Literacy Development in Language as Subject

1. Literacy Development in Language as Subject Mike Fleming

2. Outline • Changing ideas about literacy development in language as subject • Tensions • Relationship between language as subject and language in other subjects

3. Changing ideas • Traditional • Moving On • Maturing

4. Traditional • focus on reading and writing • narrow range of texts • restricted types of writing • emphasis on systems and structures • product-oriented

5. Moving On • importance of using language • context and meaning • re-conception of relationship between language and learning • personal growth • creativity, self-expression

6. Maturing Ideas • more balanced perspective • importance of explicit knowledge • broader range of reading and writing genres • skills and strategies needed for reading • importance of meta-cognition • greater attention to issues of progression and depth.

7. Concept of literacy • Changing perspectives • New literacies • Critical literacy

8. Tensions • detailed aspects of literacy development • attitude to descriptors and competencies

9. Pupils at age 11 should read a wide range of texts including novels, poems, newspaper articles, reports etc. Pupils should be able to: extract and interpret information, events, main points and ideas from texts; infer and deduce meanings, recognising the writers’ intentions; understand how meaning is constructed within sentences and across texts as a whole; select and compare information from different texts; assess the usefulness of texts, sift the relevant from the irrelevant and distinguish between fact and opinion; etc. How meaning is constructed within sentences: recognise the effect of different connectives, identify how phrases and clauses build relevant detail and information; understand how modal or qualifying words or phrases build shades of meaning; understand how the use of adverbials, prepositional phrases and non-finite clauses gives clarity and emphasis to meaning.

10. The Master and His Emissaryby Iain McGilchrist

11. “...for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience…In one we experience the live, complex, embodied, world; in the other we give the kind of attention that isolates, fixes, and makes each thing explicit” (McGilchrist, 2009: 3, 31)

12. logical • precise • restricted • mechanical • narrow attention • open • fluid • tolerant of ambiguities • broad contextual perception

14. holistic analytic (1) holistic analytic (2)

15. Analytic (1) LS and LOS • Literacy a narrow‘ basic skill’ taught discretely • Language as subject seen as a service subject • Undue concern about coverage and overlap • Language elements are taught discretely and systematically in a linear fashion

16. Analytic (2) LS and LOS • Support tool for teaching - not mechanistic but in context • Better sense of the difficulty of tasks being set (writing tasks, levels of reading required) • Diagnostic tool • Broadening of outcomes • Improving pedagogy

17. Dangers of misinterpreting concepts such as • ‘systematic’ • ‘transparency’ • ‘transversal’