Last year, an Expert Panel was appointed by the ACT Minister for Education to develop recommended actions to address equity gaps and improve literacy and numeracy outcomes in all ACT public schools. Their Final Report is now publicly available and is well worth a read.
In particular, we highly recommend reading the section on writing (pp.89-98), which heavily promotes an approach based on systemic functional linguistics and genre-based pedagogy to improve students’ writing – the very same approach all our courses are based on.
An abstract we particularly like:
“Functional approaches to language have been shown to have a positive effect on student writing outcomes in large scale studies (Myhill et al., 2012, 2013) and in a number of well-designed smaller studies, particularly with EAL/D students (Acevedo et al., 2023; Brisk, 2021; Humphrey, 2016). However, teachers’ linguistic knowledge is a key factor in the extent to which they are able to successfully and confidently make visible the meaning-making practices of the curriculum through effective feedback on student writing (Jones & Chen, 2012; Macken-Horarik et al., 2017; Myhill et al., 2013).”
If you haven’t done any of the Lexis Education courses and would like to know how we can help you support your students, don’t hesitate to get in touch and we can organise a phone conversation to discuss your school’s needs.