1

Literacy and Social Responsibility: Training Teachers to

Teach Reading Across the Curriculum
David Rose
Public lecture for Literacy and Social Responsibility lecture series, University of Sydney
2006.

Abstract
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
particularly not in secondary school, where they are more critical than ever. Instead we
leave the top students to pick up these skills intuitively as they study across the curriculum,
simultaneously ensuring that less successful students rarely do. This seminar argues that
our failure to teach high level reading skills at each level of schooling is the most
significant factor in maintaining gross inequalities of outcomes in our education systems.
The fact that most Australian teachers graduate with few or no skills in teaching reading is
a matter of serious concern, for both social equity and the future of our society in a
competitive globalised economy.

The paper describes a program that is directly addressing this shortcoming in our teacher
education, by training working teachers to teach reading as part of their normal classroom
practice, at all levels of schooling, across the curriculum. At one end, the program trains
Indigenous teacher assistants to teach reading to Indigenous children who are still not
reading after three or more years of schooling. At the other end it trains university lecturers
to build academic reading into their normal teaching cycles of lectures and tutorials. In
between, teachers in all subject areas are learning to put reading at the centre of their
classroom practice, and to close the skills gap between their students, by filling in the gap
in their own training where reading belongs. Students' literacy outcomes from this
program, known as Learning to Read:Reading to Learn, have been consistently measured
at an average of twice to four times expected rates of learning development, even as the
teachers are learning to use its strategies. The paper throws down a challenge to teacher
education faculties in our universities, and to education departments across the country, to
lift their game in training teachers to teach reading, and support teachers to build reading
into their classroom programs.

Introduction

I would like to thank Alyson Simpson, Fran Christie and our colleagues for organising this
valuable seminar series, and for inviting me to present its opening talk. My own
involvement in Literacy and Social Responsibility goes back over 25 years when I started
working for the Pitjantjatjara people of central Australia. At that time we were struggling to
establish cultural and training programs for young people in remote homeland
communities, away from the former government settlements, where up to eighty percent of
Pitjantjatjara children between the ages of 12 and 20 were chronic petrol sniffers (60
Minutes 1985). At meeting after meeting, I listened to the people plead with the state
schools, the South Australian education department, and its ministers, to teach their
children literacy in English, so that they could go on to secondary and further education,
and start to take over the management and service jobs in their communities that were,
and still are filled almost entirely by Europeans. The schools however were adamant that
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their children had to learn to read and write first in Pitjantjatjara, in a curriculum they had
inherited from progressive Presbyterian missionaries who introduced it in the 1940s, and
which was now insisted upon by linguists who had come to dominate remote Aboriginal
education in the 1980s. It was not until 1990 that the Pitjantjatjara people won policy
control over their schools, and50 0 0 de4cs. It omejettisoon in ol naurrarin a curricu0s, and
 3
across the country and internationally. But to me the astounding thing was not so much
that we made such gains so quickly, but that we did it so easily, at the same time as we
were all struggling to work out how to do it, and meeting all kinds of barriers. If it was so
easy for us, why then do educational outcomes for Aboriginal students remain so
appallingly low? It was not until I began to work with a really wide range of schools and
teachers, within and beyond Aboriginal education, that the reasons started to sink in.

To begin to answer this question I would like to show you a graph I put together from 20
years of ABS statistics on educational outcomes in Australia (Figure 1). I should say up
front that this was not hard to do, I am no statistician, and the figures are easily available
on the web. What the graph shows is that over these decades outcomes have improved
only slightly: the population with no post-school qualifications has fallen from over 60 to
above 50%; the numbers getting vocational qualifications have remained steady at 30%;
and those graduating with degrees have risen from 7 to 17%. But we know that even this
improvement is overstated since many of these degrees were diplomas before the
restructuring of higher education, and much of the drop in unqualified numbers is
attributable to new workplace and other basic certificates.

Figure 1: Australian education outcomes 1984-2004 (ABS 1994, 2004)

It is worth noting that this very slight improvement corresponds with major restructuring
and resourcing for education in Australia, and with revolutions in pedagogic philosophy
that swept the education faculties through the 1980s and 90s, initially under the name of
‘progressivism’ and in a slightly more sophisticated form as ‘constructivism’. Neither the
resourcing nor the philosophising seem to have made any significant impact on the
stratification of outcomes that is apparently endemic in our education systems. It is also
worth noting that, although the proportions may vary, these three outcome levels are
reflected in groupings of students that our teachers report in every class in every school;
with some students most successful and engaged, some achieving at average rates, and
others rarely succeeding in learning activities or assessments. These groupings are widely
labelled as ‘ability levels’. An alarmingly high proportion of Indigenous students fall into the
least successful group. In Aboriginal community schools this group constitutes an
overwhelming majority of each class.

I now want to compare this endemic stratification with Basil Bernstein’s model of what he
called the ‘pedagogic device’, in particular with what he terms its distributive rules. In
Bernstein’s view schools “position pupils differentially and insidiously...legitimizing the few,
invalidating the many” (1990: 98). They achieve this by distributing different forms of
consciousness unevenly between members of different social groups, and then evaluating
them on the uneven forms of consciousness they have distributed. At the top of
Bernstein’s model he places Power, to which I have added the two principle economic
bases from which power derives in our society: on the one hand the control of material
economic production, and on the other from the control of the production, distribution and
reproduction of symbols – symbolic control. For Bernstein these contrasting economic
bases characterise two fractions of the middle class, the old middle class with its base in
production and the new middle class with its base in symbolic control, people like
ourselves. There is a constant struggle between these fractions for control of the
pedagogic device of the society. At the moment the managerial class in Canberra seems
to be gaining the upper hand, but I would contend that we agents of symbolic control have
a fairly unshakeable hold over what happens at the chalkface of the nation’s classrooms.
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Bernstein does not specify the social groups that are recipients of the distributive rules, but
on the basis of our outcomes statistics, and our research in literacy in industry in the Write
it Right project (Rose 1997, 1999, Rose et al 1992), I have divided them broadly into
professional, vocational and manual groups. Aside from their incomes and what Ruqaiya
Hasan has called their relative autonomy in the workplace, what distinguishes these
groups is the broad types of knowledges that the distributive rules have afforded them:
technical forms of theoretical knowledge to professional qualifications, specialised forms of
practical knowledge to vocational qualifications, but predominantly everyday forms of
commonsense knowledge to those whose choices are limited to manual occupations or
unemployment. That is for the least successful student group, it is experience outside of
the classroom that provides the knowledge base for their future work rather than what the
school has to offer them.

At the bottom of Bernstein’s model he places Consciousness, as the underlying outcome

of the distributive rules. In earlier phases of his theory (1975-90) Bernstein distinguished
two broad categories of consciousness, as restricted and elaborated orientations to
meaning, or coding orientations. In broad terms this distinction simply means access to
one, or more than one, way of interpreting experience. Bernstein has illustrated this with
an experiment involving two groups of children shown a range of foods and asked to
classify them. Children in the lower working class group classified the foods by the
contexts they eat them in, breakfast, lunch or dinner, but children in the middle class group
classified them according to ‘food groups’ that are independent of such contexts. When
asked to reclassify them the working class children ordered them again into meals, and the
middle class children did the same. The middle class children had access to two modes of
classification, while the lower working class children had only one.

The distinction of restricted and elaborated codes has led to decades of controversy, and
wrangling over what they mean. Hasan and her colleagues have given us major research
projects which demonstrate that such a distinction does characterise interaction in middle
and working class families. Elaborated coding orientations have also been compared with
Vygotsky’s notion of ‘high order consciousness’, which he claims is characteristic of
educated social groups, but less so of oral cultures (Hasan 2004). Bernstein on the other
hand makes a further distinction between elaborated orientations to meaning, and
elaborated codes that are characteristic of written discourses. Elaborated orientations are
realised, for example, in the cosmologies of oral cultures such as the Pitjantjatjara, but
their "code of cultural transmission, the relay itself, is not an elaborated code" (1990: 251).

What I want to draw attention to is where middle class children’s alternative modes of
classification come from. The classification into food groups is of course an artefact of
technical discourses about health and diet, that educated people access through books.
Michael Halliday, Jim Martin and colleagues have led the world in describing the
differences between spoken and written ways of meaning, in terms of alternative ways of
construing experience of the world, and alternative patterns of organising discourse
(Halliday 1989, Halliday & Martin 1993). One such contrast is between commonsense
classifications such as breakfast, lunch and dinner, and technical classifications such as
food groups. But another aspect I’d like to focus on here is from the perspective of social
interaction. From the interpersonal angle the striking contrast between spoken and written
discourse is that speaking typically involves interacting directly with one or more other
people, whereas reading and writing involve interacting not with a person but with a book
(or its electronic equivalent).
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As highly literate readers and writers it is easy to take this distinction for granted, but for a
small child from an oral family culture it takes on another significance altogether. For such
a child, interacting with a book as though it is a person may be a very strange form of
consciousness indeed. It is for this reason I believe that literate middle class parents
spend an average of 1000 hours reading books with their children before they start school
(Bergin 2001), and that many Indigenous children do not learn to read for the first three
years of school. In order to read with understanding and engagement it is essential to
conceptualise the book as a partner in an exchange of meaning. Without the orientation to
books that middle class parents give their children, it appears to be very difficult for some
children to arrive at on their own.

These different orientations to written discourse have consequences right through

children’s school careers, and on into their adult life and work. Professional occupations
are underpinned by a body of technical knowledge that is learned primarily through written
discourse, vocational occupations involve less reading and are learnt more through
practical training, while manual occupations are learned primarily through personal
demonstration. So in place of Bernstein’s restricted and elaborated categories, I am going
to distinguish two general forms of consciousness produced by the distributive rules of the
pedagogic device: an orientation to interacting with people, and an orientation to
interacting with books. Some of us from oral cultural backgrounds have experience with
just the first, and some of us have experience with both, in varying degrees. The
distribution of types of knowledge and consciousness to groups in our society is
summarised in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Distributive rules of the pedagogic device

production symbolic control

Power
professional technical

Social Distributive Know

vocational specialised
groups rules ledge

manual everyday
Consciousness

interacting with people +interacting with books

“restricted” “elaborated”

This contrast between children from highly literate and completely oral family backgrounds
is not a matter of either/or, but represents extremes of varying orientations to book reading
that all children start school with. And we know that the orientation that they start with is
likely to have consequences for their level of success in each following year of school, so
that their prospects for future success on leaving are likely to be similar to the prospects
they began with. In twelve years of schooling most children are unlikely to significantly
change their positions in the hierarchy of success and failure, as the gap between the
most and least successful students steadily widens from year to year.
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How do education systems achieve this outcome? Far from being a natural course of
events, I think it is an extraordinary achievement to maintain educational inequalities so
rigidly and consistently, given the thousands of hours of opportunities for overcoming it in
year after year of schooling. But from my point of view the means by which it is achieved is
simple and obvious: we simply do not train teachers to teach reading skills at the levels
that students need at each stage of the educational sequence. The nature of reading skills
changes and expands at each stage, but instead of teaching these skills explicitly we leave
students to acquire them tacitly, as a side effect of the overt curriculum focus and learning
activities at each stage of school. The capacity for tacitly acquiring them depends on
preparation in preceding stages. As a result, those students who are thoroughly prepared
in one stage are likely to succeed in the next, and the least prepared students are most
likely to fail.

In my view the acquisition of increasingly sophisticated skills in reading and learning from
reading is a hidden curriculum that underlies the sequence of schooling. This hidden
curriculum is aimed ultimately at the high level reading skills required for university study
by the most successful student group. Successful students acquire such elaborate skills by
independently processing large quantities of texts across the curriculum over six years of
secondary school, learning to recognise, understand and reproduce the language patterns
of privileged written discourses, without being explicitly taught how to do so. The strategy
of leaving these skills for tacit acquisition simultaneously ensures that success remains
limited to this small minority, and that the majority who are not as well prepared for
independent tacit acquisition are directed to vocational and manual occupations.

We can distinguish five discrete stages in this underlying reading curriculum. The first
begins for successful students with parent-child reading in the home, which functions to
orient young children to written ways of meaning and to the book as a partner in
communication, in place of a person. Junior primary teachers are trained in strategies
which value add to this learning in the home, teaching the alphabet and letter sound
correspondences, reinforcing engagement with written stories through Shared Book
Reading sessions, and providing extensive opportunities for independent practice with
silent reading periods. The curriculum goal here is for independent reading by the end of
Year 3. The necessary condition for this as I have said is engagement in reading as a
communicative activity, that is prepared for in the home.

For success in school, it is essential that children are reading independently by the end of
junior primary, because the next curriculum stage in upper primary is geared to developing
skills in learning from reading. While reading as a communicative activity is a difficult
concept for young children, learning from reading is even more so, as the normal mode of
learning in all cultures is through practice that is modelled, directed and guided by another
person. In order to recognise the book as a teacher it is necessary first to recognise it as
an interactant. However skills in learning from reading are not explicitly taught in the
primary school, indeed the teaching of reading in general falls away after the junior years,
except sometimes for a few students diagnosed with ‘special needs’. Rather a large variety
of activities are used by upper primary teachers to engage children in learning topics
across the curriculum, known as ‘themes’, with a mix of teacher input and support, group
activities, and individual reading and writing. What I contend is that most of these activities
have evolved in the primary school to foster the underlying curriculum goal of
independently learning from reading.

Again it is essential that students are able to independently learn from reading, in order to
succeed in the next curriculum stage in secondary school, where reading becomes the
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primary mode of learning. As Bernstein puts it, “beyond the book is the textbook, which is
the crucial pedagogic medium and social relation” (1990:53). Classroom activities across
the high school curriculum have evolved to prepare students to read for homework, and to
build on what they have learnt from reading. Without the requisite skills in learning from
reading, students can neither succeed with their homework, nor engage with classroom
activities at the level expected of their grade, whether these involve discussing a literary
text, following a teacher explanation, or performing exercises based on such explanations.
In the high school these reading skills are rarely taught at all. Instead teachers feel
pressured to cover the curriculum content that the syllabus demands, allowing little time for
teaching skills in reading and writing this content. They are also typically burdened with a
wide range of so-called ‘ability levels’ in their classes, and are constrained to meet the
needs of the successful few at least, and the average group at best. In such a context,
students who are least prepared by the home, the early years of school, and the upper
primary years, typically hit the wall by Year 9. Instead of experiencing high school as a
gateway to the future, these students frequently experience it as a waste of time, in which
their identities are continually invalidated. This is a common experience of Indigenous
students, and very many others in Australian schools.

What then is the function of forcing successful students to study massive quantities of
curriculum content over six years of high school? What they are processing of course are
texts, of every shape and form. And the critical things they are learning are not the facts
and fictions of curriculum content, much of which will be irrelevant to their future study and
careers, but the language patterns of academic and literary texts. Rarely are they
recognising and using these patterns consciously, as they are not explicitly taught to do
so; rather they are using the skills they began acquiring tacitly in the home, and honed in
the primary school, to intuitively recognise and use the meaning making patterns of written
texts. The underlying curriculum goal of the whole of secondary schooling is to prepare
these students for independent reading and writing of academic texts when they get to
university. The stages of reading development in the educational sequence is illustrated in
Figure 4. Each stage prepares successful students with the skills they will need in
succeeding stages. So what students are evaluated on is skills they have or have not
acquired in preceding stages.
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Figure 4: Reading development sequence in schooling
before school
learning to engage
with reading

preparing junior primary

evaluating
independent
reading

upper primary
learning to learn
from reading

secondary
independent learning
of academic genres

tertiary
independent
academic study

What a clumsy wasteful hit-and-miss kind of a pedagogy we use to prepare elite students
with the skills for tertiary study. I have no doubt that in any other field but education, this
hotch potch of evolved practices would have given way decades ago to techniques
explicitly designed to achieve results with some modicum of efficiency. I am also quite
certain that they survive only because they achieve the unstated double function of
excluding the majority of school leavers from higher education, serving the needs of a
stratified economic order that is already a whole generation out of date. A school system
that can’t give children of working class families access to further education no longer
serves the needs of these families in our post-industrial globalised economy, nor of the
managerial class who want an educated work force to be internationally competitive.
Whose interests then does it serve? Whose slice of the economic pie would be most
threatened by larger numbers of working class students making it into higher education to
get the symbolic resources that education provides? How many of us in this room, in this
faculty, in this institution, depend on just these symbolic resources for our living?

Imagine for a moment what we could achieve if we taught these skills explicitly, instead of
leaving kids to discover them for themselves. Wouldn’t the achievements of even the most
successful students accelerate beyond what they could possibly do on their own? And
wouldn’t the less successful students start getting access to the skills they need to
succeed? The answer to both questions is of course yes, as we have been repeatedly
demonstrating with our teacher training program Learning to Read:Reading to Learn. The
most recent report on one of our projects, with the Middle Years program of the Catholic
Education Office Melbourne, found that:

…average literacy gains across all schools and classes, and among students from
all backgrounds and ability ranges, was approximately double the expected rate of
literacy development. Furthermore, 20% of students made gains of four times the
expected rate of literacy development (Culican 2006).

This particular project has now involved some 2000 students in Melbourne Catholic
Schools (Rose & Acevedo 2006). Even the top students in every class are making
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significantly better progress than expected, while the weakest students are developing at
four times expected rates, closing the so-called ability gap, while accelerating the learning
of all.

What I would like to do now is briefly describe to you how we achieve these kinds of
outcomes. I said earlier that the surprising thing to me is not so much that such outcomes
are possible, but that they are so easy to achieve with relatively slight shifts in teaching
practice. I mentioned how we found that Indigenous children in central Australia are not
learning to read before Year 3 or later. One of the sites we work with is a training program
for Indigenous teachers and teacher aides in these communities, the Anangu Teacher
Education Program, of the University of South Australia. We initially give these student
teachers one day’s training in some simple techniques that fill the gap in standard junior
primary teaching practice. The next day, the student teachers, whose own literacy is very
low, go into the classroom and use these techniques to teach the children to read
sentences and spell the words in them, in less than an hour. These are children who have
been in school for three years or more and have never learnt to read. I will begin by
outlining a few of these techniques for you.

Reading and writing in the early years

The LRRL early years strategies capitalise on the standard junior primary practice of
Shared Book Reading (Holdaway 1979, 1982). Following this activity we teach children to
recognise words in sentences from the reading book, and to reconstruct its sentences with
cards. Once they know its words well they practise spelling them on slates, and then
practise rewriting the story book’s sentences using the words they have learnt to spell.
After sufficient practice with all these skills they can practise writing new stories that are
patterned closely on the reading book. This curriculum cycle is illustrated in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Early years curriculum cycle

Shared Book Recognising

Reading Words

Sentence
Story
Making
Writing

Spelling &
Sentence
Forming Letters
Writing

In Shared Book Reading the teacher reads a children’s book to learners repeatedly over
two or more weeks, explaining it and engaging them until they understand it and can say
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almost every word in the story, or part of it. Commonly a big book is used which enables
the teacher to point to the words as she and the children say them together, illustrated in
Figure 6. The Shared Book Reading activity is partly modelled on parent-child reading
practices, in which books are read repeatedly until children know them intimately. It serves
to engage children in the pleasure of reading, a pleasure that derives from the communal
activity with the teacher as surrogate parent, affirming, supporting and encouraging the
children.

Figure 6: Shared Book Reading

Shared Book Reading is unquestionably the most valuable standard activity in junior
primary for preparing children to become readers, as it tunes them into the joy of reading
for pleasure and constructs shared identities as participants in reading as meaningful
communication. For learners from literate family backgrounds it reinforces the experience
of parent-child reading, contributing to their rapid development as independent readers.
For children from oral family backgrounds it introduces them to these pleasures and
identities for the first time. But then there is a gap. As the teacher reads the big book,
pointing to the words, children with a developed concept of the printed word as
communication, from experience of reading along with their parents, are soon able to
recognise the words as the teacher points. But children without this experience are
frequently unable to recognise the communicative function of the printed words, to relate
the printed objects to the spoken words they are reciting. For many of these children,
concomitant activities teaching the alphabet and sound-letter correspondences have no
effect, as they do not have a sufficient meaning base to apply these abstract symbols to
recognising their function in expressing meaning. Some form of this problem undoubtedly
occurs in many contexts, where the home culture is oral rather than literate or where
parent-child reading is not a regular activity (cf. William 1999 on differences between
middle and working class orientations to parent-child reading). This gap is a terrible waste
of opportunity to make all children successful engaged readers, which could then give
them sound preparation for learning from reading in upper primary, and so to succeed in
secondary school.

The gap results from our failure to train junior primary teachers in techniques to teach
children from oral backgrounds to recognise the words they are reading, and so to
independently read the books used in shared book reading. Yet these techniques are very
simple, and are developed from strategies often used by experienced primary teachers in
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the past, that were abandoned as progressivist philosophy took over early childhood
teacher training, and vilified them as rote learning. In the Recognising Words stage of the
curriculum cycle, the first sentence of the story that children know thoroughly is written out
on a cardboard strip. The teacher and children then point at each word as they say them
together, until each child can read the sentence accurately, pointing at and saying the
words. This may initially involve the teacher pointing at the words as they jointly read the
sentence 2 or 3 times, then holding the child’s hand as they point and read again 2 or 3
times, before the child is able to point and say the words themselves, as shown in Figure
7. With these simple strategies on a well known sentence, accurate reading can be
achieved in a matter of minutes, even with children who previously had no concept of
words. In large classes, children simply take turns to point at the words with the strip on an
easel, as the whole class recites them.

Figure 7: Recognising Words

Once they can read the sentence accurately, the teacher asks children to point out
particular words, then to cut off these words or groups of words, put them back in the
sentence, and read it again. The cut up words can then be mixed up, so that learners put
them back together, and read the sentence again. These activities firstly support young
children to recognise the relation between written words as material objects and the
meanings they express, and secondly to recognise graphic differences between each word
in the sequence of meanings in a sentence. At this stage they need not recognise the
spelling patterns of each word, but can differentiate them by visual cues such as first and
last letters, supported by the sequence of the sentence.1

Once all children can recognise words in and out of the sentence, the teacher shows them
how to cut up a word into its letter patterns, including syllables and onset and rhyme
patterns. Children then practise writing each letter pattern on slates (small white or black
boards), before practising to write the whole word, shown in Figure 8. At each step, they
observe the letter pattern or word, write it from memory, and then check for themselves if

1
Sentence Making techniques resemble strategies used in the Breakthrough to Literacy program (Mackay et
al 1978), but use known sentences from reading books, rather than composing new ones. They also
resemble strategies used in the Reading Recovery program (Clay 1994), but this is an incremental learning
program with over 20 assessed levels.
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they are correct, in order to encourage self-correction. Repeated practice of letter patterns
and whole words, whose meanings they are thoroughly familiar with, rapidly enables
young children to remember how to spell them. The practise with letter patterns then
enables them to transfer this knowledge to recognising other words.

Figure 8: Spelling letter patterns

The sequence of acquisition is thus from meaning to wording to lettering, the reverse of
incremental learning models, that treat written language compositionally as letters making
up words making up sentences. In contrast, the LRRL approach does not depend on the
ability to name or sound out letters of the alphabet, but takes meaning in context as the
starting point for teaching the components of the reading task in manageable steps. On
the same principle, accurate letter formation can also be taught in the context of spelling,
as the teacher demonstrates and learners practise on their slates.

When learners can automatically spell the main words in the sentence they can jointly
reconstruct the whole sentence on their slates, with the teacher supporting by writing
words that have not been spelt, and the children writing the words they know. The
sentence can then be rubbed out and practised again until each child can independently
reconstruct the whole sentence. The entire process can then be repeated for the next
sentence, and so on until they are able to independently read and write whole paragraphs.
Eventually the class can begin to practise writing new stories patterned on the stories they
have been reading. Although this process may sound repetitive, I can assure you that all
children enjoy both the activities and the continual praise they receive for their successes.
These pleasures are them immeasurably compounded as they learn to independently read
the shared books that they love.

Factual Texts

Techniques for reading and writing factual texts can be used at any level, from primary to
tertiary study, in any curriculum area. They support learners to develop skills in reading
texts with understanding, identifying key information, selecting information for notes, and
using it to write texts of their own. Along the way they also develop skills in interpreting and
critiquing both the content of texts and how they are constructed. The LRRL curriculum
cycle for factual texts involves six stages, illustrated in Figure 8. First there is a preparation
before reading the text, followed by detailed reading of a passage which students are
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supported to read themselves. Notes are then made from the reading text to prepare for
writing, and a new text is jointly written by the class. Students then practise rewriting the
text individually, before writing a new text independently.

Figure 8: LRRL curriculum cycle

1 Prepare before 2 Detailed

Reading Reading

3 Prepare before
6 Independent
Writing
Writing

5 Individual 4 Joint
ReWriting ReWriting

In the first stage, Preparing before Reading, the text is read aloud with the class, but
learners are first prepared to follow the words with understanding, a) by giving them the
background knowledge they need to access it (typically as part of a lesson unit), b) by
telling them what the text is about, and c) by summarising the sequence in which it
unfolds, in words all learners can understand, but also using some of the terms in the text
for learners to key into as it is read aloud. During and after reading, key terms and
concepts may also be briefly explained.

In Detailed Reading, students are prepared to read each sentence in a short passage, by
means of three preparation cues: firstly a paraphrase of the meaning of the whole
sentence in commonsense terms, together with its relation to the context or preceding text,
secondly a position cue that tells learners where to look for the wording, and thirdly the
meaning of the wording in general or commonsense terms. Students then have to reason
from the meaning cue to the actual wording on the page. This preparation enables all
students to successfully identify each wording. Once they have done so, they are ready for
an elaboration of its meaning, by defining technical or literary wordings, by explaining new
concepts or metaphors, or by discussing students’ relevant experience. In this way
students are given access to the total complexity of language patterns in the text, but in
manageable steps.

We have termed the cycle of preparing, identifying and elaborating the scaffolding
interaction cycle, diagrammed in Figure 9. This cycle formally describes the micro-
interactions involved in parent-child reading (Martin in press, Martin & Rose 2005, Rose
2004a). The formal description enables teachers to carefully plan a discussion around the
language features in a text, to think through which language features will be focused on at
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each step, how the teacher will prepare students to identify them, and how they will
elaborate on them.

Figure 9: Detailed Reading interaction cycle

Prepare
sentence meaning
position of wording
meaning within sentence

Elaborate
meaning beyond sentence
Identify
define/ explain/ discuss
affirm
highlight

The scaffolding cycle systematically renovates the ‘triadic dialogue’ or ‘IRF’ (Initiation-
Response-Feedback) pattern, described by Nassaji & Wells (2000) among many others as
endemic to classroom discourse. But there are three crucial differences between the
typical IRF classroom pattern and scaffolding interactions. Firstly the initial scaffolding
move is not simply a question eliciting a response from learners, but consistently prepares
all learners to respond successfully; secondly the follow-up move is not simply feedback
that evaluates or comments on responses, but consistently elaborates on shared
knowledge about text features; and thirdly responses are always affirmed, whereas
responses that are inadequately prepared in IRF discourse are frequently negated or
ignored.

In the Note Making stage of the curriculum cycle, students take turns to scribe, on the
class board as a dot-point list, the wordings that have been highlighted during detailed
reading, illustrated in Figure 10. At this point the students take over control, as the class
dictates wordings and spellings that they can all read, prompted by the teacher where
necessary. This stage provides many opportunities to practise spelling (and
pronunciation), and to further discuss the field and organisation of the text.
 15
Figure 10: Note Making from factual texts

When one side of the board has been filled with notes, students take turns to scribe a new
text on the other side. The teacher now steps in to support the class, firstly by pointing out
discourse patterns and other key elements in the notes. This preparation before writing
gives students the general framework of genre and field within which to rewrite the text.
The teacher then prepares students to imagine new wordings, by drawing attention to
notes, suggesting alternative wordings, and further discussing the field. Now instead of
identifying technical wordings from commonsense cues, students select more
commonsense paraphrases for the technical wordings in the notes. Then the teacher may
elaborate by rephrasing the selection, supporting them to check issues such grammar,
letter cases, punctuation or spelling, and encouraging critical discussion of the way the
original author constructed the field, and how they may reconstruct it. Such high level
critical analysis is possible because of the supported practice in deconstructing and
reconstructing meanings at all levels of the text. The scaffolding interaction cycle is thus
employed for supporting writing, in the form of prepare-select-elaborate. Following this
whole class Joint Rewrite, the text can be rubbed off and students can practise Individual
Rewriting of their own text from the same notes, in groups and individually, as a step
towards independent writing in research projects.

Intermediate between the strategies for reading and writing in the early years and factual
texts are techniques for reading and writing stories in primary and junior secondary school.
These strategies support learners to read with engagement and enjoyment, to develop
identities as readers, and to recognise and use sophisticated literary language patterns in
their own writing. The stages of Preparing before Reading and Detailed Reading use
similar strategies as for factual texts, although the focus is on literary language patterns
rather than key information. Preparing before Writing then involves brainstorming new
elements for a story, and these elements are used for Joint Rewriting of a story that is
patterned closely on the reading text with new content. Students then write stories
individually following the patterns of the original and jointly rewritten texts.

LRRL professional learning program

The LRRL professional learning program provides teachers with a high level of skills in
designing and implementing teaching strategies, in selecting and analysing texts for
planning lessons across the curriculum, and in using sophisticated knowledge of discourse
 16
patterns to assess students’ writing (Rose & Acevedo 2006b). The program involves eight
days of face-to-face training, including a two day workshop each term over the course of a
year. The professional learning model follows the principles of the scaffolding learning
cycle described above. Each workshop provides the preparation that teachers need to
implement what they have learnt in their classrooms and lesson preparation, and the
following workshop elaborates on that practical experience with more detailed, higher level
knowledge about language and learning. The principles are also applied within each
workshop, in a series of cycles in which workshop presenters provide information and
demonstrate tasks that teachers then practise in groups for 10-20 minutes. Group practice
is then elaborated in follow-up discussion led by the presenters.

The sequence of professional learning workshops is:

1. Preparing for reading and writing, in which the strategies are introduced and
participants practise using prepared detailed lesson plans.
2. Planning lessons and programs, which introduces the language model, and
participants practise selecting texts and planning lessons across the curriculum.
3. Analysing reading texts, in which high level skills in discourse analysis are introduced
and applied to lesson planning.
4. Assessing students writing, in which skills in discourse analysis are applied to student
writing samples.

The model of spaced learning allows for staged implementation with students in the
classroom, collecting and analysing data, monitoring and evaluating student progress and
reflecting on outcomes. Teachers who have undertaken the training in previous years act
as ‘experts’ or ‘mentors’ for new teachers from their own or other schools as they continue
to deepen their knowledge and expertise in the theory and practice of the scaffolding
approach in Learning to Read: Reading to Learn.

Beyond the strategies described above for factual texts are further techniques that have
been developed for scaffolding academic literacy at university level. As with the school
based program, these were initially developed to meet the literacy learning needs of
Indigenous tertiary students, but they have found widespread acceptance in mainstream
academic contexts. The Scaffolding Academic Literacy strand of the LRRL program is now
being delivered in universities across Australia, southern Africa and Central and South
America, with similar outcomes of accelerated learning for all students, including progress
from primary school levels of literacy to independent academic study within one year
(Rose, Lui-Chivizhe, McKnight & Smith 2004, Rose, Rose & Farrington in prep).

Conclusion

The LRRL program continually demonstrates that teaching all students the skills they need
for success at each stage of education is not hard to do. All that is required is a close
analysis of the tasks required of them, of learning from reading and demonstrating what
they have learnt in writing, and a close analysis of classroom practice to ensure that all
learners are adequately prepared for success, and not just the elite few.

Currently, in teacher training faculties in Australia and elsewhere, this close analysis rarely
if ever occurs to the extent that it must, if teachers are to be given the tools to fulfil the
rights of all their students to an education that will enhance their opportunities in life. An
inescapable conclusion, I believe, is that we as an international profession of teacher
educators have failed and continue to fail in our social responsibility to provide these tools
to teachers. As far as I am concerned there is little point in arguing about this: the statistics
 17
of ongoing inequitable school outcomes speak for themselves. What we need to start
doing is to ask why we seem incapable of giving our teachers the tools they need. What is
it that is preventing us from identifying and prioritising in our teacher training, the one set of
skills that all students need – to learn from reading? I will conclude by suggesting one very
concrete practical reason and one broader ideological reason.

In practical terms, the curricula of teacher training degrees are often just too full to
squeeze in entire new courses in teaching reading in all school subject areas. This is
exactly the problem that confronts the secondary teacher who feels obliged to cover the
syllabus content, leaving no time to teach the skills that students actually need to learn the
content themselves. But this practical problem is embedded in the ideological one, in that
the teacher training curriculum priorities are an outcome of competition and compromise
between education faculty staff and the traditions we have inherited. The priorities of the
curriculum reflect on balance the priorities of the staff members. Overwhelmingly the
senior staff of education faculties in Australia entered in the years following the mass
professionalisation of teaching in the 1970s and 80s, the years in which liberal
progressivism, whole language and Piagetan developmental psychology swept the
profession. This generation remains overwhelmingly committed to principles of social
equity in education, but the pedagogically inadequate philosophies of those years, and
their subsequent post-modernist and constructivist transformations, are often the lens
through which the best social intentions are still being interpreted.

The great majority of our colleagues have indispensable bodies of professional skills and
knowledge to give to our teachers. But to refocus teacher training to prioritise skills in
explicit teaching of reading and writing across the curriculum, would require a major
undertaking in professional learning for the trainers. It would require becoming a student in
technical fields outside one’s long practised domains of professional expertise and
authority. I don’t believe this will happen on a large scale any time soon, at least not in a
comfortable developed nation like Australia. In the meantime, we will continue to give
practising teachers the reading skills that they did not get from their training, whenever and
wherever we are invited to do so.
 18
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