As educators encounter a policy landscape where increasingly the education lexicon includes keywords such as data, evidence, quality, and standards, it is interesting to revisit Garth Boomer's contribution regarding teachers as researchers. In "Fair Dinkum Teaching and Learning," Boomer (1985) clearly named at least two key problems…

While teachers of English have long recognised the vital role they play in developing students' knowledge and effective use of language, the emergence of the Australian Curriculum: English has led to a great deal of discussion concerning the representation of language and the type of meta-language needed to share understandings of literacy…

In this paper we focus on one facet of Asia literacy and examine the potential of intercultural understanding through two films about Asians in Australia, as the basis for exploring Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia "inside" and not through the more accepted mode of "outside" the nation. In doing so we foreground…

This article examines synergies and gaps in the construction of English, literacy, multimodality in policy and curriculum in Australian education with a focus on current assessment practices and educational accountability in order to make recommendations for future practice for teachers and for policy-makers. The article builds on analyses of the…

The benefits of playwriting as a process for students are yet to be fully understood. While there is scarce research on playwriting pedagogy, the research that does exist suggests that playwriting provides several benefits for students relating to self-esteem, literacy and language development, as well as increased engagement in school and the…

This paper will present a brief overview of the recent shifts within English and EAL/D (English as an additional language/dialect) curriculum documents and their focus on critical literacy, using the Queensland context as a case in point. The English syllabus landscape in Queensland has continued to morph in recent years. From 2002 to 2009,…

This paper uses a narrative constructed from diary entries made over the course of a year teaching English as a platform for examining some of the political, economic, educational and socio-cultural contexts into which the Digital Education Revolution (DER) was launched as policy. It analyses the underlying imperatives, components and balance of…

Attainment of functional English literacy skills by all students has been a focus of Australian national policy since the 1989 Hobart Declaration (MCEETYA, 1989). This focus underpins current educational accountability policy enacted through the National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). The Adelaide and Melbourne Declarations…

Mandated literacy assessment is now a ubiquitous practice in many western educational systems. While educational researchers, principals, teachers and education unions continue to offer vociferous resistance in some nations, in others it is now commonplace in the educational landscape and built into the rhythms of the school year. This paper is…

Despite the emphasis in the press and elsewhere on the print-based nature of English curriculum, opportunities to develop digital English, with attention to web-based and multimodal forms of text, literacy, location, and activity, are present in the draft national (Australian) curriculum for English, alongside more traditional forms. This paper…

The fundamental purpose of education is surely to ensure all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in the economic and creative life in both the local and global community. Where does literacy fit in this definition? Everything depends on how you define "literacy". This article argues that all too often…

Garth Boomer had been a seminal influence on this author's practice and thinking as a young English teacher in the 1980s. When asked to present the Garth Boomer Memorial address in 2009, the author realised that he would be speaking on his fiftieth birthday, thus the desire to take the opportunity to reflect on his teaching life was overwhelming.…

This article argues that when secondary school teachers are able to listen to the stories young people tell about themselves and their lives there is potential to improve their literacy outcomes. As a way of illustrating how and what can be achieved, this article tells the stories of two young men who scored below benchmark on the Year 9 LaN…

Over the past twenty years much work has been done by teachers of secondary English to describe and make explicit the semiotic resources used to access and critique the discourses of powerful institutions such as schooling. At the same time, however, there has been a growing recognition that the rhetorical resources needed for adolescents to…

This article assumes that literacy practices are social practices. Based on the New Literacy Studies (Street, 2005) this view of literacy provides an understanding that the ways a person reads and writes change, depending on that person's identity, the type of texts that are involved and the context in which those texts and identities are located.…