Creating multimodal metalanguage with teachers

Curriculum guidelines, including the emergent Australian curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2009-10), indicate expectations that teachers will support their students’ interpretation and creation of multimodal texts. However, English curriculum guidelines are yet to advise on a detailed metalanguage to support teacher and student discussion of the meaning-making dimensions of multimodal texts. Theoretical work on the development of multimodal metalanguage is in its early stages, lacking ready application for use in diverse classroom contexts. This article reports on research into applications of a framework designed to help teachers add depth and breadth to teaching and learning about multimodal meanings through development of a metalanguage (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). While application of this framework in middle-years classrooms was initially found to be problematic, working in collaboration with teachers this framework was adapted and enriched for classroom use. This resulted in a refined framework which can be used in classrooms for stimulating metalanguage to describe multimodal texts.

The pragmatics of text facilitation : the study of academic English of native and non-native writers

In this paper I describe the discursive strategies related to the writer–reader textual reciprocity. I focus on one way of achieving such reciprocity -- the employment by the writer of facilitative schematic structures and metalanguage where one text segment signposts information conveyed in the segment that follows. I refer to these facilitative schematic structures as "organising relational schemata". I see organising relations as the most explicit components of the rhetorical structure of texts: they illuminate the main message and aid the reader's cognitive processes in the orientation of how information is conveyed by text.
This paper discusses the way the choices of organising relations and associated metalanguage by the writers in different cultures and different discourse communities contribute to the communicative homeostasis in the world of text. It shows how the influence of a native culture and intellectual style together with the forces operating within the writer's international disciplinary community interact in the authorial guidance in the scholarly prose.
I introduce and exemplify three types of organising relational structures: Advance Organisers, Introducers and Enumerators. I trace the utilisation of these three types of relations in sociology research papers written in English and produced in "Anglo" and Polish academic discourse comunities by native English speaking and native Polish speaking scholars. The relational typology adopted is based on a study by Golebiowski (2002), which proposed a theoretical framework for the examination of discoursal structure of research papers, referred to as FARS – Framework for the Analysis of the Rhetorical Structure of Texts. FARS entails a relational taxonomy which displays a pattern of rhetorical relations utilised by the writer to achieve textual coherence.
I describe intertextual differences in the frequency of occurrence of organising relations, their degree of explicitness and their positioning in the hierarchical structure of texts. Differences in the mode of employment of textual organisers suggest that the rhetorical structure of English research prose produced by non-native speakers cannot escape being shaped by the characteristics and conventions of the authors’ first language. They are also attributed to cultural norms and conventions as well as educational systems prevailing within the discourse communities which constitute the social contexts of texts.

Productive pedagogies : is it an intelligible language for preservice teachers?

Australian teacher educators and teachers have become increasingly familiar with the notion of ‘Productive Pedagogies’, itself the product of longitudinal research on school reform recently undertaken in Queensland, Australia (Lingard et al., 2001a, , 2001b) . One of its strengths has been its efficacy for in-service teachers to use as a language to talk about their pedagogical work and hence a way of reclaiming some of the ground on what constitutes good teaching. In part, this can be attributed to the numerous observations of teachers’ classroom practice that informed the construction of Productive Pedagogies (PPs). That is, many teachers understand these as naming what ‘good’ teachers have always done. In this paper the value of PPs as a metalanguage for developing pre-service teachers’ knowledge and understanding of teaching is examined; whether PPs is a language that is intelligible for pre-service teachers without access to this prior teacher knowledge or whether its elements and dimensions merely constitute an isolated vocabulary. A case study of four pre-service teachers provides the context for this exploration and its empirical data. Drawing on their fieldwork observations of teaching practice, voiced in the language of PPs, the paper argues that PPs language is indeed useful in the development of pre-service teachers’ understanding of teaching, particularly in assisting them to name evidence of teachers’ recognition of and engagement with difference.

Enhancing English language learners’ text understanding through metaphor awareness

 The study examined awareness of metaphor as a tool to enhance English language learners’ understanding of texts with embedded metaphors. Findings revealed that an enhanced awareness of metaphor, as indicated by greater use of the metalanguage of metaphor, longer turns conversation and reflective journals, helped them get deeper text meaning.

Productive pedagogies: a redefined methodology for analysing quality teacher practice

This paper identifies the ways in which the Productive Pedagogies framework has been refined as a research tool for evaluating classroom practice within a current study into issues of school reform in Queensland. Initially emerging from the landmark Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (1998–2001), the Productive Pedagogies has been taken up widely in Australia and internationally as both a research tool and metalanguage to support teachers to critically reflect on their practice. In this paper, following a brief description of the model’s four dimensions, we detail how we have addressed some methodological concerns in using and modifying the framework for the present study. In response to critiques by other researchers and debates within our own research team, we justify our use of the framework. To these ends, we present a refined methodology that addresses the importance of pedagogical process, substantiates the inclusion of particular items within the framework, supports a critical approach to issues of difference, includes students’ perspectives and recognises the significance of content knowledge in the assessment of quality pedagogy.