As teachers, our role is to move students from spoken to written realms and from written to spoken. We call this moving across the register continuum. At one end of the continuum (left), there is the most spoken language which usually happens face-to-face and accompanies some kind of …
News
A whole school approach to SFL metalanguage
Language plays a central role in teaching and learning. If we want our students confidently reading and writing across the range of genres and registers required by schooling, then we need to understand how language works to make meaning. Our experience has shown us that the Systemic Functional …
How to be polite in English
When we interact with others, we are involved in four major exchanges: making statements, asking for information, offering something, or demanding something. The grammar for these exchanges is ‘played with’ for a range of purposes, such as asserting power, being sarcastic or being polite. In …
Feedback: Literacy for Learning – Melbourne, December 2019
A very successful Teaching ESL students in mainstream classrooms tutor training in Melbourne this month. Thank you to Templestowe Primary School for hosting our 5 participants. They were thoroughly impressed with the quality of the materials and the delivery, and look forward to running the Teacher …
TESMC at School of the Nations
An interview with Vivek Nair, Director at School of the Nations Vivek Nair is the Director at School of the Nations. He undertook the Teaching ESL Students in Mainstream Classrooms (TESMC) tutor training in 2019 and recently delivered his first Teacher Course as a certified tutor. Tell us a …
6 tips for successful close reading with young learners
Close reading is “an approach to teaching comprehension that insists students extract meaning from text by examining carefully how language is used in the passage itself” (Snow and O’Connor, 2013). This approach can be used with young children and will help develop their understanding of a …