Senior secondary Literature courses in Australia all aim, to various extents, to develop students' critical literacy skills. These aims share emphases on reading, reflecting and responding critically to texts, on critical analysis and critical ideas, and on forming interpretations informed by critical perspectives. Critical literacy is not…

This essay emerges out of conversations with early career English teachers about their experiences of teaching literature. During those conversations, they reflected on their own literary socialisation, including the reading they did at home and at school, as well as their tertiary education. They then considered what they had learnt as teachers…

Compelling international evidence illustrates the potential of reading for pleasure for enhancing student reading achievement along with other learning and wellbeing outcomes. Yet profound challenges exist for nations seeking to encompass attention to students' volitional reading. In this paper we critically review the growing research evidence in…

The notion of reading publics has a secure place in the sociology of Literature but its place in the educational literature around curriculum studies is relatively sparse. Here I address the question of reading publics in a curriculum context by examining school subject curricula whose very raisons d'etre are the creation of a reading public, viz.…

For white settler researchers aiming to contribute to the work of decolonising education, actively seeking ways to disturb and destabilise long-held onto-epistemological assumptions associated with colonial modernity is important. In this article I investigate how these disturbances might occur in a diffractive and decolonising reading…

This paper reports a systematic narrative synthesis review conducted on the educational effectiveness of genre theory/systemic functional linguistics pedagogies for improving reading and writing outcomes in K-10 education within mainstream classrooms in Australia, the UK, the USA, New Zealand, and Canada. This framework has significant influence…

Purpose: Nearly 50 years ago, Durkin (1978-1979) conducted a seminal observation study on reading comprehension teaching in Grades 3 through 6. She reported that teachers rarely taught reading comprehension (less than 1% of instructional time). Since then, we have gained substantial knowledge about teaching reading comprehension. We aimed to…

Coverage of reading and reading instruction in initial teacher education is highly contested, with the "reading wars" representing decades of debate concerning approaches that should be promoted to teachers-in-training. Empirical evidence strongly endorses explicit and systematic teaching of code-based skills as a starting point,…

Despite the generally highly individualised educational needs of children, when it comes to reading, three collective patterns of concern tend to arise. Research explicitly highlights the disparity that at-risk children and children with a disability may face in the classroom, as well as the longstanding ripple effects of early language and…

Challenges associated with reading in the disciplines are well documented. In this article, we report on a small-scale study that was part of a larger school-university design-based research collaboration focused on improving literacy learning in Australian high schools. We discuss Paired Wide Reading (PWR), an instructional innovation designed to…

This article presents the outcomes of a study conducted in Victoria, Australia, that recognised teachers' knowledge and understanding of phonics teaching, and early literacy acquisition processes more generally. In total, 45 teachers and 220 students from the 18 focus schools who engaged in the reform initiative agreed to participate in this…

Recent research in the United States suggests that student performance differences between private and public schools disappear once student and school level characteristics are controlled for. This is an important result as it suggests that in the absence of such differences delivery of education through public means can be as efficient as that…

In this paper, we report the initial stages of Response to Intervention (RTI) implementation in one school that participated in the Getting it Right from the Start (GIRFTS) pilot study. Implementation of an RTI framework for oral language and reading was supported by teacher professional learning and a dedicated Implementation Support Partner…

The mandated introduction of a teaching performance assessment (TPA) into initial teacher education programs in Australia is one of the numerous and continual reforms that have impacted those who work in the field. The Assessment for Graduate Teaching (AfGT) is an approved TPA developed by a national consortium of higher education institutions to…

English vowels are phonologically and orthographically more difficult than consonants when learning to map speech to print. We sought to determine if teaching young at-risk readers and spellers to use a visual vowel hand sign system to segment spoken words into their component phonemes contributed to improved grapheme-phoneme correspondence…