Are you getting curriculum bang-for-buck from your texts?
Author: Jane Kelly
Drawing on SFL as the basis for analysing the AC:English curriculum, Teacher Voices Committee Member, Jane Kelly, shares her ongoing work with Woodcrest and Kenmore State Schools in Brisbane. Reinforcing the importance of careful text selection in curriculum and assessment design, Jane shows the power of SFL to manage the size of your curriculum and explicitly teach students how texts work.
In recent years, a number of the schools I have been working with have been experimenting with what we call a ‘narrow and deep curriculum’. Such a curriculum is both small enough to build mastery learning for students but also has profound intellectual stretch for students and teachers alike.
We have been developing this idea through positioning texts, not just as resources to support curriculum, but as organisers of the curriculum itself.
Is it possible to draw stronger connection between a SFL informed analysis of the English curriculum and the texts used as the vehicle for teaching?
We use Reading to Learn (Rose & Martin, 2012) as our pedagogical and formative assessment frame. The 14 criteria described within R2L assessment, and the learning routines, follow the frame of the SFL model of language-in-use: context, text, discourse and expression.
In our work we have tried to use a similar analysis of the Australian Curriculum: English to
create improved alignment between curriculum, pedagogy and assessment
increase ‘bang-for-buck’ out of the texts we use to instantiate the curriculum, and
serve as models for assessment design.
A couple of caveats before we begin:
We use the AC:English as our source document because it is still used here in Queensland but think this might work for any English curriculum that uses a context/text model as an informing framework.
The AC:English was not written with this kind of analysis in mind! Consequently, the Content Descriptors (CDs) do not always sit neatly with SFL domains and terminology. Significantly, the CDs blend knowledge and processing elements thus muddying the water. We have chosen to put the emphasis on the knowledge described, as our learning routines handle the processing. This means that the analysis is not neat or perfect, but we hope it is a ‘good enough’ interpretation of the curriculum to allow schools and teachers to build greater understanding of both the curriculum and SFL as they work.
We are not linguists and will have made many mistakes in text analysis! The educational aim is that teachers begin seeing the strands and sub-strands of the syllabus, not as separate content areas managed and taught separately, but as interactive elements of literature, language and literacy that come together in the texts students read and create.
Year 2 Imaginative Text example
Here is an example to help visualise this approach. Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham (1956) has been a Year 2 staple for many years and has lots to recommend it – particularly if you take it slowly and use all the opportunities it affords to teach the curriculum. Below is a table organising the Yr 2 knowledge (in bold) roughly to match the model of language-in-use (MOL). The Content Descriptors highlighted in yellow below can be taught rigorously and often through a detailed study of, and engagement with, Harry the Dirty Dog.
Knowledge clustered by model of language-in-use (MOL)
|
Purpose Stages Phases |
discuss how characters and settings are connected in literature created by First Nations Australian, and wide-ranging Australian and world authors and illustrators AC9E2LE01 identify features of literary texts, such as characters and settings, and give reasons for personal preferences AC9E2LE02 discuss the characters and settings of a range of texts and identify how language is used to present these features in different ways AC9E2LE03 create and edit literary texts by adapting structures and language features of familiar literary texts through drawing, writing, performance and digital tools AC9E2LE05 identify how texts across the curriculum are organised differently and use language features depending on purposes AC9E2LA03 identify how similar topics and information are presented in different types of texts AC9E2LY01 identify the purpose and audience of imaginative, informative and persuasive texts AC9E2LY03 |
|
Field |
identify how similar topics and information are presented in different types of texts AC9E2LY01 Identify, reproduce and experiment with rhythmic sound and word patterns in poems, chants, rhymes or songs AC9E2LE04 |
|
Tenor |
investigate how interpersonal language choices vary depending on the context, including the different roles taken on in interactions AC9E2LA01 |
|
MODE |
|
|
Lexis |
experiment with and begin to make conscious choices of vocabulary to suit the topic AC9E2LA09 |
|
Appraisal |
explore how language can be used for appreciating texts and providing reasons for preferences AC9E2LA02 |
|
Conjunction Reference |
understand how texts are made cohesive by using personal and possessive pronouns and by omitting words that can be inferred AC9E2LA04 |
|
Grammar |
understand that connections can be made between ideas by using a compound sentence with 2 or more independent clauses usually linked by a coordinating conjunction AC9E2LA06 understand that in sentences nouns may be extended into noun groups using articles and adjectives, and verbs may be expressed as verb groups AC9E2LA07 |
|
Spelling |
manipulate more complex sounds in spoken words and use knowledge of blending, segmenting, phoneme deletion and phoneme substitution to read and write words AC9E2LY09 use phoneme–grapheme (sound–letter/s) matches, including vowel digraphs, less common long vowel patterns, consonant clusters and silent letters when reading and writing words of one or more syllables, including compound words AC9E2LY10 use knowledge of spelling patterns and morphemes to read and write words whose spelling is not completely predictable from their sounds, including high frequency words AC9E2LY11 build morphemic word families using knowledge of prefixes and suffixes AC9E2LY12 |
|
Punctuation |
recognise that capital letters are used in titles and commas are used to separate items in lists AC9E2LA10 |
|
Presentation |
navigate print and screen texts using chapters, tables of contents, indexes, side-bar menus, drop-down menus or links AC9E2LA05 understand that images add to or multiply the meanings of a text AC9E2LA08 write words legibly and with growing fluency using unjoined upper-case and lower-case letters AC9E2LY08 |
Using Harry the Dirty Dog as a platform for teaching the curriculum allows you to teach across the SFL model, showing how choices at the expression, discourse and context levels contribute to the meaning of the text and illustrates for students how they can create similar effects in their own writing. This work can be paired with a study of Pig the Pug by Aaron Blabey, both to address many of the same ideas but also to include experimentation with rhythmic sound and word patterns, as this story is also a poem.
Next, add a study of Can I Be Your Dog? by Troy Cummings. This is a picture book presented as a series of letters a homeless dog sends to people in a street asking for a home. Neatly, the persuasive strategies the dog character uses are matched to what he knows about each audience. This allows us to address interpersonal language choices, impact of roles and appraisal language – but not in a gratuitous manner.
At the end of this sequence of text studies, we have addressed most of the year level knowledge-based Content Descriptors, except for the ones about drop-down menus and personal preferences. The point for us is not ‘ticking off’ objectives, but rather showing how all of these elements contribute to the comprehension of each story, and how the contrasts between the three texts demonstrate the impact of purpose and audience on the shape of the text. Harry is naughty but lovable. Pig is selfish and nasty. Arfy is a sympathetic character who ultimately finds a loving home. The contrast between the settings, and dog characters at the heart of each, means we can delve deeply into the Year 2 curriculum – and all in Term 1!
Our sorting of the AC: English knowledge-based content descriptors for imaginative texts has addressed most, but not all the Content Descriptors. Weirdly, or perhaps not, these ‘left-overs’ were process focused, and could be organised by mode. If these are then used as a framework for the assessment program, it provides an easy way to create an appropriate range and balance of tasks.
For our ‘Dog Character’ unit, we assess:
a written story featuring one of the characters in a new story context
a small group spoken review of another narrative featuring a dog character – comparing it to the ones studied in class and including an evaluation of which dog character students prefer and why
Processing clustered by mode
|
Listening/speaking Interaction |
use interaction skills when engaging with topics, actively listening to others, receiving instructions and extending own ideas, speaking appropriately, expressing and responding to opinions, making statements, and giving instructions AC9E2LY02 |
|---|---|
| Spoken presentation |
create, rehearse and deliver short oral and/or multimodal presentations for familiar audiences and purposes, using text structure appropriate to purpose and topic-specific vocabulary, and varying tone, volume and pace AC9E2LY07 |
| Reading - fluency |
read texts with phrasing and fluency, using phonic and word knowledge, and monitoring meaning by re-reading and self-correcting AC9E2LY04 |
| Reading comprehension |
understand that images add to or multiply the meanings of a text AC9E2LA08 use comprehension strategies such as visualising, predicting, connecting, summarising, monitoring and questioning to build literal and inferred meaning AC9E2LY05 |
| Writing |
create and edit short imaginative, informative and persuasive written and/or multimodal texts for familiar audiences, using text structure appropriate to purpose, simple and compound sentences, noun groups and verb groups, topic-specific vocabulary, simple punctuation and common two-syllable words AC9E2LY06 |
In every lesson, we teach through all the modes, but have chosen to summatively assess and focus on two of the five in this unit of work. The others will frame the assessment tasks for later units.
Returning to our original question, if you were to analyse one of the texts you have used for teaching English, would you see a similar depth of coverage of the curriculum? This can be framed more specifically using the following questions.
Would you see the objectives for your teaching working systematically and deeply at all levels: context, text, sentence and word?
Are what students learning about words, sentences, texts and contexts, as they study the text, helping them to comprehend and compose in more sophisticated ways?
Is your text selection carrying the weight of the curriculum, or are individual texts just illustrations of specific and disparate content points?
The reason that this matters links back to our original purpose in designing a narrow, but deep curriculum. If your text allows you to teach a great deal of the curriculum in connected ways, you can afford to spend time on it. If you spend time on a text, you can build student literacy at the same time as teaching the curriculum.
Managing the size of the curriculum is our first step in creating more successful teaching and learning for all students. Thoughtful text selection and analysis can be your ally.
Coming soon: Are you getting assessment bang-for-buck from your tasks? Yr 2 Imaginative Text example.In our next blog, we’ll share student work from this unit and discuss alignment between the curriculum and formative assessment frame using SFL knowledge.