Matthew Luttringer EDUC373

 Located in North- Western Sydney, Eastwood  Predominantly low- average SES Public School  50% English speakers  40% LBOTE (Mandarin and Indian)  10% EAL (Mandarin and Indian)

 A: communicate through speaking, listening, reading, writing, viewing and representing  B: use language to shape and make meaning according to purpose, audience and context

CURRICULUM OUTCOMES  Recognises that there are different kinds of texts when reading and viewing and shows an awareness of purpose, audience and subject matter (EN1-8B)  Uses basic grammatical features, punctuation conventions and vocabulary appropriate to the type of text when responding to and composing texts (EN1-9B) ISSUES RAISED  In order to recognise these aspects of texts (purpose, audience, subject matter, grammatical features), students must have access to texts which they can understand  LBOTE students may not understand language  Lower SES students may not have access to texts

EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES  Dialogic Reading (Markose, Symes & Hellsten, 2011)  Promotes understanding of texts through open questions, discussion prompts, and evaluation of responses  Quia promotes these  Reading for pleasure (Markose, Symes & Hellsten, 2011)  Students must be given access to appropriate texts to promote enjoyment and motivation QUIA  Quiz tool  Revision on grammatical features, syntax, cloze passages  Encourages students to look at the finer features of text, and how the structure of language in any text shapes its meaning  Quizzes can be customised to grade level

CURRICULUM OUTCOMES  Plans, composes and reviews a small range of simple texts for a variety of purposes on familiar topics for known readers and viewers (EN1-2A)  Composes texts using letters of consistent size and slope and uses digital technologies (EN1-3A) ISSUES RAISED  Composition of text requires understanding of the effect of language cues  EAL and LBOTE students may not have as good a grasp on language functions in English  Use of digital technologies requires access to a computer, which may be a problem for Low SES students

EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES  Cognitive Language Development (Bochner & Jones, 2004)  Some language features and cues should be developed with active cognitive effort through explicit teaching  My StoryMaker shows students exactly how a sentence should be written if they wish to display an action or emotion from a character MY STORYMAKER  Colourful, interactive, engaging site  Constructs stories and images based on the emotions, interactions, and characters students wish to represent  Scaffolded and strongly supporting (e.g. if a student doesn’t know how to say their character is sad, the program shows them how)

CURRICULUM OUTCOMES  Communicates with a range of people in informal and guided activities demonstrating interaction skills and considers how own communication is adjusted in different situations (EN1-1A)  Recognises a range of purposes and audiences for spoken language and recognises organisational patterns and features of predictable spoken texts (EN1-6B) ISSUES RAISED  Bilingual or EAL students may be able to fulfil these outcomes in their home language, but have more trouble in English (Diaz &Harvey, 2007)  Low SES students may not see relevance of public speaking skills due to occupation of parents

EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES  Attempt to assess students on actual presentation skills rather than perfect use of the language (Welch, 2007)  Provide students with simple vocal tasks for practice, such as answering questions or ‘News’  Focus on teaching structure of response (introduction, opinion, conclusion) rather than perfect grammatical features (Bochner & Jones, 2004) – Voki could be useful VOKI  Interactive and engaging text-to-speech tool  Students can make an avatar based on the speech they are going to use  Can be used to tell the story of the avatar, or the students own story  Promotes use of structure in oral presentation and allows students to hear verbal cues in speech

STRATEGIES  Dialogic Reading and reading for pleasure (Markose, Symes & Hellsten, 2011)  Cognitive Language Development (Bochner & Jones, 2004)  Appropriate assessment and teaching structural understanding (Welch, 2007) (Bochner & Jones, 2004) TOOLS  Quia Web  Useful customisable quiz activities for practicing language features  My StoryMaker  Interactive story publisher which introduces students to characters and actions  Voki  Text-to-speech tool which allows students to hear verbal cues in speech

 Bochner, S., & Jones, J. (2004). (2 nd Ed.) Child Language Development. Learning to talk. London: Whurr Publishers pp  Diaz, C., & Harvey, N. (2007). Other Words, other worlds: Bilingual identities and literacy. In Makin, L., Diaz, C.J., McLachlin, C. Literacies in Childhood: Changing Views, changing practice. Marrickville, NSW: Elsevier.  Markose, S., Symes, C., & Hellsten, M. (in press) ‘In this country education happen at the home’: two families in search of the instruments of appropriation for school success. Language and Intercultural Communication (11), 3, August 2011,  Welch, A. (2007) Cultural difference and diversity. In R. Connell, C. Campbell, M. Vickers, A. Welch, D. Foley, & N. Bagnall (Eds) Education Change and Society (pp ) Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.