Positive outcomes from collaborative work between University Researchers and Teachers in raising standards for all students including ESL students by instigating intellectually challenging curriculum through creative and innovative planning. How is intellectual quality realised in the classroom. SCLA positions teachers and students being active in collaborative learning processes.
Use of SFL to map the role of language (form and function) in learning History in Australian Secondary schools. Consciousness raising- both staff and students. Included ethnographic interviews to identify approx. 100 successful texts for analysis. Genre -purpose -staging. Teaching -learning cycle (deconstruction - work on genre- grammar-lexis - students' writing improved - particularly text structure and organisation.
Rose discusses the Australian Learning to Read:Reading to Learn programme as a prescription for the new South Africa. Detailed examples of application of this model and its techniques. Good discussion of underlying (Vygotskyan) principles; and how this model diverges fundamentally from its failed traditionalist and progressivist rivals. Based on extensive, long-running and highly successful action research.
Parkinson and Musgrave confirm the role of nominalisation and the noun phrase in teaching/learning academic writing. This study seems to lend support to Biber's notion of developmental stages in in use and understanding of noun phrase forms.
Unsworth applies Halliday's SFL analysis to multimodal texts. Brings together from a range of studies concepts for describing the semiotics of image and word and crucially how these modes make meaning in combination with each other. Cases mostly drawn from books for children.
Woodward-Kron looks at the role of university language learning advisers and how they work with NNS students and subject teaching staff. Recommends dialogic exploratory talk as scaffolding in one-to-one work with students. Notes that the disciplines do not recognise or accept their own role in language teaching. Pilot study - strictly indicative.
A research study which used the tools of functional linguistics to illuminate the writing requirements of the history curriculum in the context of Australian secondary schools. It shows how the resulting linguistic description was integrated into a sequence of teaching and learning activities through collaboration between linguist specialists and content/pedagogic specialists. These activities were designed to facilitate students’ writing skills whilst simultaneously developing their historical knowledge.
Wingate deals with development of induction program for all students at Kings, something not well addressed previously in UK.
Recommends discipline-specific genre-based approach using exemplar materials drawn from student work.
Outlines application of deconstruction/joint construction/individual construction (Martin & Rose, Rothery) procedure through small group work with prepared guidance and commentaries. Suggestive of dialogic teaching, though this not directly explored.
Notes student preference for authentic essays; and subject tutors reluctance to engage.
Small scale and early reported - tentative.
This research looks at not only the problems that science teachers have with engaging students in science and bringing theory and practice together, but it also takes into account the linguistics. In school I was less than engaged in science classes but if teachers could make the language more accessible to students then they could possibly make science more accessible too.
Model of pedagogical practices around various scaffolding strategies to support ESL learners in learning content and developing language in mainstream curricula.
Explains the Systemic Functional Linguistic theory that children's language development encompasses learning of, about and through language simultaneously in order to extend their meaning-making potential.
C. Coffin. NALDIC Quarterly, 3 (3):
13--26(2006)<b>Copyright</b><br></br>Copyright for individual contributions remains vested in the authors to whom applications for rights toreproduce should be made. NALDIC Quarterly should always be acknowledged as the original source ofpublication.NALDIC retains the right to republish any of the contributions in this issue in future NALDIC publicationsor to make them available in electronic form for the benefit of its members. For further information contactpublications@naldic.org.uk.
B. Mohan, and T. Slater. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, (2006)Notes possible problems in bilingual education (in US). Describes (unconscious) consideration of theory-practice relationship.