Teaching reading comprehension across the national curriculum with EAL/D learners : are we brave enough to really take it on?

Teaching English to EAL/D learners as a cross-curricula priority, not just the purview of the English classroom or language specialist, is now officially endorsed in the national curriculum. Yet many teachers, including subject English teachers, feel ill-equipped for this task. This paper presents an action research project conducted with a teacher of junior secondary English and Geography. The focus of the project was developing metacognitive reading strategies among EAL/D learners to enable them to access content area information more effectively and more independently. We discuss the particular strategies that were beneficial for students at the Emerging level of English and present a range of research-based reading strategies that teachers can embed in regular teaching in order to enhance reading comprehension. Examples from Geography and English lessons will be provided to show how the teaching of explicit ‘second language’ reading strategies can position EAL/D learners as valuable members of the classroom.

Reading Squadron: Crossing borders in literacy experiences for preservice teachers.

Teaching literacy requires accurate and current knowledge in the field (Commonwealth of Australia, 2005). There have been persistent inquiries into what constitutes specialist knowledge and skills for teaching students to be literate. Preservice teacher education is fundamental to literacy development, which includes the approaches universities employ to prepare graduates for teaching literacy. Indeed, preservice teacher programs and literacy education also elicit insatiable media coverage. There is a continued push to improve literacy outcomes for school students across the nation and prepare the literacy knowledge and skills of Australian teachers. This study mainly focuses on 10 final-year preservice teachers attending a regional university campus who volunteered for further experiences to teach students to read traditional texts. These preservice teachers completed three university literacy units before commencing with practical applications. A literacy program, titled Reading Squadron, was developed in partnership between a local primary school and the university. Primary students were identified by the school as requiring literacy support. Preservice teachers attended a whole day training session run by school staff at the university and then visited the school for two one-hour sessions each week over a six-week period. Each preservice teacher was assigned two students and worked with each student for half an hour twice a week. The aim of this small-scale qualitative study was to investigate the perceptions of the preservice teachers and school staff as a result of their involvement in the Reading Squadron program. The preservice teachers completed a questionnaire to determine their views of the program and ascertain how it assisted their development. Further data were gathered from the preservice teachers through individual face-to-face interviews. Three school staff involved in the program also completed a questionnaire to determine the value of the program. Results indicated that the preservice teachers made links between theory and practice, and felt they gained knowledge about teaching reading. Three preservice teachers noted it was difficult to work around timetable commitments but gained from the experience and suggested embedding such experiences into university literacy units. Data gathered from school staff indicated that six-weeks was not sufficient time to measure improvements in the school students, however, they were supportive of such a program, particularly for its continuation. Collaborations between schools and universities can provide opportunities for preservice teachers to use theoretical knowledge gained from core university subjects with application to assist primary students’ literacy development in schools. Teachers in this study were supportive of the Reading Squadron program, however, more data needed to be collected to understand the literacy improvement of students. Longitudinal studies are required to ascertain specific knowledge and skills gained by preservice teachers to teach reading and how these programs enhance students’ literacy levels.

Reading fictions

Each of the six chapters, which offer a cumulative course of study, begins with a concise overview of the concepts to be explored through the students’ reading of selected stories. The first chapter, 'Texts and readings', tries to make reading seem 'strange' through a series of de-familiarising activities that ask students to consider not only what particular stories might mean, but also how they are made to mean in different, and often quite contradictory, ways. This is explored further in the second chapter which introduces the idea of 'reading positions' and investigates the idea that in some senses, stories are always 'already read'. The next two chapters, called 'Intertextuality' and 'Re-readings?', invite students to consider how they produce particular readings and how they might choose among quite different readings or interpretations of the same story. The fifth chapter explores ideas about texts and their relationship to 'reality' through readings of racism, while the final chapter, 'Real people?' asks students to consider how they produce often rich and detailed readings of characters from minimal textual information. Terms and concepts which may be new to some students are highlighted in the text and indexed for easy reference. The short stories in this collection are by writers from different parts of the world and will appeal to students. They range from 'expressive realist' texts to less conventional narrative forms. Those teachers who have enjoyed using Reading Stories with their students will have a lot to look forward to in this collection of surefire 'winners' - by writers as varied as Bessie Head, Kristin Hunter, Tim Winton, Joyce Carol Oates, John Wain and Patricia Grace - each of which is accompanied by imaginative, enjoyable and thought-provoking activities.

Re-reading the reading lesson : episodes in the history of reading pedagogy

Reading pedagogy is constantly an object of discussion and debate in contemporary policy and practice but is rarely a matter for historical inquiry. This paper reports from a recent study of the history of reading pedagogy in Australia and beyond. It focuses on a recurring figure in the historical record—the ‘reading lesson’. Presented as a distinctive trope, the reading lesson is traced in its regularity in and through the discourse of reading pedagogy, starting in 1930s Australia and moving back into 19th-century Europe, and with specific reference to the UK and the USA. Teaching reading is expressly identified as a moral project—something that, it can be argued, clearly continues into the present.

Treatment resistors

Treatment resistors, that is children whose reading skills have not responded to sustained periods of appropriate intervention, have long been the concern of parents, educators, clinicians and researchers. Rudolph Flesch's book of 1955, Why Johnny Can't Read and What You Can Do About It, sparked the "great (and largely continuing) debate" about appropriate instructional methods for teaching reading.

“Diving into reading” : revisiting reciprocal teaching in the middle years

This paper reports on a project that was designed to support teachers to introduce reciprocal teaching and student-generated questioning in the middle years. It began as a solution to teachers expressing a concern that there was a lack of professional development related to the teaching of reading in the middle years.

Increasing relevance and interest : teaching environmental and planning law to built environment students

A new approach was taken to delivering a challenging "stewarship of land" unit to over 350 predominantly first year built environment students stewardship. The new approach involved incorporating environmental and planning law into the syllabus, exposing students to a wide range of statutes, selecting legal cases according to a et of criteria and revisiting the material using different modes of delivery and teaching resources. To evaluate the effectiveness of the new approach, the students were surveyed to elicit their learning experience and preferences. The survey found that most students perceived learning about environmental and planning law, including legal cases, worthwhile.----- Areas identified by the surcey for improvement included the perception by some students that: environmenatl and planning law is irrelevant to their discipline and future caree; studying law is dull and sometimes daunting; and the prescribed reading could be omitted.----- To address student perceptions, it is proposed to reorder the topics commencing with local, charismatic topics, while explanding international content and cases, to enlarge and enhance the repertoire of video clips to include sites of legal cawses and development projects, and to reformat the online weekly quizzes to promote reading of primary material.----- Overall, the approach to teaching environmental and planning law to built environment students, including the criteria for selecting legal cases, described in this paper, was found to be effective.

Young Australians reading in a digital world

The realities of new technological and social conditions since the 1990s demand a new approach to literacy teaching. Looking onward from the original statement of aims of the multiliteracies movement in 1996, this volume brings together top-quality scholarship and research that has embraced the notion and features new contributions by many of the originators of this approach to literacy. Drawing on large research projects and empirical evidence, the authors explore practical and educational issues that relate to multiliteracies, such as assessment, pedagogy and curriculum. The viewpoint taken is that multiliteracies is a complementary socio-cultural approach to the new literacies that includes pedagogy and learning. The differences are addressed from a multiliteracies perspective – one that does not discount or undermine the new literacies, but shows new ways in which they are complementary. Computers and the Internet are transforming the way we work and communicate and the very notion of literacy itself. This volume offers frontline information and a vital update for those wishing to understand the evolution of multiliteracies and the current state of literacy theory in relation to it.

Reading stories

What expectations do readers have of stories? Where do readers’ expectations come from? Do certain kinds of readings serve to support particular beliefs and assumptions? These and other questions are raised in Reading Stories, a collection of eleven short stories that have been very popular with Year 10 classes and above, accompanied by activities for talk and writing that encourage students to reflect on stories and their reading of them. Reading Stories aims to make recent literary theory accessible to students through a range of practical activities that work well in the classroom. Each story’s accompanying activities are designed to give students not only the opportunity but also the support they might need to construct and analyse possible readings of the text. There are five chapters - offering a cumulative learning experience - that consider such areas as readers’ expectations, how and why readings change, what is at stake in the disagreements between readings, and reading for gender, race and class. The approaches used begin with students’ familiarity with stories and then work to make available for analysis aspects of reading and ‘interpretation’ that are often taken for granted. While the concepts addressed are complex, the book aims to encourage participation from all students.

Resistance : re-imagining innovation in higher education teaching and learning

The call to innovate is ubiquitous across the Australian educational policy context. The claims of innovative practices and environments that occur frequently in university mission statements, strategic plans and marketing literature suggest that this exhortation to innovate appears to have been taken up enthusiastically by the university sector. Throughout the history of universities, a range of reported deficiencies of higher education have worked to produce a notion of crisis. At present, it would seem that innovation is positioned as the solution to the notion of crisis. This thesis is an inquiry into how the insistence on innovation works to both enable and constrain teaching and learning practices in Australian universities. Alongside the interplay between innovation and crisis is the link between resistance and innovation, a link which remains largely unproblematized in the scholarly literature. This thesis works to locate and unsettle understandings of a relationship between innovation and Australian higher education. The aim of this inquiry is to generate new understandings of what counts as innovation within this context and how innovation is enacted. The thesis draws on a number of postmodernist theorists, whose works have informed firstly the research method, and then the analysis and findings. Firstly, there is an assumption that power is capillary and works through discourse to enact power relations which shape certain truths (Foucault, 1990). Secondly, this research scrutinised language practices which frame the capacity for individuals to act, alongside the language practices which encourage an individual to adopt certain attitudes and actions as one’s own (Foucault, 1988). Thirdly, innovation talk is read in this thesis as an example of needs talk, that is, as a medium through which what is considered domestic, political or economic is made and contested (Fraser, 1989). Fourthly, relationships between and within discourses were identified and analysed beyond cause and effect descriptions, and more productively considered to be in a constant state of becoming (Deleuze, 1987). Finally, the use of ironic research methods assisted in producing alternate configurations of innovation talk which are useful and new (Rorty, 1989). The theoretical assumptions which underpin this thesis inform a document analysis methodology, used to examine how certain texts work to shape the ways in which innovation is constructed. The data consisted of three Federal higher education funding policies selected on the rationale that these documents, as opposed to state or locally based policy and legislation, represent the only shared policy context for all Australian universities. The analysis first provided a modernist reading of the three documents, and this was followed by postmodernist readings of these same policy documents. The modernist reading worked to locate and describe the current truths about innovation. The historical context in which the policy was produced as well as the textual features of the document itself were important to this reading. In the first modernist reading, the binaries involved in producing proper and improper notions of innovation were described and analysed. In the process of the modernist analysis and the subsequent location of binary organisation, a number of conceptual collisions were identified, and these sites of struggle were revisited, through the application of a postmodernist reading. By applying the theories of Rorty (1989) and Fraser (1989) it became possible to not treat these sites as contradictory and requiring resolution, but rather as spaces in which binary tensions are necessary and productive. This postmodernist reading constructed new spaces for refusing and resisting dominant discourses of innovation which value only certain kinds of teaching and learning practices. By exploring a number of ironic language practices found within the policies, this thesis proposes an alternative way of thinking about what counts as innovation and how it happens. The new readings of innovation made possible through the work of this thesis were in response to a suite of enduring, inter-related questions – what counts as innovation?, who or what supports innovation?, how does innovation occur?, and who are the innovators?. The truths presented in response to these questions were treated as the language practices which constitute a dominant discourse of innovation talk. The collisions that occur within these truths were the contested sites which were of most interest for the analysis. The thesis concludes by presenting a theoretical blueprint which works to shift the boundaries of what counts as innovation and how it happens in a manner which is productive, inclusive and powerful. This blueprint forms the foundation upon which a number of recommendations are made for both my own professional practice and broader contexts. In keeping with the conceptual tone of this study, these recommendations are a suite of new questions which focus attention on the boundaries of innovation talk as an attempt to re-configure what is valued about teaching and learning at university.

Art in early childhood : the discourse of 'proper' teaching

This thesis is a problematisation of the teaching of art to young children. To problematise a domain of social endeavour, is, in Michel Foucault's terms, to ask how we come to believe that "something ... can and must be thought" (Foucault, 1985:7). The aim is to document what counts (i.e., what is sayable, thinkable, feelable) as proper art teaching in Queensland at this point ofhistorical time. In this sense, the thesis is a departure from more recognisable research on 'more effective' teaching, including critical studies of art teaching and early childhood teaching. It treats 'good teaching' as an effect of moral training made possible through disciplinary discourses organised around certain epistemic rules at a particular place and time. There are four key tasks accomplished within the thesis. The first is to describe an event which is not easily resolved by means of orthodox theories or explanations, either liberal-humanist or critical ones. The second is to indicate how poststructuralist understandings of the self and social practice enable fresh engagements with uneasy pedagogical moments. What follows this discussion is the documentation of an empirical investigation that was made into texts generated by early childhood teachers, artists and parents about what constitutes 'good practice' in art teaching. Twenty-two participants produced text to tell and re-tell the meaning of 'proper' art education, from different subject positions. Rather than attempting to capture 'typical' representations of art education in the early years, a pool of 'exemplary' teachers, artists and parents were chosen, using "purposeful sampling", and from this pool, three videos were filmed and later discussed by the audience of participants. The fourth aspect of the thesis involves developing a means of analysing these texts in such a way as to allow a 're-description' of the field of art teaching by attempting to foreground the epistemic rules through which such teacher-generated texts come to count as true ie, as propriety in art pedagogy. This analysis drew on Donna Haraway's (1995) understanding of 'ironic' categorisation to hold the tensions within the propositions inside the categories of analysis rather than setting these up as discursive oppositions. The analysis is therefore ironic in the sense that Richard Rorty (1989) understands the term to apply to social scientific research. Three 'ironic' categories were argued to inform the discursive construction of 'proper' art teaching. It is argued that a teacher should (a) Teach without teaching; (b) Manufacture the natural; and (c) Train for creativity. These ironic categories work to undo modernist assumptions about theory/practice gaps and finding a 'balance' between oppositional binary terms. They were produced through a discourse theoretical reading of the texts generated by the participants in the study, texts that these same individuals use as a means of discipline and self-training as they work to teach properly. In arguing the usefulness of such approaches to empirical data analysis, the thesis challenges early childhood research in arts education, in relation to its capacity to deal with ambiguity and to acknowledge contradiction in the work of teachers and in their explanations for what they do. It works as a challenge at a range of levels - at the level of theorising, of method and of analysis. In opening up thinking about normalised categories, and questioning traditional Western philosophy and the grand narratives of early childhood art pedagogy, it makes a space for re-thinking art pedagogy as "a game oftruth and error" (Foucault, 1985). In doing so, it opens up a space for thinking how art education might be otherwise.

Critical reading comprehension in an era of accountability

This paper argues for the need for critical reading comprehension in an era of accountability that often promotes reading comprehension as readily assessable through students answering multiple choice questions of unseen texts. Based upon a 1 year study investigating literacy in Years 4–9 the ways strong-performing primary schools develop serious and in-depth reading for learning are explored. School and teacher features which allow for the development of sophisticated pedagogical repertoires and space for critical reading comprehension, without losing the complexity of curriculum offerings, are outlined. How one experienced middle primary teacher operates strategically, ethically and critically in supporting her ESL students to learn to read is illustrated. The teacher’s work is situated within the complex accountability demands faced by classroom teachers. This was accomplished by a teacher whose pedagogical repertoire has been assembled across a career teaching in low-SES high ESL communities in a school with a balanced literacy program and high level of collegial support. Risks for schools and teachers whose circumstances work against their capacities for prioritisation and strategic decision-making are identified and discussed.