David Rose

• PhD
• The University of Sydney

A recent issue of the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy included an article reporting on a systematic narrative review of the research literature that indicated that there was insufficient evidence to conclude whether genre theory and systemic functional linguistics either ‘worked’ or ‘did not work’. The criteria used to evaluate these st...

Reading to Learn has become the vehicle for a whole-school approach to literacy at Kenmore State School. Since then, we have learned many lessons about the nature of literacy and the conditions under which it can flourish. The purpose of this chapter is to record in some ways the growing understanding of contemporary issues for education, both in e...

One school's journey to prioritising the teaching of literacy

This study investigates the interplay between language, image, and gesture in science teaching in the school. It applies the theoretical framework of systemic functional semiotics, and the investigative method of pedagogic register analysis, to construct a detailed description of intermodal pedagogic practice. The approach is illustrated with a sec...

In this chapter we address the challenge of interpreting and teaching complex infographics of the kind read and viewed in secondary school science in Australia. Inspired by the work of Bateman and his colleagues we adopt a complementary bottom-up and top-down perspective – analysing infographics bottom-up in terms of general gestalt grouping princi...

This chapter introduces the genre-based approach to discourse analysis in systemic functional linguistics. It begins by outlining the theory of meaning that underpins the approach, then focuses on genres in education to illustrate methods of discourse analysis. Three perspectives on meaning are outlined: 1) of genres configuring social relations an...

This chapter explores nominal grammar resources in Pitjantjatjara, an Indigenous language of Australia's Western Desert. Data for the description comes primarily from recordings of oral discourse. The description takes a discourse semantic perspective on ideational and textual resources in nominal grammar. Options are described for construing entit...

Exploring the relationship between theory and practice in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this volume offers a state-of-the-art overview of Appliable Linguistics. Featuring both internationally-renowned scholars and rising stars from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Indonesia, New Zealand, Singapore and the USA, Appliab...

This paper takes as point of departure a functional linguistic model of metaphor as ‘symbolising’ discourse semantics, to re-consider metaphor from the perspective of literacy pedagogy. It starts by contextualising this model in the stratal theory of language, register and genre in systemic functional linguistics, then outlines the structuring of c...

This pioneering volume lays out a set of methodological principles to guide the description of interpersonal grammar in different languages. It compares interpersonal systems and structures across a range of world languages, showing how discourse, interpersonal relationships between the speakers, and the purpose of their communication, all play a r...

This chapter examines the teaching of poetry appreciation in late primary and junior secondary English classrooms. By analysing dialogic patterns in classroom exchanges using pedagogic register analysis (Rose 2018), we investigate how students in upper primary acquire nascent ways of reading poetic texts that pave the way for later work.

This paper discusses the roles of intermodality and multilingualism in a genre pedagogy program aimed to improve students' literacy in Indonesia. It draws on data from an intervention program which extended the Reading to Learn (R2L) genre-based literacy pedagogy to embed English literacy learning in biology lessons for Indonesian junior high schoo...

Mathematics differs from other curriculum subjects as its written texts are generally brief and ancillary to the major curriculum genre of the discipline – which is in fact the intermodal modelling of maths processes by teachers, followed by individual student problem solving using the modelled process. While R2L offers strategies for teaching the...

In this chapter we address the challenge of interpreting and teaching complex infographics of the kind read and viewed in secondary school science in Australia. Inspired by the work of Bateman and his colleagues we adopt a complementary bottom-up and top-down perspective – analysing infographics bottom-up in terms of general gestalt grouping princi...

This paper investigates the interplay between language and images in science teaching in the school. A dynamic approach is taken to analysing lessons, identifying choices by teachers and learners, and building up systems of options for intermodal pedagogic practice. The approach is illustrated with a secondary science lesson that can be viewed onli...

This chapter illustrates M.A.K. Halliday’s concept of an appliable linguistics. It outlines an approach to teaching spoken and written language that has been developed over many decades in the research tradition of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), known as genre-based literacy pedagogy. The term genre refers to the ways that texts vary accord...

This chapter reports on a typological study, not of particular linguistic features or particular languages, but of patterns of register realised by language. The data is a corpus of traditional stories in a range of languages around the world, illustrated in the chapter with texts from China, Australia and Africa. Analyses focus on units of structu...

This chapter outlines current research in the tradition of genre-based literacy that has flowed from four decades of Jim Martin’s collaborations with educators. The chapter first sketches a research project in science education in the secondary school, and the Martinian model of genre and register applied for the analysis in the project. It then de...

This is the first of two papers that offer suggestions for providing teachers with knowledge about language that they can use in their practice. This paper focuses on analysis of curriculum genres; its companion paper (Rose, chapter 10, this volume) focuses on knowledge genres. The suggestions derive from a long-term, large-scale project in teacher...

This is the second chapter on building knowledge about language, developed in the teacher education methodology known as Reading to Learn (R2L) (Rose 2015, 2017, 2018a; Rose and Martin 2012). This paper focuses on metalanguage for teaching and learning knowledge genres; its companion paper (Rose, chapter 9, this volume) focuses on metalanguage for...

This is a set of resources for teachers to study the Reading to Learn literacy methodology, including 9 books and DVDs with lesson demonstration. The books are composed of activities for teachers to practice the methodology and build knowledge about pedagogy and language that underpins the methodology. Available from https://www.readingtolearn.com....

This contribution attempts to convey the interplay between theory and application in the development of the Reading to Learn literacy methodology. Applications and extensions of SFL genre and register theory are illustrated with the design of a series of reading and writing lessons that are embedded in a curriculum unit on Indigenous Australian cul...

This paper offers a method for analysing pedagogic practice of all kinds that is detailed, exhaustive and appliable to designing effective teaching practice. The analysis builds on research into the structuring of pedagogic discourse by applying systemic functional (SF)research methods to the contextual stratum of register. Each meaningful element...

This paper offers a framework and set of tools for analysing the use of language shift in multilingual classroom discourse. The term language shift refers to the use of multiple languages in all types of interactions, including teaching and learning. The analysis was developed in the context of an action research project in Indonesian schools. It i...

This paper analyses a set of exchanges between members of Australia’s Indigenous Western Desert culture, in the Pitjantjatjara dialect of the Western Desert language. The analyses are designed to illustrate how social relations in the culture are enacted with resources for interpersonal meaning in the language. The paper begins with a brief overvie...

This article considers some of the ways in which genres adapt to the cultural niches in which they appear. This may mean adapting themselves to the formation of a macro-genre that includes two or more elemental genres, such as report and explanation. A genre may also adapt to the formation of a multimodal text, for example where captions act as a b...

This chapter describes a methodology for apprenticing students into the knowledge structures of mathematics, by giving them control over the elaborate procedures of maths processes. The method has been developed in partnership with primary and secondary maths teachers, as part of the Reading to Learn (R2L) action research program, informed by the m...

In this chapter we outline strategies that all university educators can use for preparing students in advance, so that their encounters with texts are productive, stimulating and satisfying and, at the same time, enhance their capabilities for meaningful engagement with subsequent texts. These strategies, known as Scaffolding Academic Literacy, are...

p>Este artículo describe las características fundamentales del programa conocido como Leer para aprender (Reading to Learn, R2L), un programa para la mejora de la alfabetización académica y la formación del profesorado basado en los géneros discursivos (Rose, 2014; Rose y Martin, 2012). Los antecedentes del modelo R2L se explican en términos del de...

For three decades, genre based literacy pedagogy has been describing the written genres that students are expected to read and write in school, and designing teaching/learning activities through which students can be guided to read and write these genres successfully. This paper positions this research within the model of language and pedagogy that...

In Chapter 9, Rose provides an example of the role of assessment in an integrative program on writing. The heart of the author’s discussion is not about assessing the student or the program but the actual task of learning. He illustrates this via a social theory of learning and a functional theory of language, and describes a program of reading and...

Este artículo describe las características fundamentales del programa conocido como Leer para aprender (Reading to Learn, R2L), un programa para la mejora de la alfabetización académica y la formación del profesorado basado en los géneros discursivos (Rose, 2014; Rose y Martin, 2012). Los antecedentes del modelo R2L se explican en términos del desa...

This paper outlines a sequence of strategies that are designed to enable every child to experience pleasure in reading narrative literature, and to achieve success in writing, both their own stories and the responses to literature expected by the school curriculum. To enable these goals, literary texts are analysed at three scales: whole literary t...

Teachers are expected to simultaneously cover the demands of the curriculum, improve their students’ learning outcomes, and manage the needs and behaviours of all their students. This PETAA Paper outlines a set of strategies that are designed to help teachers meet all these demands successfully, by teaching through reading and writing. The strategi...

This chapter outlines a set of strategies for teaching reading and writing in school, that have been proven to rapidly accelerate the learning of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students, at all year levels. The strategies have been developed with teachers, in the professional learning program Reading to Learn. They include techniques for teaching be...

Over three decades Sydney School researchers have endeavoured to describe the genres that students learn to read and write in school and beyond, and to design a pedagogy that can make these genres accessible to all groups of students. This chapter provides an overview of the genres described in the research to date, their social purposes -- engagin...

The goal of this paper is to give the reader a sense of the rich varieties of discourse through which speakers of the Australian language Pitjantjatjara enact their social relations. The brief sketch here is based on a fuller survey in Rose 2001, using the tools of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) for relating language to its social contexts....

The themes of this book bring together two fields of study that seem only distantly related at first sight, a sociological study of governance in education and the semiotic study of communicative modalities. But the breadth of these themes gives me an opportunity to tie together two perspectives on schools and Indigenous children, which I hope the...

If we want to achieve the twin goals of enabling Indigenous children to succeed in school, at the same time as strengthening their Indigenous identities and community languages, we cannot simply focus our attention on the children themselves, or their home and cultural backgrounds. Rather we have to focus on what it is that schools do, that current...

A study was conducted in 2010 in 20 Stockholm primary schools of maths teaching strategies known as Reading to Learn. The strategies involve close analysis of classroom discourse in teaching maths operations, and careful planning of teacher-class interactions based on these analyses. Classroom implementation involves repeated guided practice using...

It is now over 30 years since genre-based literacy pedagogy of the ‘Sydney School’ (hereafter simply genre pedagogy) began making an impact on the teaching of writing in Australian schools (Hyon 1996, Johns 2002, Martin 2000, Rose 2008a). Over these decades its practices, pedagogic contexts, and informing theories have expanded considerably, so thi...

This paper presents a novel analysis of pedagogic discourse using genre and register theory. Curriculum genres are analysed as configurations of pedagogic activities, relations, modalities, knowledge and values. Each of these register variables is realised as discourse semantic patterns, including exchange structures, learning cycles, multimodal so...

The ultimate aim of the Teacher Learning for European Literacy Education (TeL4ELE) project was to improve student learning outcomes, particularly for those who are educationally disadvantaged, including second language learners. The consortium aimed to do this by supporting literacy educators in five European countries to become experts in genre ba...

This report outlines the implementation of the Teacher Learning for European Literacy Education (TeL4ELE) project in Portugal. The Portuguese TeL4ELE team came to create, develop and apply, as part of a teacher training strategy, a new approach to literacy education based on genre and the way the concept feeds knowledge acquisition and the organiza...

This report oulines the implementation of the Teacher Learning for European Literacy Education (TeL4ELE) project in Spain. The Key Educators in Spain continued developing their new roles as “experts” in the genre based reading pedagogy, studying the theory and application of the functional model, and preparing summaries of the training material in...

This report outlines the implementation and outputs of the Teacher Learning for European Literacy Education (TeL4ELE) project in Denmark.

The aim of the Teacher Learning for European Literacy Education (TeL4ELE) project was to support literacy educators in five European countries to become experts in genre based literacy pedagogy and in turn support teachers to improve learning outcomes for all students especially those who are educationally disadvantaged. This report outlines activi...

The aim of this paper is to sketch some possible correlations between phases in the development of languages in Australia, and phases in the archaeological record of people in the continent. The technique is to compare Australian language groupings, at the scales of phylum, family, group, language and dialect, with events in the climatic and archae...

The aim of the Teacher Learning for European Literacy Education (TeL4ELE) project was to support literacy educators in five European countries to become experts in genre based literacy pedagogy and in turn support teachers to improve learning outcomes for all students especially those who are educationally disadvantaged. Based on the external evalu...

The aim of the Teacher Learning for European Literacy Education (TeL4ELE) project was to support literacy educators in five European countries to become experts in genre based literacy pedagogy and in turn support teachers to improve learning outcomes for all students especially those who are educationally disadvantaged. Based on the external evalu...

Building on Halliday’s view of linguistics as an ideologically committed form of social action, a major goal of language research in the Sydney School has been to analyse and redesign the pedagogic contexts through which school knowledge is acquired and evaluated. On one hand, the Sydney School research has applied the SFL model of text-in-context...

In pursuit of democratising education outcomes, this paper analyses contexts of schooling from the perspectives of two powerful models of social context: the model of text-in-context developed within systemic functional linguistic theory (sfl), and the model of pedagogic contexts developed in the sociological theory of Basil Bernstein (1975, 1990,...

Genre is the coordinating principle and starting point for discourse analysis in what has become known as the Sydney School. The approach has been designed over the past three decades with three major influences: Halliday’s theory of language as a social semiotic, the sociological theory of Basil Bernstein, and a series of large-scale action resear...

Implementation and outcomes of the Reading to Learn professional learning program, for the Western NSW Region NSW Department of Education and Training, 2008-2010. This was a large scale project with 400 primary and secondary teachers. Average results were double expected learning rates across all schools and classes.

This paper argues for a designed approach to teaching that explicitly integrates the curriculum with the language and literacy skills that students need to acquire it in each learning area and stage of school. It begins with a model of the relations between school knowledge and the learning activities, social relations and modalities through which...

This chapter outlines a set of strategies for effectively teaching all students in a class to read and write at levels appropriate for their school grade and curriculum. Teachers using the these strategies consistently show that there is no need for the unequal outcomes that plague education systems and disadvantage many children, particularly thos...

How have Indigenous peoples’ traditional stories been interpreted in western culture? What is the place of Aboriginal ‘Dreaming stories’ in the education of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children, and what other genres should they be exposed to? These questions are addressed here by first examining the kinds of stories that are presented in childre...

This chapter explores the interpersonal dimension of learning to read, from interacting with people to interacting with books.

This paper introduces a methodology known as Scaffolding Academic Literacy, that is designed to integrate the learning of academic skills with the study of academic fields in university programs. The Scaffolding Academic Literacy methodology has been developed as part of the Reading to Learn program that trains teachers in skills for embedding read...

This Report documents the outcomes of a systemic initiative carried out over 2009 and 2010 in primary and secondary schools in Stockholm. The project involved teachers implementing the Reading to Learn pedagogy and monitoring the progress and achievement of a group of ‘target’ students using a variety of strategies designed to collect both quantita...

This chapter outlines the genre-based approaches to teaching reading and writing developed over the past three decades in what has become known as the Sydney School. The pedagogy has been designed through a series of large-scale action research projects with teachers in various educational contexts, informed by functional linguistics and genre and...

We report on an action research project that explored the use of an innovative pedagogy, known as Scaffolding Academic Literacy, to accelerate the learning of Indigenous undergraduate health science students at the University of Sydney. The pedagogy encompasses a set of teaching strategies that enable all students to read high level academic texts...

Applied linguistic research into genres of written communication has had a considerable impact in recent decades on the pedagogy of writing in all sectors of education in Australia, from early schooling to post-secondary and workplace contexts (eg. Christie and Martin 1997). Attending to the social purpose of language and modelling and deconstructi...

Genre based literacy pedagogy has been developed over 25 years, in what has become known as the Sydney School (Martin 2000). The initial motivation was to improve the academic success of marginalised school students by giving them explicit models to organise the genres they were expected to write. In the 1980s the research focus was on writing genr...

All of us in the language education and functional linguistics communities are now talking about texts, and about teaching the language of spoken and written texts, but far less attention is given to the fact that we learn the language of written texts by reading them. Many of us are working on writing, but the function of writing in school and uni...

Genre-based approaches to teaching reading and writing have been widely adopted in Australia and other western education systems, and have achieved spectacular improvements in student outcomes. However, introducing a genre-based literacy pedagogy in English language programs presents a number of challenges, given the variations in education histori...

This paper describes a unique literacy program Learning to Read, Reading to Learn, and its implementation in the Middle Years of Schooling (5-9) by the Catholic Education Office Melbourne, to successfully accelerate the literacy development of “at risk” learners, and close the gap between the most and least successful learners in our schools. It en...

This PEN describes an approach to literacy learning that closes the gap for learners considered ‘at risk’ in years 5-9, while at the same time accelerating the learning of all students regardless of their starting point. The approach, known as Reading to Learn, has been implemented over three years in the Middle Years Literacy Project of the Cathol...

This contribution argues that unequal outcomes of education flow from two key factors. The first is the failure of schools to explicitly teach reading skills required at each stage of education, so that some students are able to tacitly acquire these skills themselves while others remain disadvantaged. A hidden curriculum of reading development is...

An approach to interpreting possible steps in language evolution is offered here from systemic functional linguistic (SFL) theory. SFL models language at three levels from sounds to wordings to complex patterns of social discourse. Typological studies in this framework have shown striking commonalities at each level across languages, that are not y...

In this paper we briefly review the teaching/learning cycle developed by Rothery and her colleagues, which focussed mainly on writing. We then describe how this pedagogy has been extended and refined for teaching both reading and writing in work by David Rose and colleagues (Rose 2004, Rose et al 1999, Rose et al 2004). This extension involves the...

This paper summarises findings of discourse analyses of traditional stories from eleven language phyla around the world. Five discovery procedures are developed for the analyses, including 1) techniques for standardising translations of the stories, and charts displaying 2) patterns of theme and participant identities, 3) staging of texts and conju...

This paper summarises findings of discourse analyses of traditional stories from eleven language phyla around the world. The aim is a preliminary exploration of relationships amongst diverse languages in patterns of discourse, using a systemic functional language model. Several techniques were developed for managing and displaying the analyses, inc...

Key findings from the Learning to Read: Reading to Learn Middle Years Literacy Intervention Research Project carried out in 2003 and 2004 by the Catholic Education Office Melbourne. The project involved approximately 60 middle years teachers from 24 primary and secondary schools working with approximately 400 students. The findings summarised here...

This chapter looks at resources for meaning in the language of the Anangu people of Australia’s Western Desert, exemplified with the dialect Pitjantjatjara. I will attempt to outline some of the semantic motifs with which Pitjantjatjara speakers enact their culture as social discourse. In order to do so I have endeavoured as far as possible to exem...

This paper describes a “scaffolding” methodology for teaching academic literacy that has achieved outstanding success with Indigenous adults returning to formal study at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney. The paper begins by outlining the background to the Koori Centre program and the literacy needs of Indigenous students. We then describe the...

This paper briefly surveys grammatical resources in the Australian language Pitjantjatjara, for representing the experience of its speakers, and contrasts these with corresponding resources in English. The focus is on types of grammatical structure, interpreted from the perspective of discourse semantics, using the analytic tools of systemic functi...

This paper discusses variations in how clauses are organised across diverse languages, including Chinese, French, Gaelic, German, Japanese, Pitjantjatjara, Tagalog and Vietnamese, from the perspectives of discourse functions and the grammatical strategies that realise these functions. The discussion is based on comparative text analyses, and inform...

This book is an introduction to ways of meaning in the language of the Anangu people of Australia’s Western Desert, with particular focus on the dialect Pitjantjatjara. The two major objectives for the volume are to survey the grammatico-semantic resources by which Western Desert speakers construe the world and enact their culture, and to map the r...

The aim of this book is an introduction to ways of meaning in the language of the Anangu people of Australia's Western Desert, with particular focus on the dialect Pitjantjatjara. The two major objectives for the volume are to survey the grammatico-semantic resources by which Western Desert speakers construe the world and enact their culture, and t...

In this chapter we report on a literacy teaching approach that is enabling indigenous learners to successfully read and write texts that are appropriate for their school years, across the curriculum. The approach employs a sequence of strategies that provide scaffolding support for students to read complex texts fluently and accurately, and then to...

My goal in this contribution is to offer some practical, theoretically grounded strategies to teachers of Indigenous children, that will assist them in developing effective English literacy programs. I begin by outlining some expectations for English literacy teaching from Indigenous Australian communities,1 discuss problems with current approaches...

In the written texts found in both industrial workplaces and science education, three complementary semantic developments take place as we move up the industrial ladder and the educational sequence. One axis of change is in the ways that reality is represented as sequences of activities. The second is in the ways that social relations are enacted b...

The chapter begins with a discussion of the relationships between the stratified production systems of western economies, and the highly stratified outcomes of their education systems. This is followed by a discussion of the nature of technical discourse at each stratum of education and industry. Discursive relationships between the two fields are...

Anyone who has been to school knows that the central skill that all students need to achieve success is to be able to learn from reading. In each stage of schooling the demands on this skill become more and more complex and conceptually challenging. Yet after the early years of school, we rarely explicitly teach skills in learning from reading, and...

This paper describes a professional inservice program that trains teachers in a literacy methodology known as Learning to Read:Reading to Learn. This program is achieving remarkable success in closing the gap between successful and 'at risk' students in the Middle Years of schooling (Yrs 5-9), at the same time as it accelerates the learning of all...

This paper contrasts a set of genres from Indigenous Australian and European cultures, with comparable functions. The focus is on genres in which change is construed, firstly changes in social processes, from Indigenous and European perspectives on histories of colonisation, and secondly changes in natural processes, from the perspectives of Europe...