Literacy in the middle years of schooling 2006

1
Literacy in the middle years of schooling 2006

• Understanding students in the
• middle years

2

• coming to shared understandings about the
  contested nature of language and literacy
  education
• examining literacy, multiliteracies and critical
  literacy pedagogy
• developing shared understandings about reading
  practices, particularly the four practices of the
  literacy learner as elaborated by Luke and
  Freebody and then
• working towards a shared consciousness of what
  efficient and successful readers know and are
  able to do when they engage with diverse and
  complex texts.

3

• Young people need to be able to navigate,
  negotiate, control, deconstruct and manipulate
  complex and diverse traditional as well as
  multimodal texts. The students in our Middle
  Years classrooms must be explicitly taught to
  decode, interpret, use, analyse and critique
  texts in which written, visual, audio, spatial
  and other semiotic elements converge

4

• that literary texts share classroom space with
  email messages and radio broadcasts to explore
  the similarities and differences between written
  and spoken language
• that computer games are clustered with
  traditional stories to examine narrative
  structures
• that texting messages (sent via mobile phones,
  chat rooms, etc) are aligned with advertisements
  as a way of exploring the dynamic and changing
  nature of language
• that magazines share the stage with web pages in
  order to examine the codes and conventions of
  particular text types

5

• that documentary film and sports writing are
  critiqued to pose questions about how texts
  position readers
• that political cartoons and current affairs
  programs are juxtaposed to draw out the textual
  and socio-cultural prior knowledge needed to make
  meaning from such texts
• that picture books and billboards are read,
  contested and rewritten in response to their
  construction of gender
• that product instructions, information brochures
  and advertorials are compared as a way of
  examining how particular texts have particular
  social purposes.