By Brian Dare & John Polias
For more than thirty years, educators Brian Dare and John Polias have worked in classrooms, staff rooms, and teacher training spaces around the world with one clear mission: to make language central to teaching and learning. Their work is grounded in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) — a powerful framework for understanding how language makes meaning. This is their story of what worked, what challenged them, and what lessons can help the next generation of teachers.
From ESL support to language-based pedagogy
In the early 1990s, Dare and Polias were ESL consultants in South Australia. Back then, language support often happened in small, isolated settings, disconnected from the mainstream curriculum. Whole-language approaches dominated, with little explicit teaching about language itself.
Encounters with the “Sydney School” of genre-based pedagogy and SFL scholars such as Michael Halliday and Jim Martin sparked a shift: ESL teachers began working alongside mainstream teachers to make the demands of academic language transparent to all students.
Building teacher capacity
Dare and Polias quickly realised that teachers needed more than occasional workshops — they needed deep knowledge of how language works. This led to the Language & Literacy Course, a ten-module program combining theory (genre, register, grammar) with classroom applications. Running in the evenings or holidays, it drew enthusiastic teachers across all levels, from early years to university.
Scaling up: the train-the-trainer model
To reach more educators, Dare and Polias developed a train-the-trainer model. Instead of relying on visiting experts, schools could build in-house capacity through trained tutors equipped with manuals, resources, and a support network. This model spread within Australia and internationally — from Hong Kong to the UK, Canada, Sweden, and beyond — and proved sustainable because it embedded expertise inside schools.
Tools for assessment and planning
Another breakthrough was the creation of the ESL Scope and Scales (later the Language and Learning Development Continuum), giving teachers clear descriptions of language learning progress. These tools aligned with the curriculum and helped plan lessons, measure progress, and report outcomes.
What made the approach work
Over the years, several principles emerged as non-negotiables:
- A strong theoretical framework – teachers and students need an explicit, shared metalanguage.
- High challenge with high support – complex ideas can be taught successfully if scaffolded well.
- Practical, relevant training – every session connected theory to classroom reality.
- Multisemioticity – acknowledging that meaning is made through language, images, symbols, and other modes, especially in secondary subjects.
Moving to whole-school change
By the 2010s, the focus shifted to whole-school approaches. Research showed that when every teacher in a school — not just ESL specialists — understood the role of language, literacy outcomes improved across the board. In recent years, schools like Pakenham Secondary College, Elisabeth Murdoch College and the Western English Language School saw significant gains when adopting the Language and Literacy for Learning (3L) or How Language Works courses school-wide.
The national Australian Curriculum, introduced in 2010, gave further momentum by embedding functional language concepts into the English strand and promoting the idea that all teachers are teachers of literacy.
Evidence, renewal, and the future
The authors highlight that sustained change depends on leadership support, ongoing post-course mentoring, and research evidence. They also note the need to continually adapt content — for example, developing courses for young children, for subject-specific contexts, and for multilingual classrooms.
After three decades, their core belief remains unchanged: giving teachers and students the tools to talk about language is not an optional extra — it is a pathway to equity and success. As Michael Halliday has argued,
Most educational failure is linguistic failure.
Their advice to educators today? Be bold. Be brave. Recontextualise the work for your setting. And above all, make learning about language central to learning itself.