Academic Literacies in the Middle Years

A Framework for Enhancing Teacher Knowledge and Student Achievement

Sally Humphrey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317232438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The professional learning framework this book presents is designed to support teachers' understandings of how language functions in their academic disciplines. This framework—a 4 x 4 metalinguistic toolkit—is informed by systemic functional linguistic theory and international educational research on academic and disciplinary literacies.

The book shows and explains how teachers have applied specific 4 x 4 toolkits with students in middle school classrooms across a range of subjects for curriculum literacy instruction, assessment and feedback, resulting in substantial growth for their students in high-stakes national tests of literacy, as well as writing assessments in a number of subjects. In its focus on disciplinary literacies in diverse sociocultural settings, Academic Literacies in the Middle Years responds to contemporary international curricula for English language and literacy and the need for a strong evidence base for professional learning design.

1
The Context of Middle Years Literacy Research

This chapter contextualises the literacy research projects reported on in the volume. It addresses issues related to global concerns in literacy education, including: the importance of literacy instruction in the middle years; the role of explicit language instruction for students who have not been socialised to the language of schooling; and the consequences for teachers of English and literacy standards frameworks, curricula and standardised testing. The discussion forms a rationale for the volume’s focus on research of teachers’ knowledge and application of metalanguage in middle years curriculum areas. A description of the specific collaborations that informed our research is provided, along with an overview of their key findings.

Introduction

Academic literacies have traditionally been associated with higher education and the senior years of schooling. However, there is growing recognition that the language patterns for meaning making in academic contexts have their foundations in developments that typically occur during the middle years, which are here understood as including students from age 11 to 14. Evidence from a growing number of international research studies indicates that when teachers give explicit attention to language in meaningful learning contexts during these years, students not only develop significant understandings in academic literacy, but are better able to achieve challenging curriculum goals (Brisk, 2015; Brisk & Proctor, 2012; de Oliveira & Lan, 2014; Hammond, 2012; Palincsar & Schleppegrell, 2014; Schleppegrell, 2013). In the middle years, curriculum distinctions and their literacies become more pronounced, with increasing pressure to focus on discipline content. When explicit language instruction does occur in middle years curriculum areas, it tends to focus on discipline terminology and global text structures as curriculum teachers are often not trained to attend to the resources for creating more delicate patterns of meaning.

This volume reports on a number of design-based research projects that have sought to address the literacy challenges faced by teachers and students in the middle years, through explicit language instruction embedded in curriculum or discipline teaching and learning. These projects, known collectively as ‘4 × 4 projects’, were conducted by the author in collaboration with over 100 teachers of Australian middle years students in a range of curriculum areas, including English and the arts, science and technology, geography, history, commerce and health.

While attending to the need for students to develop generic academic skills and to recognise patterns of language that traverse academic, civic and everyday discourse, the projects were based on understandings that learning the particular literacies of a curriculum area is vital to accessing and demonstrating learning of that subject (Fang, 2012a; Muspratt & Freebody, 2013). Such an understanding is consistent with the approach known as discipline literacy (Moje, 2007, p. 35 in Fang & Coatam, 2013), which has been contrasted with content area or generic literacy due to its concern with developing knowledge, skills and strategies consistent with those used by experts in a particular field.

Literacy and Middle Years Learners

The focus on the middle years of schooling in this volume recognises that literacy learning and instruction at this stage of schooling is a vital yet under-researched area of education (Freebody, 2010). Recent research tracking development of literacy in English, science and history (Christie & Derewianka, 2008) has found that it is in the early adolescent years that literacy practices at school become increasingly responsive to specialised discipline goals and reliant on language beyond the ‘here and now of you and me’ (Macken-Horarik, 1996, p. 247). Significantly, studies across English-speaking countries have found that a large number of students in these years are not able to compose texts that meet the demands of school disciplinary writing (Freebody, 2011; Graham & Perin, 2007), and that neither higher- nor lower-performing students compose the kinds of texts that prepare them for the challenges of discipline learning and high-stakes assessment (Campbell Wilcox & Jeffery, 2014). These findings have been particularly noted among cohorts of students from low Socio-Economic Status backgrounds (SES), whose achievement in print literacy and curriculum learning has been found to be consistently lower than students from higher socio-economic backgrounds (Caro, McDonald, & Willms, 2009; OECD, 2013a, 2013b; Reardon, Valentino, & Shores, 2012; Teese & Lamb, 2009; Thomson, De Bortoli, & Buckley, 2013). In short, the children of high-earning professionals are more likely to achieve in tests of print literacy and to progress to higher education than those of low-skilled manual workers in most countries.

Although many students from immigrant families perform well in high-stakes assessment, significant challenges also remain for students who are learning English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D). Middle years EAL/D learners frequently learn conversational language quite rapidly and are able to effectively compose the more informal written texts required in the primary years. In secondary discipline classrooms, they may also be able to engage successfully in classroom discussion. However, many of these learners struggle to produce the more abstract and discipline specific written texts that demonstrate their learning at this stage (Cummins, 2000; Gibbons, 2003). While strong arguments have been made for including the use of L2 learners’ everyday ‘communicative repertoires’ (Rymes, 2010) in literacy instruction, significant challenges have been identified in using these approaches effectively for discipline learning and performative assessment in school contexts (Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010; Johns, 2011; Kalantzis & Cope, 2012).

To contribute to an equity agenda and to support all middle years students to access and use academic English effectively, researchers have called for scaffolding pedagogical practices (Gibbons, 2002; Hammond & Gibbons, 2005; Rose & Martin, 2012), informed by functional models of language and Vygotskian theories of language learning (Halliday, 1993; Painter, 1989; Vygotsky, 1978; Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976), and increasingly by pedagogical applications designed for diverse learner groups (Brisk, 2015; Rose & Martin, 2012). Common to these pedagogies are understandings that literacy instruction needs to be ‘anchored in the disciplines’ (Fang & Coatam, 2013, p. 628) and that the language and multimodal affordances of privileged literacies need to be made ‘visible’ (Clark, 2014; Freebody, 2013; Freebody, Maton, & Martin, 2008; Jewitt, 2008; Kress, 2003; Schleppegrell, 2004, 2013; Unsworth, 2001). Crucially, explicit instruction to control academic genres and registers needs to be mediated through substantive talk around texts, including support to challenge and transform discourses that sustain inequities (Achugar & Carpenter, 2014; Gebhard & Harman, 2011; Lea & Street, 2010; Rogers & Schaenen, 2013).

Pedagogical imperatives to make linguistic resources of school curriculum learning visible to students have also emerged from policy changes that have seen greater accountability of teachers for all students’ learning outcomes (Gebhard, Willett, Jimenez, & Piedra, 2010) and from the inclusion of language content related to academic literacies within English programmes of study and curricula internationally (ACARA, 2012; CCSSI, 2012; Department for Education, 2013). Middle years teachers have long accepted their role in supporting their students’ academic literacies through assessing and providing feedback on students’ written texts, and many also provide success criteria and mentor or exemplar texts. However, there is considerable evidence that teachers lack confidence in using the relevant language content of their curricula and standards to talk about their discipline texts (Jones & Chen, 2012; Macken-Horarik, Love, & Unsworth, 2011). Most currently practicing middle years teachers have not received training in academic language and are challenged to build on the language knowledge that students may have developed from elementary school instruction. For middle years students, who often encounter numerous teachers in the course of a day or week, inconsistencies in the ways texts are discussed in class is particularly problematic. Overgeneralised, abstract and/or ‘folk’ ways of referring to discourse patterns in teaching and assessment rubrics have been recognised as particularly problematic for L2 learners because they under-specify the requirements of discipline tasks (Carlino, 2010; Johns, 2011) and are often indifferent to contextual requirements (Fang & Wang, 2011).

A focus of each of the projects reported on in this volume, therefore, has been on supporting middle years teachers to develop their own knowledge of the distinctive language patterns of texts in their discipline. Recognising the extreme pressure many discipline teachers are under to ‘get through content’, we have sought in these projects to build teachers’ knowledge of those genres that they themselves recognise as vital to their students’ achievement of curriculum goals. Teachers have applied their knowledge of these ‘core business’ genres to build with their students a robust bridge from the foundational understandings of elementary texts to those that are crucial for achievement in the senior years and beyond.

Developing a Metalanguage for Exploring Discipline Literacies

Developing teachers’ deep discipline literacy knowledge has included supporting them to apply that knowledge to analyse and articulate the linguistic requirements specified by curriculum and to develop criteria for success in written tasks. This has been made possible through the development of a shared metalanguage (Christie, 2010; Clark, 2010; Myhill, Lines, & Watson, 2011; Schleppegrell, 2013), a term used throughout the volume to refer to a language for talking about language and its meanings. The concept of metalanguage extends beyond the acquisition of terminology for naming linguistic structures and includes the ability to explain how they are related to meanings in different disciplinary contexts (Berry, 2009). This understanding of metalanguage relates to understandings of explicit grammatical knowledge described by Ellis (2006, p. 95), as both analysed knowledge and metalinguistic explanation.

The metalanguage framework developed for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Context of Middle Years Literacy Research
• 2 Design and Foundations of a Metalanguage Framework
• 3 Designing Literacy Interventions
• 4 Exploring Narratives as Prose and Drama Script
• 5 Writing Responses to Analyse Cultural Works
• 6 Factorial Explanations in History, Science and the Social Sciences
• 7 Persuading Audiences in the Academic Domain
• 8 Persuasion for Civic Purposes
• 9 Towards Design Principles for Middle Years Literacies
• Index