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 and literature with students. Of particular concern is that teachers be provided with language resources which are not limited to either abstract representations of text structure or to decontextualised word level grammatical forms. This paper responds to these concerns by presenting a toolkit, developed as a 4 x 4 framework, to map the multifaceted resources needed to understand and generate texts within subject English, from the more abstract whole text level to their concrete manifestations as words and forms. In framing language resources according to the meanings and levels which are most at stake for literacy development and literature response, the 4 x 4 aims to provide resources for teachers in working with the three strands of the Australian Curriculum: English in meaningful and creative ways. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)