The pedagogy
A functional approach
An understanding of how language functions is critical to success in school. A functional approach ensures that students develop the language resources needed to successfully complete curriculum tasks. This is particularly important to secure equitable outcomes for students from diverse linguistic and socio-economic backgrounds.
Control of language is at the core of all learning and literacy as students comprehend and compose texts that are increasingly complex as they move through school.
Explicit teaching
A functional approach to language and literacy teaching identifies the language demands of curriculum tasks and explicitly teaches students how to gain control over those demands. These include texts that narrate, describe, explain, recount, argue, review and so on.
As a starting point for teaching students about how texts work, we develop their understanding about the purpose of the text and how it unfolds in stages and phases. They learn how texts can be made cohesive and coherent. They learn how well-structured sentences enable different kinds of reasoning. They learn how writers interact effectively with their reader/viewer. And in the process, they expand their academic vocabulary repertoire.
A teaching-learning cycle
In developing their language resources, students move through a literacy teaching-learning. The cycle is designed around the notion of having high expectations supported by strong scaffolding.
The cycle sees learning as a social process – developing knowledge and skills through guided interaction with more proficient others in a shared context as students move towards independent authorship.
The cycle provides a planning framework designed to develop deep knowledge of a specific curriculum field, along with the language and literacy skills needed to grow that knowledge.
In other words, students learn content knowledge through the intentional integration of reading, writing and class discussions together with knowledge about how language works. In this way, language, literacy and content are seen as inseparable.
Through explicit teaching and careful sequencing of activities throughout the different stages of the cycle, students’ knowledge and skills are developed so that they achieve success.
To sum up …
The cycle
can be used across all areas of the curriculum and all levels of schooling;
is not an ‘add on’ – stages of the cycle are integrated at appropriate points into current curriculum units;
locates the teaching of language and literacy in a context where such teaching makes sense;
teaches students the literacy and language skills needed to successfully achieve the task outcomes and feel a sense of achievement.
Over the years, this approach has come to inform syllabuses and literacy programs across Australia. Increasingly, it is being taken up in countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Argentina, Chile, Sweden, Denmark and some parts of the USA.