as readers.  So how does a text try to get us to think and feel in particular ways and whose voices and opinions might it represent and whose voices and opinions might that text also leave out?  And you might hear this referred to in terms of critical literacy but really it underpins most of what we do in contemporary literacy practice, teaching and learning.    So when we’re engage in reading or indeed in writing or speaking or listening, we are employing these skills.  And we are drawing on the knowledge that we bring with us of language, culture and the world.  This is really complex to grasp and it is certainly something we are going to be unpacking further in the weeks ahead of us, but to help understand it, there are a range of models that have been put together and you’ll find one that’s on a slide here, if you are looking at a visual version of this or it will be available to you in other ways that represents how these different resources might map against the kinds of knowledge we explored in the previous podcast session.    So to bring all of this together, the knowledge and the skills, it’s really important to remember that reading is a bit like solving a problem.  It’s like doing a Sudoku, if you have done those, where you need a range of strategies to figure out the really tricky ones.  You can’t just rely on one strategy working all of the time. As experienced readers, our strategies and the use of our own skills and our own knowledge becomes much more innate, much more intuitive.  We do this unconsciously without having to think about it but we still need to be taught how to use these things initially and we do tend to forget how difficult it actually is to learn to read.  So in English, essentially, what we are doing is trying to take 26 letters and produce about 44 different sounds and we don’t always even spell those sounds in the same way.  It’s also complex and particularly difficult because English borrows from so many other languages so the rules keep changing as we learn more words.  So compare the sound at the end of the word helmet with the sound at the end of the word gourmet.   They are both spelt in exactly the same way but they produce a very different sound.    So for now, my take home message for you in all of this is that reading is about making meaning and that is why we engage in the effort required to solve the puzzle of text.  If we don’t have understanding and if that understanding isn’t formed both through our knowledge and then enacted through our skills, we aren’t really literate, we are just making sounds. 

Being literate here and now

If we accept the sociocultural view of language and literacy, we recognise that language and culture are connected. This connection is evident in the ways in which texts have developed over time, in terms of their construction and their design features. As Healy (2008) has argued, “new times mean new texts” (p. 5). With the advent of digital technologies, and the accessibility of text through the internet and mobile devices, it is widely understood that the texts of the 21st century pose new challenges for users (readers/viewers/listeners) of those texts, and for the creators of texts (writers/speakers).

Your reading last week introduced the concept of multimodality, as a way of describing the methods of communicating that are evident in today’s new media texts. Anstey and Bull (2010) suggest that texts can be described as multimodal when they contain more than one semiotic system. It is worth reading their explanation of the five possible semiotic systems.

Healy (2008) developed a visual representation of these five semiotic systems, showing their relationship to each other and their relative prominence in contemporary society. As you come to better understand the five semiotic systems explore this notion of multimodality in greater depth, and consider its application for you personally and professionally.

Understanding literacy demands

As teachers, and as people engaging in literate practices in a multimodal society, it is important that we consider not only the characteristics of the texts that surround us, but also what kinds of challenges these texts might pose for us as we read, view, listen, and otherwise engage with them to create meaning.

Ludwig (2003) presents a useful exploration of the literacy demands of contemporary society, drawing on the seminal work of Bill Green (as cited in Ludwig, 2003), who proposed that literacy demands can be understood across three broad dimensions:

· operational – the knowledge of the language system, and the codes used to communicate meaning (this aligns well with the ‘code breaking’ aspect of the Four Resources Model)

· cultural – the knowledge of the contexts in which we use language (this aligns with the ‘text user’ and ‘text participant’ aspects of the Four Resources Model)

· critical – the understanding that texts represent a particular point of view and message, and that there are other points of view and messages that are excluded (this aligns with the ‘text analyst’ aspect of the Four Resources Model).

Making sense of literacy (Ludwig, 2003) expands on this way of understanding literacy demands, where the framework is aligned with classroom practice in English, and is also considered in the context of the Four Resources Model.

Bringing it together

In contemporary society, text is presented in complex, highly visual, and multimodal ways. It’s important to recognise this, and plan for teaching that recognises this complexity and the varied skills and knowledge that students bring with them.

The models presented this week can be used to assist in understanding the skills and knowledge required to participate in contemporary society. They can also assist in unpacking the kinds of demands that particular texts might make of a reader (or viewer, or listener). Understanding them will assist you in planning, teaching, and assessing English in the primary classroom, and, more immediately, will enable you to complete Assessment Task 1 for this unit.

 Additional readings

These readings aim to extend upon the concepts of multi-modality and how the concept of literacy has changed over time.

Multiliteracies

Chapter 5: A new generation of readers: Skills and abilities of children in the new millennium (McLachlan, Nicholson, Fielding-Barnsley, Mercer & Ohi, 2014, pp. 68-80), provides a useful discussion of some of the key concepts introduced this week, including multimodality and multiliteracies. It situates these terms within the classroom context, and also considers how these understandings interact with models such as the Four Resources Model.

For more on multi-literacy you might like to spend some time reading Chapter 3 Becoming multiliterate in contemporary times (Yelland, Lee, O’Rourke, & Harrison, 2008, pp. 28-45). Even a quick skim-read now will stand you in good stead for future discussions.

Week 3

This week, we explore two elements of language development – we begin with the development of oral language (as, for many learners, this is where language development begins). Following this, we explore word recognition and phonemic awareness. It’s important to note that while development does generally follow particular patterns, these are not universal. Theories of language development and acquisition are still emerging, and we will engage with some of these theories through readings this week.

Regardless of the context or age level in which you are working as a teacher, it is important to understand how language develops. It is only through such understanding that we can build upon the foundations of language development and extend learners’ skills and knowledge in language, literacy, and literature.

The development of oral language

Before we can learn to read or to write, we must learn to hear and produce the sounds of language. This is where, for many people, language development begins – with listening and speaking. Please access the podcast on language development for an overview of this process. These ideas are explored in more detail in this week's reading. At this stage, it would be a good idea to consider the application of these developmental processes for teaching and teachers.

Lecture part 1

Stages of language development

In this podcast we will be exploring how language develops and by language here I mean what we speak, what we hear and possibly also what we think.  So this is language in broad terms, not narrowing to what we might think of as literacy development, reading and writing.  So for teachers, this is fundamental knowledge regardless of your destination, understanding how students come to be the language users that they are and understanding where they might still be going in their language development can be very revealing for you and your practice.   It is important to note a few key points about language acquisition at this stage.  First, it really is an extraordinary achievement.  To some extent, the way in which we acquire and develop language is still the subject of much discussion and debate because there is so much we don’t fully understand about the brain and how it develops and about language specifically but one thing everybody agrees is that it is both complex and extraordinary.   Second, it’s ongoing.  In one sense it seems to happen so quickly because children speak in full sentences using their own grammar and grown‐up words by the time they are about six.  But in reality, our development never stops.    And third, it happens without any direct teaching at all for the majority of children.  They don’t need to be taught language.  They learn it simply through listening and being part of a culture that uses language.    So when we are talking about language acquisition, we are talking about a range of different things.   When we are learning language, we need to acquire the ability to receive and to produce the sounds of speech and those two things are not the same.  We need to acquire the knowledge of how to put words together in particular ways, sentences, plurals, tense and so on.  We acquire knowledge and practice in using language in social contexts, how we use language differently for different purposes and we acquire the meanings of words and word combinations.  We need to understand that language relates to the world around us and also to things that we can’t see like feelings, for example.  And again, that awareness and that understanding really is a major achievement.    So how does this happen?  Well although the exact timing differs and there are always exceptions, language development does generally follow a particular pathway.  And here it is.  So the first stage is preparation.   Even before they speak, children are receiving language and preparing to use it.   Crying leads into cooing, the vowel sounds ah, ee and this leads into babbling.  So this is where they add consonants.  So mamamamama, dadadadada, which is one way of understanding why mum and dad are such well‐chosen words to describe parents.  After this preparing to talk, the babbling gives rise to actual recognisable word which arise initially from the need to make sense of the world around them.  And often, these are words for things that actually do things because the focus is on what is actually engaging children in the world around them: cat, dog, ball, for instance, and these are the things they interact with.  So of course this is what their language focuses on although there might also be words for familiar actions like drink, up, move, and so on.    It’s interesting to note that while a child might only use one word at this stage, that word actually has a complete meaning for that child.  So ball might mean “I want the ball.”  Or indeed “Take the ball away from me!”  And it’s really important to recognise that, at this stage, comprehension exceeds production.  So children actually understand a lot more words than they can produce themselves.    The next stage involves adding a lot more words.  Usually it’s two words to start with:  all gone, my truck.  We call this the telegraphic speech stage.  So the child chooses the words that will get their message across in the most economical way and again these words have complete meaning.  As they start to add more words: two words, three words, five words, it becomes not so easy to predict and development happens really rapidly but generally it does go one, two and then more.    Next, we get to the stage of knowing rules and this is where we start to see some really creative uses of language: He goed or I have two feets or you runned.  Are these actually wrong?  Well, what they show us is the child is developing and demonstrating their knowledge of the important rules of knowledge.  Things like tense.  Go is present tense so therefore goed must be past tense.  Because where shop is present tense, shopped is past tense.  So it shows that children are actually again making some pretty strong leaps in their understanding and their creativity with language.    Then we get to middle childhood.  And by about age six, this is where children can produce longer sentences and conversations, essentially.  So between five and ten, language development starts to really shift.  It becomes less about how to actually form the words and more about how to get it right in different social situations and at this stage at middle childhood, children don’t always get it right, as evidenced by those wonderful moments you may have seen at parties or so on when a six year old asks Auntie Jenny or Uncle Bill, “Why are you so fat?”  If you’ve ever watched the show Outnumbered which is sometimes on ABC Television, that’s a classic example.  You look at the youngest daughter.  She’s very much in this stage and some of the things that she asks and comes out with, you would not consider appropriate in those social circumstances.  

Word recognition: phonics, phonemes and phonemic awareness

Along with oral language development, another key aspect of becoming literate is the development of word recognition. In broad terms, this is our capacity to relate the sounds of English to the written forms, and is one aspect of learning to read (along with comprehension, which we will explore later in this module). However, we must first identify and be able to produce sounds to recognise them in written form, so word recognition also relies on oral language development.

The podcast explores the process of word recognition (or decoding, as it is commonly known).

Lecture part 2

Word recognition

This time, we will be exploring word recognition which in many ways is really the bridge between speaking and listening and reading.  So what we are talking about when we are talking about word recognition is the ability to decode the words in text.  So to see those little squiggles on the page that we call letters and translate those letters into sound.  This is really important for us because essentially most of us hear language.  So writing is the system that tells us what written text should sound like and if you remember the four resources model, and really you probably should because it is quite important, this is essentially what’s involved in the code‐breaking role.    So when we are talking about English, English is what we call an alphabetic system so that the letters go together or sometimes indeed stand on their own in order to represent the sounds of words.   And it’s important to note that English is actually a little bit tricky in this regard because there’s not just one way of making each sound and because we have more sounds than we do letters.  We have about 44 sounds and only about 26 letters.  To just further complicate things, we can make particular sounds with different combinations of letters so the f (sound) in fun, think about how that’s spelled versus the f (sound) in photo. The same sound, spelled completely differently.  This is really different to some other languages like the language Kana in Japan where the written system is entirely syllabic.  So each symbol represents one sound and always only that sound.    So when we are talking about letters and sounds in English, we are referring to the way that those letters represent what are actually called phonemes.  And a phoneme is really just a fancy word to say an individual speech sound.  So if you think of the word cat and try to sound out and hear the individual sounds or the individual phonemes within that, you will find that although it only has one syllable cat, it actually has three different phonemes, c – a – t.   It’s really hard to imagine once you are unconsciously skilled with this but at one point you actually had to learn to distinguish those three phonemes.  That skill is called phonemic awareness, being able to distinguish and to produce the sounds of the language.    So in English we have two distinct groups of sounds.  We have vowels and we have consonants.   Vowels are what we call voiced sounds, meaning that they are produced by the voice box and the sound travels through your mouth with no obstruction.  So technically, with a vowel you could continue to produce that sound for as long as you have breath.  So try that with a couple of different vowel sounds.  Obviously, there is a lot more to vowels than that.  There are long vowel sounds, there are short vowel sounds, all those sorts of things, and there are some that don’t follow regular patterns but in broad strokes that’s what a vowel is.  Then we have the consonants which is where your mouth has to get involved in some way to produce that sound, by creating an impediment to the passage of breath of the voice through your mouth.  So it could be like b which uses the lips or k which uses the tongue and the roof of your mouth or s which again uses your tongue and your teeth.    So what does all of this have to actually do with becoming literate? I hear you ask.  Well in order to crack the code of written language, children need to learn the symbol sound relations in written text and teaching of these relations is what we mean when we say phonics.  So this knowledge needs to be taught systematically and explicitly.  As a teacher, you need to actually plan for this teaching and learning and it also needs to be sequenced in that some letters and sounds need to be learnt before other letters and sounds and you can’t rely on your students to discover that for themselves.  It’s also really important to note that in some circles there is still some debate about the merits of teaching using a phonics based approach.  Some say it is the only way while others point out that we have different thinking skills and that we use our brains differently when we are processing word recognition than when we are processing comprehension and that taking language out of context makes phonics extraction of limited use.    I think you will find these days, though, that most theorists and certainly most curriculum documents including the Australian Curriculum English acknowledge the value of phonics instruction as a component of a broader, overall balanced literacy programme.  So in terms of how our phonemic awareness develops, generally it follows again a pretty clear pattern.  We move from an awareness of syllables to an awareness of the patterning in sounds within syllables, what we call the onset and the rhyme within a syllable and then awareness of specific phonemes.  So we move in our ability to detect sounds from larger units of sound down to more specific ones.  Of course, in saying that that’s a general pattern, it happens over a different amount of time and at different times for different children.  We do know though that the use of rhymes helps.  We know that poems help, songs help, shared books in the classroom, all those kinds of language experiences help children to develop in this regard.    And so again we find ourselves at a key question when it comes to dealing with English concept.  As a teacher, it’s really important for you to be aware of the importance of maintaining balance in your approach.  That’s why this is important.  That’s why you should care about this.  Teaching people how to read is tremendously complex.  One size definitely doesn’t fit all.  Not all children are the same, they don’t all learn in the same way and that means you need to adopt a varied approach in your teaching.  Some students will engage in phonics very easily, very quickly, while others might really struggle and there’s no one right way to teach because there isn’t one way of learning or one way of developing that will learn for everyone.  So with this in mind, it’s particularly important that your teaching is carefully planned and carefully implemented.  Don’t leave such important learning to chance.   

Reading: Oral language development

Chapter 2: Oral language learning in and out of the classroom, pp. 28-63  The discussion of the conditions and models for oral language development in this chapter is particularly relevant, as is the section on language cueing systems. You’ll find that many of these ideas expand and reinforce concepts introduced in the podcasts this week. The chapter offers a very helpful overview of oral language development from a classroom perspective.

Week 4

Comprehension

This week we examine several important aspects of literacy development related to reading (comprehension), and also consider how we learn to write, and why this process might be particularly difficult and challenging for learners. As well as exploring writing development in broad terms, we will consider the development of spelling skills and knowledge specifically.

As you are no doubt aware, while reading is partly an act of translating symbols to sound, there is more involved than this. Put simply, reading is an act of meaning-making, and it is the reader who must engage actively in this process.

The podcast on comprehension provides an overview of some of the key factors involved in comprehending text, and some of the barriers to comprehension.

Lecture

Comprehension

In this podcast we will be exploring what we mean by comprehension and the role in comprehension in making meaning and why this is such an important process in terms of literacy development and reading, in particular.    So when we are talking about comprehension, we are moving away from the code‐breaking aspects of reading development and instead we are starting to explore how we go about actually making meaning from text.  To comprehend something essentially is to understand it.  I really like this quote which is taken from Tompkins and it was a student in that text, a grade 6 student saying “I was thinking all the time in this story.  I guess that’s why I know so much about it.”  So as you can see from this student’s comment, comprehension is a process of thinking and interpreting a text which helps us to understand its meaning on multiple levels.    Irwin defines comprehension as “a reader’s process of using prior experiences and the author’s text to construct meaning that’s useful to that reader for a particular purpose.”  I really like that definition because it emphasises that reading is essentially an interaction. It is about the meaning we take from a text, of course, but it also involves the meaning that we bring to that text.  Readers need to be active.  That definition also emphasises that reading takes place for a purpose and this links us back to the socio‐cultural view of literacy and language that we have developed particular types of texts to meet specific purposes.    One of the easiest ways to actually understand what we mean by comprehension, of course, is to remember a time when you read something that you just didn’t understand.  Maybe it was a difficult piece of poetry in school.  Maybe it was a difficult textbook chapter in University.  What did you actually take away from that text?   What was missing for you as you struggled through it, as you read the same page or the same paragraph three or four or five times?  Well, probably what was missing was comprehension.   So in order to actually comprehend, we need a range of different things that help us to understand.   The first thing we need is background knowledge.  So we need to actually be able to use our background knowledge to link a text to what we know of the world around us.  That knowledge of the world is what helps us to predict and interpret a text.  So if children know that a book is about life on a farm, for instance, that will help them think about the certain types of animals they expect to see and that will help them to understand or think ahead to what the story might be about.  Along with our background knowledge, we need vocabulary.  We need to be able to recognise at least some of the words that we are reading in order to achieve understanding and to help us make sense of those other words that we don’t know because we can read around them and try and make sense.  It doesn’t always work. It sometimes does.  And third, really importantly, we need fluency.   So the more fluently we can read, the more cognitive resources that actually leaves us in order to deal with the content of what we are reading.  We only have one brain, essentially, and depending on how much of it we are using just trying to get through the words, that will dictate how much we have left to comprehend the meaning.   We also draw upon a range of comprehension strategies, so these are the active strategies that we use as we read in order to direct our reading, in order to monitor our understanding, in order to troubleshoot problems.  We apply these strategies actively and they can actually be taught and they can be modelled explicitly.  Along with those strategies, we use a range of skills and these skills are the internalised automatic processes that we use when we are reading.  These ones don’t require conscious thought or interpretation.  They are really the basic building blocks of reading.    And finally but incredibly importantly, we need motivation.  We have to want to read for some reason, not necessarily for its own sake.  Perhaps it’s a recipe and we have to want to know how to cook that thing.  Perhaps we want to become teachers and so we know we have to read these textbook chapters in order to acquire the knowledge we need to get there.  So this is what keeps us focused.  This is what keeps us on task and the more focused we are the better we are able to actually comprehend what it is that we read.   So let’s pick up those strategies.  In order to actually make sense, we work through a series of different strategies and it’s a bit of a cycle, and so often it starts by sampling the text.  So we’ll use information like the page layout, paragraph lengths, pictures on the cover, those sorts of things to help us get a sense of what the text might actually be about. Then we use the other kinds of information that are available to us to: semantic knowledge, syntactic knowledge, the visual information that’s there, for instance, to predict the meaning, to think ahead.  What’s this going to likely be about? Then as we read we confirm that meaning has been gained and then we keep reading.  So if we come unstuck or we lose meaning along the way, we correct by searching for more information either before or after where we discover we were lost.  And that process happens at the level of the text as a whole and also many, many times as we read.  And it’s important to understand, of course, that these strategies overlap in practice.   We use many different strategies, not just one at a time.    So what?  Who cares?  Well it’s important for a range of reasons for us as teachers to understand comprehension and how it works.  First, if we understand comprehension we can ensure that we take into account the pre‐requisites for it in our planning and our teaching.  For instance, background knowledge.  You might recall earlier in the unit where I discussed the importance of semantic knowledge, knowledge of the world and this is vital for comprehension, although as teachers when we are choosing texts, we need to think about whether students are actually going to be able to relate to the experiences in the text and how are we helping students to use their world knowledge as a bridge to a new text.    And as teachers we also have a responsibility to be thinking about how the components of a balanced English language programme and comprehension is a really important aspect of that balance.  Comprehension strategies, in particular, are really important because these are behaviours and these can be taught and this is one area where struggling readers often experience difficulty because they just don’t understand what they are reading.  You may well have seen this is you have seen children struggling their way through a page that’s too difficult for them.  And if we don’t understand we are not really reading.  As Alfred Kohn says, “Unless we comprehend what we read, really we are just barking at the page.”

Learning to write

Having explored the processes involved in oral language development (learning to hear and to speak), and some of the key aspects of learning to read, the final aspect of our literacy development relates to our capacity to create our own texts – learning to write. For many, learning to write can be a daunting and challenging process, as writing involves more than simply learning to form letters on a page. Rather, writing represents a fundamental means through which we make meaning of our experiences, both for others and for ourselves.

As with oral language development, learning to write involves moving through a series of predictable stages of development – this podcast on writing development explores these stages.

Lecture part 2

Writing development

So far in this unit, we have been focusing on what we might call a model of skills and knowledge in language, literature and literacy development.  In this podcast, we will continue this exploration of the key elements of literacy development with the focus on writing development.  So how do we actually learn to write and what are the stages along the way?    Well, writing has been defined by Winch et al as a phenomenon invented by humans to help in the communication process.  It’s both a social and cultural practice in the sense that it’s carried out to meet a particular purpose within a context and with an awareness of audience.  This shapes what is written and how it is written.  One of the really interesting things about writing is just how much of a social construct it is.  Think about the range of different forms of writing that exist:  alphabetic, phonetic, even idiographic, if you think about some of the Chinese language systems, for instance, where each character represents an idea.  And the fact that of the 9,000 or so languages in the world, only about 300 are written.    So to learn to write in English then, there are several principles that we need to grasp as foundational knowledge.  First, we need to understand the sign principle.  This is when children realise that letters and symbols actually have a meaning.  They stand for something.  A drawing of a cat represents a cat, something out there, beyond the page.  And that leads us to learn that the word cat represents a cat even though it looks nothing like one.    Then, we need to learn the flexibility principle, that some symbols can stand for some things and other symbols can stand for different things.  For example, some symbols are letters while others, think about addition, think about multiplication and the symbols for those for instance, don’t stand for letters.    Then, we learn linearity and this directionality is again not something that is done universally and it is tricky for kids to grasp.  So we need to learn it for English.  We read from left to right in lines across the page, most of the time.    And finally, we need to learn about the spaces between words. Those of you with young children may notice that sometimes they just won’t leave a space.  They might fill up the gaps with full stops, for instance, or it’s really hard for you to see where one word ends and the next word begins because they often struggle with that notion of leaving a space on the line, of leaving something out.   So even before we talk about forming characters, before we talk about writing a single letter, there is a lot of knowledge behind writing.  All of these things have to be in place before we put pen to paper.    And then it’s important to note as we actually start to work through the stages of development that as we have in a number of other things to do with literacy and language, there is a lot of discussion and debate surrounding the exact number of stages of development and what to call them.  But underneath that discussion, there is still quite clear developmental progression in writing and I’ve taken these back to the largest level in terms of where a lot of discussion and the debate happens at a level below this.  So the first stages are what we would broadly call the pre‐writing stages.    In the beginning, children are using drawings, sometimes scribbles, sometimes on paper, sometimes on the walls as a way of communicating a message.  But they can then sometimes read that drawing out for you.  They might experiment with the linear principles.  So they might write from left to write.  They might write from right to left.  They might write up and down.  There might even be a drawing or a number appearing somewhere in those squiggles.  After squiggles, children can reach a point where they can start to separate pictures from letters and they know which is writing, even if they can’t quite do it themselves.    Next, we have several stages that are referred to as the developing stages and initially this is where writers move to using letters and starting to see spaces between the letters.  Often you see repeated letters happening at this stage because children are figuring out how to make them, particularly the difficult letters, and so they get a bit carried away putting them in there.  After that, children then learn to discern letters much more effectively and they can even understand there are different kinds of writing.  They might still be using inventive spellings at this point or some invented words but it looks a lot more like writing when you see it on a page.  And then the final stages of development reflect what we call the experienced stages.  Generally, this is middle to upper primary but of course as with all aspects of language and literacy development, it never actually stops.  It goes on right through to adulthood.  But in the early stages here of this experienced phase, we see great advances in the quantity of writing, much more extended texts.  And then after that, we see the final step which is extending and that is perhaps where we start to see more quality in writing.   At this level, children are doing what we would probably consider to be conventional writing.   There’s proper punctuation, their actual writing on the page resembles that of an adult, spelling is mostly accurate and knowledge of different text types is much better developed.  It really is this development of specialist language and increasingly sophisticated text types that continues to develop into adulthood.  As you may well recall from writing your first university assignments, you get better the more you do it.    So, when we think about writing then, there are several key points to be aware of as a future teacher.  First is that reading and writing are connected.  They have been described as the opposite sides of the same coin.  Both draw on the same skills and knowledge   and as we learn more about one, that helps us further develop the other as well.  And because of this, writing really isn’t an add on to our learning.  Instead, it is a fundamental way in which we make sense of our world and share this sense with others.  And reading and writing together help us to shape our understanding, to think, to share.  They are, in a very real sense, the gateway to all other learning.   

Spelling

One aspect of writing that remains important in contemporary society is learning to spell. For teachers, knowledge of spelling is essential, and spelling, as an aspect of writing, is addressed at all primary year levels (ACARA, 2014). It is important that, as developing teachers, you understand that there are a range of pedagogies for the teaching of spelling that go beyond, and are more successful than, ‘look say cover write check’ and weekly spelling tests.

 Recommended reading: Spelling

Chapter 4: Looking closely at spelling (Wray & Medwell, 2008, pp. 40-51) analyses and unpacks a range of words which are considered to be difficult to spell in English, as a way of highlighting some of the issues related to the way English is constructed. Take the mini-quiz at the start of the chapter, which provides an opportunity to reflect on your own knowledge as you read!

Also, find and read news stories about the possibility of the Federal government introducing strict literacy tests for aspiring teachers. Here is one story from January 2015. If these tests had been introduced before you were accepted into this course, would you be studying to be a teacher right now? Post your thoughts on this week's discussion thread and then engage in a conversation with others.

Here is an article from The Conversation titled "Good grammar and spelling - are they enough to guarantee good teaching?". When you've read this article, post your thoughts in this week's discussion thread.

Week 5

Assessment

Our work this week provides an introduction to some of the key issues, debates, and practices regarding assessment in English. This is a significant area for all teachers to understand, and it’s important to realise that our work this week will provide you with an orientation, but not a comprehensive foundation for your future practice.

You will learn a great deal about assessment during Professional Experience placements, in terms of understanding the kinds of strategies that teachers use to assess, and the role of assessment as part of the teaching and learning cycle. This week, we will explore some principles of assessment in general terms, and then consider assessment as it applies to reading and writing in the primary classroom. We will also consider the role of high-stakes testing, in the form of NAPLAN.

An orientation

Before exploring the specifics of assessment in English, it is useful to ensure we are working from a common foundation, in terms of understanding what we mean by assessment, why we assess, and the general process and principles of assessment. With this in mind, please listen to the podcast on assessment.

Lecture

In this podcast, I’m going to branch out a little bit in the sense that I’m not going to be discussing very much that relates specifically to English. Instead, what I’ll do here is provide something of a brief and broad orientation to assessment in general terms. We will explore what we mean when we talk about assessment, why we might engage in assessment within the classroom, when might be the best time to do it, and I’ll give you a little clue early one, the answer is often. And I’ll also aim to present assessment as part of a broader cycle of learning and teaching. So let’s get started. To begin, I think it’s a good idea to very briefly define what I mean when I talk about assessment. It’s a term that we encounter often within every unit that you study with us at Swinburne, for a start. So, we might think that we know what it means. But I would suggest that it is perhapsjust a little broader and involvesjust a little more on the part of the assessor than it may at first seem. So when I’m talking about assessment, I’m talking about essentially a process, a way of identifying, gathering and interpreting information about how and about whatstudents are actually learning. So when we ask you to submit an assignment for us in any unit, essentially we are doing this to gather evidence of your achievement and of your learning. And that’s the first step of the process. Then, of course, we have to analyse the evidence that you provide. We have to mark it, in other words, and we compare your achievementto the kinds of outcomes or the kinds of standardsthat we expect. At university, these are going to be the pass, credit, distinction and so on and often you will find that we actually articulate these standardsfor you, either through a marking guide, a standard statement or a rubric. In the classroom, you will have a differentset of outcomes and standardsthat you are working towards. Curriculum, for a start. And then the final step in the process which you may not directly experience as a student but that you will find essential and valuable as a teacher is what we actually do with the information we discover through the first two steps, and what we do with it is we use it as a base for planning and programming and teaching for further learning. So I hope this gives a sense of a bit of what we mean by assessment as an integral part of the teaching process. Let’s explore these purposes just a little further. We use the process of assessment across the year for a whole range of different purposes. These include identifying where to start our teaching at the beginning of the year, knowing how to group students according to ability, figuring out whatstudents have actually learnt as a result of our teaching, identifying students who are struggling and those who may need additional challenges, reporting to parents, reporting to educational authorities about our programmes,so quite broad. And I think it is really useful to think about these broad purposes within two overall kinds of assessment. First, we have assessment of learning which is also called summative assessment. This is assessment that aims to identify what learning has actually occurred. An exam or a final assignment at the end of a unit would be an example of assessment of learning. On the other hand, assessment for learning, which is also known as formative assessment, is the use of assessment to set a starting point for planning and teaching. In English and the primary classroom, that might involve taking a running record of student reading, for example, to determine the kinds of errors a student is making and how they problem solve as they read, which will tell us where we might need to go next in our teaching them about reading. The reality is that as teachers we need both approachesto assessment and we use both approachesto assessment. And that’s the way it should be in order to ensure our teaching is appropriately aimed towards students’ needs and in order to ensure we are actually achieving the outcomes with our studentsthat we had in mind. It is also important to note, I think, that assessment is something you should be considering when you are actually developing new units of work. This way, you can actually match the tasks to the content of the work much more easily than if you try to add in assessment later after you have started teaching. Winch et al provide this, what I think is a very interesting model of the teaching and learning cycle and this shows the role of assessment very clearly in a visual way. And it shows that assessment plays a crucial role in your decision‐making as a teacher. So first, teachers need to find out what students can actually do in relation to the specific skills and knowledge that we are planning to cover. Then, we need to use data to tell us where we might appropriately go next. What makes sense from the curriculum as a next move? Then, teachers have to figure out how they are actually going to teach these things with a focus on what it is they have identified as the next step in student learning. And then finally, teachers assess the impact of this work on students’ learning. Was it successful? And then of course the cycle begins again. What can they do? Where do we go next? How will I know when we’ve got there? And how are they actually going to learn this along the way? So before finishing, I think it’s important to acknowledge that as a process assessment is really complex and challenging and perhaps not quite as neat as the model presented there mightsuggest. There are a great many issues that must be balanced including how to cater for the needs of a whole class full of individuals, how to meet the requirements of a nationalsystem of testing without impinging on the context of the individual classroom, how to effective maintain records of student achievement without this becoming too time‐consuming, how to effectively reportstudent achievement to parents and how to assess students with additional needs against the curriculum. Unfortunately, we don’t have the scope to consider these issues here but these are the kinds of issues you might wish to discuss with mentor teachers when you are on professional experience to see how practising teachers manage these competing demands. To finish then, I would just remind you that although assessment can seem, particularly as a student, as the least engaging or exciting part of a teaching and learning cycle, it’s important for you to understand that without it we would essentially be teaching in the dark without a really clear idea or understanding of our purpose and our direction. And don’t we owe it to our students to do more than just teach in the dark?

Assessment in English is informed by the principles and processes described in this podcast. These are applied in particular ways to address each mode of communication within the English curriculum. This week, we will explore how the two modes of communication addressed in-depth in this unit (reading and writing) can be assessed.

Assessing reading

Teachers draw upon a range of strategies when assessing students' reading. The table below was created by Winch et al. (2010) to consolidate knowledge of assessment strategies for reading, and the data each strategy provides about students’ reading skills, knowledge, and understanding:

Assessment Strategies	Can be used to find data about
Informal discussions	· Use of oral language · Vocabulary · Prior knowledge about a topic
Oral reading inventory	· Decoding skills and strategies · Reading fluency · Comprehension
Read and retell	· Decoding · Comprehension
Test of basic sight words	· Sight word recognition
Word writing test	· Sound-letter matching · sight word recognition
Tests of graphophonics	· Graphophonic knowledge
Cloze passage	· Decoding · Comprehension · Use of semantic and grammatical cues · Reading strategies, e.g.reading ahead
Running record and follow-up questions	· Decoding · Reading accuracy and fluency · The student's instructional reading level · Use of all cueing systems · Use of reading strategies, e.g. reading ahead · Self-correcting · Comprehension
Vocabulary tests	· Vocabulary knowledge
Words per minute tests	· Reading speed · Reading accuracy
Written tests with questions	· Decoding · Knowledge of question and answer structures, e.g. multiple choice · Literal comprehension · Inferring

Assessing reading in the classroom

You can see several of the key strategies for assessing reading demonstrated in the videos on the Teaching AC English website (ESA, n.d.) – particularly in the clip below, which demonstrates the collection and analysis of reading data across multiple year levels in the primary context.

Winch et al. (2010) note that it can be difficult as a new teacher to know how to balance these assessment strategies – and they suggest that it is best to choose strategies that provide clear and specific data, link to the teaching program, and mirror the classroom learning experiences that students are familiar with. This means that over time, you are likely to draw upon a wide range of strategies, as the learning needs of your students change and develop.

MyRead: A useful resource

To familiarise yourself with a wide range of assessment practices for reading, particularly in the middle years of schooling, you may wish to browse the extensive list of practices described on the MyRead website. You will also read more about effective assessment practices in the eText chapter set for this week.

Assessing writing

As with reading, when assessing students’ writing, teachers use a wide range of strategies. Winch et al. (2010, p. 377) provide a comprehensive list of writing assessment strategies, including:

· Cloze tests

· Diaries or journals

· Essays and other writing tasks

· Mind maps or concept maps

· Portfolios

· Projects

· Teacher-developed tests

· Self-assessment and peer assessment

Assessing using portfolios

Portfolios are particularly effective as a means of assessing students’ writing, as they have the capacity to represent development over time, and show students’ capabilities across a range of writing genres and tasks.

Portfolios can include a range of entries, such as writing samples from classroom activities, evaluations of books read, story or text retelling, responses to open-ended questions, cloze exercises, poetry, and oral interviews (Winch et al., 2010). At the very least, O’Malley and Valdez Pierce (cited in Winch et al., 2010, p. 388) suggest that a portfolio should include an oral summary, a story summary, a writing sample selected by the teacher, student choice of writing, and a content sample.

The video below is useful in demonstrating how one UK school has addressed the assessment of writing for students from diverse language backgrounds, and shows the importance of using assessment as the basis for ongoing planning and teaching. Listen to the teachers' discussions and the data they draw on as the basis for their conversation as well as the types of language skills the students are developing. As you watch, take notes of the key ideas and strategies the teacher employs and then consider how you might apply these ideas to your own practice.

National assessment of literacy

In 2008, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) commenced in Australian schools. NAPLAN operates every year, and assesses Year 3, 5, 7, and 9 students’ level of achievement in literacy nationally. As Tompkins, Campbell and Green (2012) highlight, it is important to be aware that standard national tests (such as NAPLAN) are essentially a unique text type, and as such require readers and writers to demonstrate their skills in a different way than they would in other text types – teachers should not assume, therefore, that students know how to take such tests. They go on to highlight some key principles for teachers in preparing for standard national tests without simply ‘teaching to the test’:

· Check that your instructional program aligns with relevant national curriculum standards.

· Set goals with students and use formative assessment to monitor progress.

· Engage students in authentic activities so that they become effective readers and writers.

· Explain why the tests are being undertaken, and what they are used for, without causing anxiety.

· Maintain a balanced approach to the teaching and learning of English.

(Source: Tompkins, Campbell & Green, 2012, p. 89)

It is important to note that NAPLAN has been the subject of ongoing debate and criticism, in terms of the motives for such national testing, and the impact of the testing on schools, teachers, students, parents, and the wider educational community. Given the relatively recent introduction of NAPLAN, there is little in the form of conclusive large-scale research about these issues, although some early research projects are now producing publications (see, for example, Dreher, 2012).

In drawing your own conclusions about the benefits and potential issues of standard national testing such as NAPLAN, you may find it useful to consider the statedpurposes of NAPLAN, and the kind of data published at the conclusion of each testing cycle. You will also read more about NAPLAN in the reading for this week, and you may also wish to conduct further investigation of the emerging research in journals such as the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy.

Readings and activities

This week's reading looks at the needs of intermediate and accomplished readers and writers while also explaining how teachers can identify and teach to these needs.

 Reading: Assessing reading

Chapter 9: Effective assessment practices for reading and writing (pp. 322-361 from your eText) provides an excellent overview of assessment practices relevant to Australian classrooms and the current English curriculum. Particularly beneficial are the links to the four resources model, and assessment practices suited for each resource, and the discussion of high-stakes testing and NAPLAN, which places these tests in a broader social context.

eely Flint, A., Kitson, L., Lowe, K., & Shaw, K. (2014). Literacy in Australia: Pedagogies for engagement. Milton, QLD: John Wiley & Sons Australia.

Referencing the podcasts

If you refer to any of the material mentioned in the weekly podcasts, follow the following referencing convention (please pay close attention to the punctuation):

Author surname, Initial. (2015). Name or title of podcast [file format]. Retrieved from URL

Example:

Moss, T. (2015). Week 2a [audio file]. Retrieved from http://ilearn.swin.edu.au

Week 0

Vccbaking. (2013, February 26). What is reflective learning? [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIsznZR4hzY&feature=youtu.be

Week 1

Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA]. (2014). Australian Curriculum: English. Retrieved from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/english/content-structure.

Week 2

Anstey, M., & Bull, G. (2010). Helping teachers to explore multimodal texts. Curriculum Leadership Journal, 8(16). Retrieved from http://www.curriculum.edu.au/leader/helping_teachers_to_explore_multimodal_texts,31522.html?issueID=12141

Healy, A. (2008). Multiliteracies and diversity in education: New pedagogies for expanding landscapes. South Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press.

Ludwig, C. (2003). Making sense of literacy. Newsletter of the Australian Literacy Educators’ Association, February 2003. Retrieved from http://www.alea.edu.au/documents/item/53

McLachlan, C., Nicholson, T., Fielding-Barnsley, R., Mercer, L., & Ohi, S. (2014). Literacy in early childhood and primary education: Issues, challenges, solutions. Port Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press.

Yelland, N., Lee, L., O’Rourke, M., & Harrison, C. (2008). Rethinking learning in early childhood education. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press.

Week 4

Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA]. (2014). Australian Curriculum: English. Retrieved from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/english/content-structure.

Harvey, S., & Goudvis, A. (2007). Strategies that work: Teaching comprehension for understanding and engagement (2nd ed.). Portland: Stenhouse.

Tompkins, G. (2010). Literacy for the 21st century: A balanced approach (5th ed). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Wray, D., & Medwell, J. (2008). Primary English: Extending knowledge in practice. Exeter, UK: Learning Matters.

Week 5

Dreher, K. (2012). Tests, testing times and literacy teaching. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 35(3), 334-352.

EdChatTV. (2013, August 6). Teachers TV: Assessing writing [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUohb00Wul4

Education Services Australia. (n.d.). Teaching AC English. Retrieved from http://www.teachingacenglish.edu.au/

Tompkins, G., Campbell, R., & Green, D. (2012). Literacy for the 21st century: A balanced approach. Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson.

Winch, G., Johnston, R., March, P., Ljungdahl, L., & Holliday, M. (2010). Literacy: Reading, writing & children’s literature (4th ed). South Melbourne, VIC: Oxford.