Two hundred ninety-eight primary teachers (88% female) from across all Australian states and territories reported on the frequency with which they implemented instructional adaptations for struggling writers in their classrooms. They also rated their preparation and self-efficacy for teaching writing. The majority of participating teachers…

Purpose: Punctuation is traditionally seen to represent grammatical structures in writing, but some authors argue that it can also reflect the intonation and pauses of speech. In two experiments, we examined the influence of grammar and prosody on adults' judgments of comma placement. Method: University students rated the appropriateness of commas…

In the journal article "Did DI do it? The impact of a programme designed to improve literacy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in remote schools," Guenther and Osborne (2020) compare schoolwide NAPLAN reading scale scores for 25 Very Remote Indigenous schools implementing Direct Instruction through the Flexible Literacy…

The purpose of this study is to describe the errors made by Turks living in Sydney, Australia in Turkish written texts. The mistakes identified in the texts were handled with the error analysis approach and evaluated according to their linguistic, cognitive processing, communicative, spelling and punctuation characteristics. Content analysis…

Daily contextualised sentence dictation was used for Year 2 students to practise, and the teacher to assess, taught spelling concepts, capital letters and full stop usage in an Explicit Instruction (EI) intervention. Conducted in a mainstream setting, it supported all students learning to spell, including those with a learning difficulty (LD) and…

This study used wrap-up effects on eye movements to assess the relationship between online reading behavior and comprehension. Participants, assessed on measures of reading, vocabulary, and spelling, read short passages that manipulated whether a syntactic boundary was "unmarked" by punctuation, "weakly marked" by a comma, or…

Writing provides a means for personal reflection, thinking, creativity, meaning-making and sharing, as well as complementing other modes of communication in a world of multimodal texts. While writing in the digital age has become increasingly fast-paced and exposed to global scrutiny, being able to write efficiently with correct spelling, grammar…

It came as a surprise to me, after an extensive Google search and reading of numerous policies, that English, and more specifically Standard Australian English, is not the official language of Australia (ACARA, 2016c; Lo Bianco, 1987). There are examples cited by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (1999) that state, 'English is regarded as…

This paper is a reflective critique of practice within the field of mathematics education in relation to the challenges faced by non-first-language-English speaking academics when they attempt to publish in English language research outlets. Data for this study are drawn from communications between a German and an Australian academic as the…

Writing is a key area of literacy in the early years, however writing receives less research attention than reading despite its impact on students' learning generally, and literacy development specifically. Writing skills have also been shown to be quite stable--good writers in the early years stay good writers in the later years. Therefore it is…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to investigate the influences of calendar year, year level, gender and language background other than English (LBOTE) on student achievement in literacy and numeracy relative to class size. Design/methodology/approach: Data for this study were collected over five years (2008-2012) as test results from the…

This report presents a snapshot of the academic performance of Australian children in the care of child protection services in 2013. Findings are based on the linkage of data from the Child Protection National Minimum Data Set and the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy. This report shows that the proportion of children in care…

Since 2008 Australia has held the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (known as NAPLAN) for all students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Despite the multilingual character of the Australian population, these standardized literacy and numeracy tests are built on an assumption of English as a first language competency. The capacity for…

The capacity of secondary school teachers to support general literacy and to teach discipline-specific literacy skills depends upon their personal literacy competence. Diagnostic testing of 203 secondary teaching undergraduates at one Australian university revealed deficiencies in personal literacy competence that could affect their future…

Writing is a complex process, and this complexity poses particular challenges when researchers and teachers approach the task of analysing young students' writing samples. This paper outlines a program of research undertaken to develop a writing analysis tool. The tool is designed to map shifts over time in the range of skills and competencies…