Pauline Jones

University of Wollongong | UOW · Faculty of Education

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...

This chapter investigates the dynamic life of ideas in online discussion by revisiting an earlier study and reflecting upon Alexander’s conceptualisation of dialogic teaching. The study sought to address the challenge of how to engage students in productive online discussion, which was motivated by our experiences of shifting from face-to-face to o...

This file is an extract from Teaching Language in Context (3rd Ed.) published in 2023. Oxford University Press have given permission for us to post here in response to the many requests we receive for full-text downloads. The complete text is available as an ebook or hardcopy from OUP. This first chapter is an overview of the functional model of...

This chapter investigates the dynamic life of ideas in online discussion by revisiting an earlier study and reflecting upon Alexander’s conceptualisation of dialogic teaching. The study sought to address the challenge of how to engage students in productive online discussion, which was motivated by our experiences of shifting from face-to-face to o...

One critical transition for many cultures can be characterized as that between primary and secondary education. All western developmental theories treat this period (between ages of 11 and 13) as a benchmark of education and socialization (as the change of school itself indicates). The challenge is… to view this transition as… a function of the cul...

Much of the current interest in dialogic theory derives from efforts to improve classroom talk and hence students' literacy outcomes. Yet the nature and role of talk in prior to school settings is often overlooked in these endeavours. As a result, not only do students often experience discontinuities in the transition to school, but a rich area of...

The applied disciplines of architecture and civil engineering require students to communicate multimodally, and to manipulate meaning across media and modes, such as image, writing or moving image. In their disciplinary studies for example, students must be able to transform the language of lectures and textbooks into models and diagrams. In their...

The construction of dynamic multimedia products requires the selection and integration of a range of semiotic resources. As an assessment task for preservice teachers, this construction process is complex but has significant potential for learning. To investigate how weaving together multiple representations in such tasks enables learners to develo...

Creativity has been identified as an increasingly important graduate attribute for employment in the 21st century. As sites of significant development of disciplinary specialization, universities seem to be the natural place for creativity to be fostered. However, there remain contestations and ambiguities in the ways creativity is theorized, and t...

Creativity is recognised as an essential twenty-first century skill. Despite the significant volume of research on creativity, there remains considerable ambiguity in the way it is conceptualised within education. This study uses a qualitative approach to explore primary educators’ (n = 9) perceptions of creativity in English, science, and history....

The transition from upper primary to secondary school learning is commonly held to be difficult for the literacy progress of many learners (Alexander & Fox 2010, Christie 2012, Humphrey 2017) with consistent rates of progress for all students remaining elusive (Teese & Lamb, 2009; Thomson, De Bortoli, & Underwood, 2017). Movement into discipline-ba...

Education systems around the world have moved to develop literacy progressions that describe a sequence of development in oral language (talking and listening), reading/viewing and writing. In Australia, the National Literacy Learning Progression (ACARA, 2021) is designed to support students’ literacy development across the years of primary and sec...

Australian early childhood education positions literacy learning as a set of social practices contextualised by one’s unique experiences and knowledges. Despite widespread agreement about the need to teach phonics and other code-breaking practices, the ways early childhood educators integrate “constrained” skills are not well understood outside the...

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.

Digital media tasks are increasingly used in university settings to assess students’ scientific knowledge. The use of such tasks has generated the need for principled analytical approaches to better understand how meaning-making operates in these artefacts. However, there has been a proliferation of approaches to multimodality in recent years and a...

Assessments in tertiary science subjects typically assess content knowledge, and there is current need to both develop and assess different forms of knowledge and skills, such as communications and digital literacies. A digital explanation is a multimodal artefact created by students to explain science to a specified audience, which is an alternate...

This chapter describes a task where preservice primary teachers [PSTs] create a digital explanation, which is a short 3–5 min dynamic stand-alone artefact to explain a science concept to children. In creating the artefact, PSTs engage with scientific knowledge and choose semiotic resources to represent the concept for young learners. Data include d...

Classroom dialogue has been the focus of educationists’ attention for over 60 years (Myhill 2018), most recently manifest in the work of Alexander (2017); Edwards-Groves & Davidson (2017); Resnick, Michaels & O’Connor (2010) and Mercer, Dawes & Kleine Staarman (2009). In concert with this work, systemic functional linguists have developed useful to...

This paper arises from research undertaken by educational semioticians and science educators investigating the use of student generated digital artefacts as assessment tasks in pre-service science teacher education. Part of a broader shift toward student-generated media in tertiary science, the use of such tasks is driven by the need to deepen pre-...

A “digital explanation” is a science learning task where learners explain science content to non-expert others, in this case, the learners are primary preservice teachers [PST] in a science methods class. In the task, PST are assigned a prompt based on science content from the New South Wales K-6 syllabus and generate or source multiple representat...

Communicational, technological, and cultural shifts within science have substantially impacted how scientific understanding is developed and communicated. Accordingly, science learners need to experience teaching and learning approaches that utilize a wide range of multimodal forms and representations to develop content knowledge and communications...

This paper reflects on the influence of Halliday's work in the way three educators conceive and conduct their teaching of English for academic purposes in various degree courses at the same university in Australia. Several ‘big ideas’ from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) are considered within the general aim of helping students master the spe...

Denne artikel giver en oversigt over udviklingen inden for genreteoriog genrepædagogik fra et australsk perspektiv.

This guide articulates a set of principles to help University lecturers, and other teaching academics in the Higher Education sector, to set up and conduct successful asynchronous online discussions for the students in their distance or flexible delivery courses. These principles are based on theory, a review of the literature and research trials c...

The inclusion of the Knowledge about Language strand in the recently introduced Australian Curriculum: English (AC:E) is both promising and challenging. For the first time, students across primary and secondary years of schooling are expected to develop ‘a coherent, dynamic, and evolving body of knowledge about the English language and how it works...

This paper reports a study-in-progress examining interactions in the asynchronous discussions of a post-graduate TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) distance subject, focusing on the impact of scaffolding collaborative knowledge construction. Two complementary theories were used: sociocultural theory, which views interaction as...

This review focuses on three interconnected socio-emotional aspects of online learning: interaction, sense of community and identity formation. In the intangible social space of the virtual classroom, students come together to learn through dialogic, often asynchronous, exchanges. This creates distinctive learning environments where learning goals,...

Internationally, English curricula increasingly emphasize the explicit teaching of knowledge about language. This paper reports on a small pilot study of an ongoing project investigating the relationship between explicit teaching about language and its uptake by students. Drawing on the underpinnings of Vygotskian sociocultural theory and Hallidaya...

The ways educators incorporate technologies into their classroom literacy experiences and the implications these present for professional practices have been the focus of discussion for some time. We believe it timely to re-examine these debates in a period of ‘digital reform’ as we consider the realities teachers report as they use technology as a...

The new Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2012) has considerable implications for teachers’ knowledge about language (KAL) and pedagogic practice. To successfully implement the functionally oriented model of grammar proposed by the Curriculum, many teachers will need to expand their expertise in grammar to understand ‘the structures and functi...

Internationally, English curricula increasingly emphasise the explicit teaching of knowledge about language. This paper reports on a small pilot study of an ongoing project investigating the relationship between explicit teaching about language and its uptake by students. Drawing on the underpinnings of Vygotskian sociocultural theory and Hallidaya...

Technologies such as interactive whiteboards, laptops, wireless connectivity and personal communications devices mark the educational zeitgeist. Their proliferation in schools is an emergent theme in educational research, yet, the impact on pedagogic discourse is less understood. This paper reports on a case study of one teacher’s work to integrate...

This paper addresses the current resurgence of interest in classroom talk and its place in pedagogy; in particular the role of teachers in shaping students' learning through the design of classroom interactivity. The importance of teacher agency with respect to pedagogic design is highlighted in recent studies of pedagogy in the UK (Alexander, 2008...

This paper explores the implementation and the use of the Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) in literacy teaching in an Australian primary school. A socio-cultural approach (Vygotsky, 1978) and Activity Theory (Engestrom, 2001) are used to explore the integration of the IWB in the literacy classroom environment where the individual, classroom and the who...

This paper reflects upon the implementation of the current NSW English primary Syllabus (Board of Studies, NSW, 1998); in particular those aspects to do with oral interaction. It demonstrates how official curriculum is read varyingly in classroom settings with the result that learners are positioned differently in respect of the communicative resou...

In the year in which the new Australian government has officially apologized to the Stolen Generations for taking them away from their "place" of origin, that is to say, from their families, communities and lands, we think it appropriate to revisit the notion of place as it relates to voice, identity and culture. In systemic functional theory, noti...