This paper explores the issue of metalanguage and writing instruction in the senior secondary curriculum. It reports on the use of a design based research collaboration between a very experienced teacher of Ancient History and a research team with the aim of improving literacy outcomes for a group of disadvantaged students. The case highlights…

This paper reports on a classroom-based inquiry using quantitative methods conducted with Japanese EFL students' writing practice using ETS's Criterion. The purpose of the study is to examine the actual effects of teachers' feedback on students' writing on Criterion. Twelve university students in Japan participated in this study, while completing…

For most Anglophone countries, the history of grammar teaching over the past 50 years is one of contestation, debate and dissent: and 50 years on we are no closer to reaching a consensus about the role of grammar in the English/Language Arts curriculum. The debate has been described through the metaphor of battle and grammar wars (Kamler, 1995;…

While teachers of English have long recognised the vital role they play in developing students' knowledge and effective use of language, the emergence of the Australian Curriculum: English has led to a great deal of discussion concerning the representation of language and the type of meta-language needed to share understandings of literacy and…

A national survey of senior secondary English curriculum content has confirmed that contemporary literature predominates among set texts, being seen as an "essential" category for study because of its "relevance" in helping students "understand the world in which they live." Perhaps uncontentious -- depending on the…

This article extends the conversation on English education as preparation for democratic participation. The author journeys through a cycle of action research, analyzing one classroom case study to improve her practice of curricular negotiation in a methods of teaching writing course.

This dissertation is a qualitative study of a curriculum I designed for composition students in the Fall of 2012. The curriculum I created is informed by the Freirean edict that a self-generated desire to "create knowledge" is far more likely to result in meaningful, holistic learning than simply "banking" information. In the…

A yearlong classroom-based intervention was designed to explore the reading-writing connection in second-language literacy by examining whether the development of reading improves writing and vice versa. Middle school learners of English as a foreign language (N = 300) in South Korea were assigned to three treatments that involved extensive…

I begin with an account of my own observation of an English lesson taught by one of my student teachers using a teaching resource, "The Island," that I used myself as a new teacher more than 20 years ago and of my own responses on finding it transformed by two decades of change in educational policy and practice. It has become almost a…

This study, situated within the fields of English education and writing teacher education, illustrates not only "what" is happening in writing methods courses but why in its examination of writing methods courses and instructor influences. The writing methods course is identified by English educators and writing teacher educators as…

The present study investigated how fifteen Iranian EFL learners developed the ability to self-assess their writings through having access to the rater's scores. The participants were supervised for four weeks as they went through their first experience in self-assessment. They were provided with a detailed evaluation sheet for assessing their…

Theorists of multiliteracies, social semiotics, and the New Literacy Studies have drawn attention to the potential changing nature of writing and literacy in the context of networked communications. This article reports findings from a design-based research project in Year 4 classrooms (students aged 8.5-10 years) in a low socioeconomic status…

Traditional grammar instruction is a challenging element of the English curriculum; both students and teachers struggle with the rules and dull nature of grammar. However, understanding grammar is important because students need to understand the language they speak in order to be effective communicators, and teachers provide grammar instruction…

The place of grammar in an English or literacy curriculum has long been a source of debate, one in which professionals, politicians and the public have often engaged with unbridled enthusiasm. As such, the debate has sometimes been characterised more by ideology or polemic, than by intellectual engagement with the core ideas. In part, this is…

The current version of the draft National Curriculum (1.0.1) remains a document which dis-integrates the subject through its three strands and fails to conceptualise a relationship between these strands. Drawing on curriculum history, I argue that this stands in strong contrast to a curriculum such as the 1971 NSW Syllabus for Years 7-10, which…