Spring 2007

Curriculum for the 21st century

Accelerated literacy: academic inclusion in the 21st century

Accelerated Literacy has the potential to transform teacher practice and welcome all students into academic learning. Bronwyn Parkin describes some of the features of this pedagogy, and its development in the South Australian context.

For teachers in the ‘Accelerated Literacy Program’, the future of our students into the 21st century relies on our pedagogy, which determines the inclusion or otherwise of those who just don’t ‘get’ school. The students with whom we work are often not familiar with academic or literate discourse. They are mostly not from middle class homes with thinking and language congruent with school. Not only are expected school behaviours unfamiliar to them, the reason for those behaviours is a mystery as well. For students to be welcomed into and become valued and fully functional members of important discourses, we as teachers are challenged to transform our classroom talk and teaching in such a way that the intent, as well as the content of what we are doing, becomes clear to all students.

The National Accelerated Literacy Program operates out of Charles Darwin University and is funded by DEST. Its roots can be found in the Concentrated Language Encounters developed by Dr Brian Gray at Traeger Park in Alice Springs in the 1980s and later developed at the University of Canberra with Wendy Cowey. While it was developed with Indigenous schools in mind, the pedagogy is now used in many mainstream schools in several States.

The program

The South Australian Accelerated Literacy Program is strongly aligned with the national program and works from the same theoretical base, but has other funding sources. It operates in volunteer schools in the highest levels of educational disadvantage, with priority given to schools with high Indigenous cohorts.

Accelerated Literacy pedagogy is based on the socio-constructivist principles of Vygotsky and Bruner. Learning is recognised as intrinsically social, with the most effective learning supported by an ‘informed other’, that is, the teacher. The teacher lends students the cultural tools of language and cognition needed to achieve learning goals until students are able to use these tools for themselves independently. This way of teaching has been developed into a pedagogical routine by Dr Gray and Wendy Cowey. It systematically supports teacher and students in working from reading, through spelling to writing goals, all based around the study of one highly literate text.

Key features

Here are some key features of the Accelerated Literacy (AL) teaching sequence.

1. Narrative is used as the basis of literacy teaching: many students with whom we work are strongly disaffected with learning. Well-written narrative leads most easily to emotional engagement with the text. In addition, it is the most complex of genres, and supports the building of the metalanguage needed for students to analyse and generate written texts.
2. Systemic functional linguistics is an important analytic tool. We work with our students to analyse a text, and only then move to synthesis: that is, students only write when they have thoroughly studied a good model of the required text.

The texts we work with are not necessarily at the intended student reading level, but are as close to age-appropriate as we can get. Poor readers are not going to learn to engage with the rich complexity of good quality literature if all they ever read is high-interest, low-level readers. It is the teacher pedagogy that supports students to engage with complex texts in a communal setting, building common understandings about writer techniques and intent, which in turn support students in their writing.

While individual performance might be the end goal, it is not the means to that end. Joint discussion around rich texts, and negotiated joint construction of texts are both central learning strategies. While a visitor to an AL classroom might perceive this as strongly teacher directed, AL teachers are trained to work towards ‘handover’, with students taking over control of the understandings made explicit in discussion.

Texts are typically studied for a term, or ten weeks: but the students do not get bored. This is not mindless repetition, it is a familiar teaching routine that assists students to know what is coming next, and be prepared to take risks, knowing that they will be supported in their learning. Passages of the text are identified as having rich literate resources which will not only be enjoyable to read, but which will be useful resources in student writing. The class moves through the teaching routine, with the initial goal of understanding the meanings in the text, including the important but invisible inferential meanings. We then begin to look again at the text as writers, identifying techniques and their purpose which can be used by student writers in creating their own texts. In the middle we work on decoding and encoding through our work, again communal, in spelling. This routine is spiral, creating deep shared literate knowledge which will be called on in future text analysis.

One of the transformational changes in AL is our questioning routines. Gray argues that the challenge or display questioning currently used in classrooms assumes incorrectly that all students understand the intentionality of the teacher when she/he asks a question, that they know what is in the teacher’s head. These questions expect students to display knowledge and use a particular logic that may also be unfamiliar. Such questions don’t help students outside of literate discourse in ‘getting it’. In the AL program, teachers prepare students for questions with a preformulation that orients students to the intent of the question before it is asked. The quality of our preformulations determines the inclusion or otherwise of students in the learning conversation. The student’s answer is followed by a reconceptualisation, which broadcasts to all students in the class the significance of that answer so that the new knowledge is shared. This process is clearly outlined in Gray’s most recent publication.

As shared knowledge is built, and teachers can see signs of ‘handover’, the preformulations are removed. Teachers use their judgement to decide when students are informed enough to answer those open-ended display questions without support.

Commitment to the program

The South Australian program now has 50 schools involved. Twenty teachers will shortly complete their Graduate Certificate in Accelerated Literacy through Charles Darwin University. This gives us a rich resource of committed teachers with a strong theoretical basis to their teaching.

AL is not some miracle. It requires rigorous and long-term learning from teachers, who commit for at least two years. It is easy for a pedagogical routine to turn into a mindless ritual if teachers are not constantly monitoring their own talk and their learning goals in the light of the engagement and take-up of their students.

Sometimes the AL program is accused of cultural exclusivity, because the texts we study are chosen not for their Indigenous content, but because of the literate resources they contain. It is in the writing workshops that students represent their own worlds in such rich ways, not stereotypical Indigenous experience, but their own. Here, as an example, is a description of Michael O’Loughlin, Sydney Swans football star, from a year 7 Indigenous student in the program.

He turned around and stared at Michael. His fiery eyes looked green. His forehead was sweaty and a bit tanned and his long brown hair was back. Two eyebrows big and fluffy and his nose was big and long. His lips were held together. He smelt like Lynx and deodorant and his hair smelt like hairspray. Michael paused at the front door, walked towards him and shook his hand and then gave him his signature.

References

Bruner, JS (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Gray, B (2007). Accelerating the Literacy Development of Indigenous Students, Charles Darwin University Press, Darwin.

Rose, D, Gray, B and Cowey, W (1999). ‘Scaffolding Reading and Writing for Indigenous Children in School’, in Peter Wignell (ed.), Double Power: English literacy and Indigenous education, Language Australia, Melbourne.

Vygotsky, LS (1986). Thought and Language, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

National Accelerated Literacy Program www.nalp.edu.au/

Bronwyn Parkin is a program and policy officer, Accelerated Literacy, in the South Australian Department of Education and Children’s Services.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au