The need for English and literacy curriculum to connect with young people's lifeworlds to build bridges and frames of reference that connect traditional English curriculum with digital texts and literacies, are increasing priorities in curriculum frameworks in Australia and elsewhere. This paper reports on a project in which the authors worked…

Contemporary curriculum guidelines, such as those provided in the incoming Australian curriculum, call for English to attend to multimodal forms of text and literacy as well as more traditional forms. Students are expected to become capable and critical readers, users and creators of texts and forms of literacy that span everything from newspapers…

Despite the emphasis in the press and elsewhere on the print-based nature of English curriculum, opportunities to develop digital English, with attention to web-based and multimodal forms of text, literacy, location, and activity, are present in the draft national (Australian) curriculum for English, alongside more traditional forms. This paper…

Both James Britton and James Moffett were keynote speakers at the Sydney International Federation for the Teaching of English conference in 1980--a fact reflective of the wide recognition and acceptance of their work and influence throughout Australia by that time. In Victoria, Moffett's writings became known initially through teacher education,…

Provides support for using computer games in the English curriculum, as texts of the new technologies, to strengthen links between students' in-school and out-of-school worlds. Claims that far from presenting a threat to accepted literacy practices, the games help students gain an awareness of how texts work and become more reflexive about the…

Considers what happens to teachers and the curriculum when the philosophical and theoretical bases of subjects to which they are committed undergo significant change. Explores patterns of text choice for 9 teachers across 3 years. Finds all teachers were challenged into rethinking their views of literature. (SC)

Questions about the implications of the new technologies for literacy, literacy teaching, and literacy practices provoke diverse and contradictory responses in the media, in policy documents, in state and national assessment surveys, and among teachers themselves. On one hand, the need for literacy to be reconceptualized and redefined in the face…

Relates the evaluation of a secondary school writing program that concentrated on three areas: (1) the level of group participation and group feeling generated in the classroom, (2) the level of security felt by students and teacher within the process approach, and (3) the linking of the students' reading and writing. (HOD)

A study examined the incorporation of computer games into English classrooms, seeking to explore computer games as text, players' engagement with them, literacies needed, and the interchangeability of traditional and newer technology. Subjects were students enrolled in a coeducational private middle school or a state secondary school, and used two…

Explores complex relationships between teachers (in Victoria, Australia) and curriculum change. Explores ways in which the teachers' positioning within a mix of discourses and settings variously supported or undermined their preparedness to accept new configurations of the subject Literature as well as the implications of curriculum change not…

This paper challenges notions of gendered game playing practice implicit in much research into young women's involvement with the computer gaming culture. It draws on a study of Australian teenagers playing "The Sims Deluxe" as part of an English curriculum unit and insights from feminist media studies to explore relationships between…