Subject Language

26th July 2017  HOD Wednesday morning meeting

Deadlines are good and with a ten minute deadline the HOD's group looked at and discussed the need to focus on subject language when designing unit plans. We know people don’t generally scroll down, but at the bottom of the new unit plan format there is a section which asks teachers to detail how they are addressing the literacy and numeracy needs of their students. One aspect of learning that our students struggle with is fluency in writing. Many decades ago educators moved away from the explicit teaching of grammar skills, often known as ‘drill and kill’. It was known then, that the teaching of grammar had little or no effect on improving student fluency. This generally happened in the 1950s or 1960s, but it wasn’t until the late 70s that the Australian, M A K Halliday, promoted a functional approach to the teaching of grammar skills for writing task. A functional approach.

Halliday argued that teachers need to show students which language features they must master in order to succeed at a writing task. The Australians picked up on this and some decades later there are numerous publications which model the language features associated with the writing of a particular genre. (See below) This method goes beyond the much used writing frames favoured by teachers. We know many of our students lack fluency when writing a sentence or a paragraph but highlighting the grammatical features in a text is a must, according to Luke, another of Australia's leading researchers in language acquisition.

Just the word grammar or teaching grammar can send a chill down the back of even the most experienced teacher but the only way to do this is to make a start. Teachers have the academic skills to pick up a few basic grammar terms and to use them in their lessons. We can’t leave this to the English Department alone as each school subject has its own language forms or features. This is a huge subject but the good news is, functional grammar helps us focus on a simple range of easy to teach language features. These features are practical and easy to master.

The next step is to talk to teachers about what they are doing now and to ask what are the language demands of each assessment task. Once that is done we can focus on skill building, one step at a time. We can ask: what language features could I add to this lesson to enhance the student fluency as they write their responses? In the meantime we can focus on writing frame wall charts, wall charts of magic sentences, verb tenses and writing prompts. Lastly, departments can start talking about and focusing on the language demands of written assessment tasks in their discipline.