Learning to Teach Grammatics:A Multimodal Ensemble Performance

更新时间:2023-08-14

【摘要】Recent Australian curriculum reform(ACARA 2014) has meant that all teachers are responsible for teaching their students about the English language for the first time for many years.While educational linguists and teacher educators in general have responded positively to the functionally oriented model of language adopted in the new curriculum(Derewianka 2012),its implementation is a challenging task for many teachers.The curriculum places considerable demands on their own knowledge about language at the same time as it requires them to redesign their practices to incorporate an explicit focus on functionally oriented metalinguistic awareness.The issue of teachers’ knowledge about language has been taken up in a number of academic papers but discussion of what constitutes appropriate models of pedagogy for grammatics in contemporary classrooms has been less visible.This paper addresses this gap by reporting on a recent project in which teachers of children in the early years of primary school worked with university academics as they begin to enact the new curriculum.The paper draws on two threads of research informed by social semiotic theory;pedagogy as "ensemble performance"(Butt 2004,Kress 2010) and classroom discourse analysis after Christie(2002) and Rose and Martin(2012).It argues that as teachers build their substantive knowledge about language,they will draw on their pedagogic knowledge to develop new ways of teaching grammatics,ways that engage students and support them to acquire the cumulative knowledge about language envisaged in the curriculum.The paper also offers recommendations about the contribution of the SFL community to this work as part of the larger ongoing project to improve students’ literacy outcomes.The paper provides important early data on the nature of the pedagogy required of a new grammatics curriculum as well as the resources teachers will bring to the task of implementing the curriculum.

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