Pedagogies: An International Journal

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Literacy pedagogical content knowledge in the

secondary curriculum

Kristina Love

To cite this article: Kristina Love (2010) Literacy pedagogical content knowledge in
the secondary curriculum, Pedagogies: An International Journal, 5:4, 338-355, DOI:
10.1080/1554480X.2010.521630

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Pedagogies: An International Journal
Vol. 5, No. 4, October–December 2010, 338–355

Literacy pedagogical content knowledge in the secondary curriculum

1554-4818 An International Journal
1554-480X
HPED
Pedagogies: Journal, Vol. 5, No. 4, Sep 2010: pp. 0–0

Kristina Love*
Pedagogies:
K. Love An International Journal

Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

(Received 12 October 2008; final version received 15 January 2009)

In this paper, I address the challenge of raising the consciousness of prospective sec-
ondary teachers about their roles in supporting their students in the advanced literacy
demands of their subject specializations. I argue that to better equip them in supporting
the conceptual development of diverse groups of students, prospective high school
teachers need, as part of their pedagogical content knowledge, an understanding of the
pervasive role of language and literacy in learning. I illustrate how, after even a short
but intense input, one group of prospective teachers with no prior knowledge of lan-
guage developed a capacity to plan content area learning with an informed conscious-
ness of the role of language and literacy in the learning of diverse groups of their
students. The continued development of literacy pedagogical content knowledge, I
argue, will be crucial to the strength of those pillars of government reform related to
lifting the academic achievement of adolescents in disadvantaged schools.
Keywords: literacy pedagogical content knowledge; diverse learners; secondary
curriculum; teacher education

Introduction
At the time of writing this paper, the Australian Federal Government had just released
details of the next phase of its ‘Education Revolution’. Three central pillars of reform to
be taken to the Council of Australian Governments at that stage were: improving the qual-
ity of teaching, properly transparent reporting, and lifting achievement in disadvantaged
schools (Grattan, 2008). Particular concerns had been expressed about the so-called liter-
acy tail, which comprises a disproportionate number of disadvantaged and/or ‘at risk’ stu-
dents, many from linguistic minority backgrounds. Each of the three pillars of reform and
their relationship to improving literacy outcomes has immediate ramifications for teacher
education, an area that has itself recently undergone close scrutiny. Most significantly, in
the Australian context, we have had the Report of the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into
the suitability of pre-service teacher training courses (Education and Training Committee,
2005) and the House of Representatives Standing Committee’s Top of the class: Report on
the inquiry into teacher education (2007).
In this paper, I want to focus explicitly on the preparation of prospective secondary
teachers and the challenge of raising their consciousness about their roles in supporting
their students in the advanced literacy demands of their subject specializations. I will
argue that to better equip them in supporting the conceptual development of diverse

*Email: k.love@unimelb.edu.au

ISSN 1554-480X print/ISSN 1554-4818 online

© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/1554480X.2010.521630
http://www.informaworld.com
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 339

groups of students, prospective high school teachers need, as part of their pedagogical
content knowledge (or PCK; Darling-Hammond, 2006), an understanding of the pervasive
role of language and literacy in learning. I hope to illustrate how, after even a short but
intense input, one group of prospective teachers with no prior knowledge of language
developed a capacity to plan content area learning with an informed consciousness of the
role of language and literacy in the learning of diverse groups of their students. The con-
tinued development of literacy pedagogical content knowledge (LPCK), I argue, will be
crucial to the strength of those pillars of government reform related to lifting the academic
achievement of adolescents in disadvantaged schools.

Pedagogical knowledge and knowledge of literacy and learning

PCK entails an understanding of the range of teaching practices required to make disciplinary
or content knowledge accessible to students, as well as an understanding of the context
within which this pedagogy is enacted (Darling-Hammond, 2006; Darling-Hammond &
Bransford, 2005). Primary school teachers’ pedagogic knowledge across all areas of the
curriculum (English, humanities, mathematics, physical and personal learning, science,
technology and the arts) is typically developed in tandem with a specialized knowledge of
literacy, numeracy and communication. Secondary or high school teachers develop PCK
in a narrower range of discipline areas as they work with adolescents in the more special-
ized curriculum of the high school. However, traditionally, they have been given little sup-
port in understanding the significance of spoken and written language in learning within
those subject specializations (Christie et al., 1991; Luke & Elkins, 2003). This narrow
focus on disciplinary content knowledge has historically informed the structure of second-
ary teacher preparation programmes, themselves often characterized by highly classified
and strongly framed curriculum structures (Bernstein, 1996). At a time when teacher edu-
cation is under serious review and when the diversity of student populations is dramati-
cally increasing, the capacity of high school teachers to plan specialized content area
learning in tandem with an informed consciousness of the role of language and literacy is
crucial.
In Australia, large-scale demographic studies of geographical, socio-economic and
language background status of secondary school populations (see Lo Bianco & Freebody,
2001; Teese & Polesel, 2003) have highlighted the extent of the diversity of students.
Focusing on English as a second language (ESL) students alone yields at least three broad
categories: children of established post-war immigrant families, many of whom experience
difficulty with academic language and literacy beyond their acquisition of spoken
English (Davison & Williams, 2001); refugees who often have experienced trauma,
interrupted schooling and extensive dislocation, and who typically are immersed in the
mainstream high school curriculum before they are linguistically ready; and fee-paying
international students, whose social, emotional, linguistic and academic needs are often
not understood or supported by their mainstream teachers (see Arkoudis & Love,
2008; Love & Arkoudis, 2004).
High school teachers of such diverse groups of first and second language learners need
to be supported in developing a knowledge base about both oral and written language.
Unfortunately the role of such language in academic development is all too often left
invisible, and there is considerable empirical evidence indicating that secondary teachers
are unable to address, overtly and deliberately, the specific language and literacy demands
of their varied teaching and learning contexts, and the related texts and textual practices
they use with their students. For example, after surveying 200 schools across Australia,
340 K. Love

one well respected government-commissioned report exploring the literacy and academic
curriculum of the ‘middle years’ concluded that ‘subject teachers have insufficient know-
ledge of the language and literacy demands of their discipline’ (Luke & Elkins, 2003,
p. 118) and that ‘schools were scrambling to put together materials from diverse resources
without any principled understanding of language and literacy’ (p. 135). A key recom-
mendation from this report was that academic literacy be included in the coursework of
secondary teachers so that they are able to support their students in the specialized litera-
cies of their disciplines.
This recommendation echoed those made by another government-commissioned
report more than a decade earlier into the role of literacy in teacher education (Christie
et al., 1991). Amongst other recommendations, this report pleaded that ‘as a compulsory
component of their pre-service education, all teachers should receive a substantial prepa-
ration in knowledge about language and literacy and the pedagogical principles for their
teaching’ (vol. 1, p. 98). The report challenged those universities involved in preparing
secondary teachers to build into their programmes ways to ‘use explicit knowledge about
language to construct and deconstruct their specialist discourses with a view to engaging
with these discourses as powerful writers and critical readers’ (recommendation 46); and
to ‘work explicitly with students on the complementarity of spoken and written styles of
argumentation’ (recommendation 47).
If governments are to achieve their goal of improving the literacy development of the
disproportionate number of disadvantaged or ‘at risk’ students, many from linguistic
minority backgrounds who comprise the so-called literacy tail, it is crucial that they heed
such calls for teacher educators to teach knowledge about language as a central rather than
marginal concern in high school teacher preparation. Such calls for all teachers, not just
the literacy or ESL teacher, to be directly and intimately involved with their students’ aca-
demic language development have become increasingly insistent internationally as well as
within Australia (see Alverman, 2002; Valdes, Bunch, Snow, & Lee, 2005, for the US
context; Corson, 1990, 1999, for the UK context; and May & Smyth, 2007, for the New
Zealand context). The challenge of course lies in identifying the body of LPCK that can be
meaningfully and coherently covered in the short time typically available in the already
demanding context of teacher preparation programmes. In designing an effective and effi-
cient programme, we can benefit considerably from research conducted by educational
linguists.

Academic literacies and learning in the secondary school

Extensive research by educational linguists working within a social semiotic tradition (see
Christie & Derewianka, 2008; Coffin, 2006; Scheppegrell, 2004) has identified more pre-
cisely the specialized demands of the secondary school curriculum and offers teacher edu-
cators powerful new ways of making explicit the nature of advanced literacies required for
student success beyond the primary school. Initially motivated by a concern for equity,
this research focused on school contexts where students were socially and educationally
disadvantaged (see the New South Wales Department of School Education, 1994) and
identified how success with the more specialized forms of reasoning demanded in the
senior school curriculum requires control of distinctive, subject-specific register and genre
choices (Coffin, 1997; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Unsworth, 2000; Veel, 1999).
In elementary school science, for example, students are largely concerned with ‘doing
science’, where the preferred genres are procedures (where instructions are given for
tasks) and procedural recounts (where a record of completed tasks is chronologically
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 341

structured). As they progress further into the middle years of schooling, students are
required to also learn to ‘organize scientifically’, learning to control information reports
and taxonomies (where information is described and classified) and to ‘explain science’,
drawing on explanation texts (where sequential, causal or theoretical relationships
between phenomenon are clarified). In the later years of schooling, in addition to these
processes, students are also required to ‘challenge science’, using argumentative genres to
put forward one or more appropriately supported points of view. These increasing generic
demands of school science, summarized in Table 1, are further discussed in Halliday and
Martin (1993).
This research into curriculum genres, as well as offering guidance on the social
purposes and organizational structures of the key genres written and read by high school
students, offers guidance on their specific language features. Such research, for example,
has highlighted which features of mathematical language make the most cognitive
demands of learners. To illustrate, at an initial level of comprehension, abstract concepts
like length, width and height are nominalizations of processes that can more congruently
be understood respectively as ‘how long something is’, ‘how far across something is’ and
‘how far off the ground something is’. In high school mathematics, such nominalizations
are presumed to be understood, but if they are not, as is the case with many students from
linguistically diverse backgrounds, difficulties compound with problems worded at even
higher levels of abstraction; for example, where students are required to comprehend the
relationship between multiple abstractions, as in ‘Area = Length x Width’, or at an even
higher level of abstraction, ‘Volume = Area x Height’. The demands of increasingly tech-
nical and abstract mathematical language accumulate dramatically by the middle years of
high school, when many fragile learners are left behind. Yet it has been convincingly
shown that teachers who can explicitly discuss such language features and their role in
making mathematical meanings with their students can engage them more deeply with
mathematical content (Huang & Normandia, 2000).
It has likewise been shown that the more teachers know about the language of history,
the better able they are to help their students understand and critically analyse historical
discourse (Coffin, 2006). For example, below is a sentence from a text used regularly in
Australia to teach about the causes of the Boxer Rebellion in China:

Imperialist powers had been competing to carve the country into spheres of influence for
years, while enforced opium addiction and widespread corruption had reduced most of the
populace to abject poverty. (Denny, 2000)

In comprehending this text, student readers have to unpack abstract and highly nomi-
nalized concepts such as ‘spheres of influence’ and ‘enforced opium addiction’. In senior
history, they must not only understand the historical facts but also recognize that what are
presented as ‘facts’ are often interpretations to be evaluated, as various historians make
more or less explicit judgments about the people and events in history. In evaluating the

Table 1. Generic requirements of school science (adapted from Veel, 1999).

Organizing
Doing science scientifically Explaining science Challenging science

Procedure Descriptive report Sequential explanation Argument

Procedural recount Taxonomic report Causal explanation Discussion
Theoretical explanation
342 K. Love

above text effectively as a commentary on a period of Chinese history, students have to

assess the writer’s twenty-first century post-colonial stance by focusing on his choice of
value-laden epithets (‘abject’), verbs (‘carved’ and ‘reduced’) and nouns (‘corruption’).
Students need support in learning to read in these highly specialized ways, drawing
attention to how such language operates to construct a particular argument about his-
tory, and thus apprenticing them as critical historians, able to interrogate various histor-
ical viewpoints.
Such close examination of the relationship between language and content knowledge
offers teacher educators powerful new ways of supporting diverse learners by making
explicit the often invisible characteristics of the advanced literacies of secondary school-
ing. In particular, it offers teachers and prospective teachers insights into how increasingly
abstract and nominalized language and complex sentence structures may present chal-
lenges to students as they progress up the years of secondary schooling. In my own teacher
education context, we draw systematically on such work as it contributes to the building of
teachers’ LPCK.

Literacy pedagogical knowledge in one teacher education programme

Despite the burden of research evidence, and despite the recommendations of national and
international reviews of teacher education, integrating understandings about the import-
ance of scaffolding academic learning through knowledge about language has been diffi-
cult in faculties of education in many Australian universities. In the typical highly
compressed one-year secondary pre-service teacher preparation programme, student
teachers already grapple with both disciplinary content knowledge (Darling-Hammond,
2006) and pedagogical content knowledge, often in a mass-education, resource-poor con-
text. To add language/literacy pedagogical content knowledge to this list of curricular
demands and to teach it effectively to non-language specialists requires considerable
imagination and the designing of carefully chosen resources and tasks.
I have argued elsewhere (Love, 2009) that we can usefully conceive of LPCK as hav-
ing three key components: knowledge about how spoken and written language are struc-
tured for learning; recognition that subject areas have their own characteristic language
forms and hence entail distinctive literacy practices; and a capacity to design learning and
teaching strategies which account for subject-specific literacies and language practices. At
my own university, we have addressed the challenge of incorporating the development of
LPCK in a new Master of Teaching (secondary) programme. In the remainder of this
paper, I will offer a brief outline of a core subject in this programme, Language and
Teaching, as it prepares prospective high school teachers to support increasingly diverse
groups of learners by drawing explicitly on key knowledge about the role of language and
literacy in learning. In particular, I will report on how a group of teacher candidates with
no prior knowledge of language learned to support their diverse groups of students with
the literacy components inherent in a unit of work they had planned.
The Master of Teaching programme, introduced into the Graduate School of Educa-
tion at the University of Melbourne in 2008, is a two-year programme that seeks to pre-
pare teacher candidates (TCs) as prospective ‘master teachers’ through an intensive
clinical experience in which the university’s theory components are closely articulated
with the more extensive school practicum (two days every week, plus two blocks of three
weeks). In working with large and diverse groups of learners, each with unique needs and
proclivities, TCs are learning to systematically:
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 343

. . . draw on many kinds of knowledge – of learning and development, social contexts and cul-
ture, language and expression, curriculum and teaching – and integrate what they know to
create engaging tasks and solve learning problems for a range of students who learn differ-
ently. (Darling-Hammond, 2006, pp. 34–35)

As they develop this more general PCK, TCs simultaneously develop LPCK covered most
directly in a core subject in the programme, Language and Teaching.

Language and Teaching

This subject introduces TCs to the literate demands of the range of subject areas taught in
secondary school, helping them to: recognize the role of spoken and written language in
learning across the secondary school subject areas; to plan lessons and units of work
which account for and address literacy demands; to reflect on their own ongoing role in
supporting learning through spoken and written language; and to have sufficient metalin-
guistic awareness to reflect productively on their language use in the classroom. Though a
compulsory subject in the Master of Teaching programme, it is allocated only 18 hours of
face-to-face contact.
The key resource used in the subject is a DVD entitled Literacy across the school sub-
jects (LASS; Love, Baker, & Quinn, 2008). LASS is designed in eight units, summarized
in Figure 1. Unit 1, ‘An introduction to language and literacy’, examines the range of first
and second language learners in Australian schools and the range of language and literacy
practices and modes.
Unit 2, ‘Scaffolding literacy’, introduces the notion of scaffolding (after Gibbons,
2002; Hammond, 2001) as a highly planned and explicitly structured support for learning
through and about literacy in the middle to upper years of schooling. Here, a five-stage ‘learn-
ing/teaching cycle’ is proposed: Engagement, where teachers identify a ‘gap’ in students’

Figure 1. Index screen from Literacy Across the School Subjects (LASS).
344 K. Love

understandings, plan strategies to bridge the gap and engage with learners’ prior under-
standings; Building knowledge, where teachers provide learners with new information,
and together build common knowledge and shared understandings of the purpose of the
set tasks; Transformation, where learners build their own insights about the new informa-
tion, the teacher helping as needed and controlling possibilities of error, but judiciously
withdrawing help as appropriate; Presentation, where learners complete the task independ-
ently and demonstrate their understandings; and Reflection, where the teacher and learners
reflect on information, insights and understandings, and together identify a new ‘gap’.
Unit 3, ‘Oral language’, examines the structures of the oral language that can be used
for effective learning in a range of classroom contexts for both exploratory and formula-
tory purposes. Unit 4, ‘Standard written genres’, introduces the structures and linguistic
features of six of the key genres that students are required to read and write across the sub-
ject disciplines; while Unit 5, ‘Multi-genre texts’, examines the more varied structures that
underpin the print and multimodal texts that students are required to comprehend and
produce.
In Unit 6, ‘Supporting reading’, and Unit 7, ‘Supporting writing’, the reading and writ-
ing demands of the more complex texts that students need to understand and produce to be
successful in the various subject areas are made explicit and the means whereby teachers
can support their students are outlined. Finally in Unit 8, ‘Planning for literacy learning’, a
framework is suggested for teachers who are working across the discipline areas to sup-
port students in the complex literacy demands of the tasks they set and to assess students’
progress.
LASS as an interactive, video-based multimedia resource thus provides TCs with a
virtual clinic for closer scrutiny of the demands on spoken and written language that learn-
ing across the subject areas makes of secondary school students. Through group and indi-
vidual use of the DVD in the subject language and teaching, TCs are themselves
scaffolded in building a ‘metalanguage’, a language to talk about language for learning,
including knowledge about the key grammatical differences between spoken and written
language. Working with the interactive features of the DVD, in combination with elec-
tronic and face-to-face tutorials over an intensive six-week period, TCs (who are non-
language specialists) build a LPKC that can be applied to the analysis of their own class-
room interactions. Figure 2 shows one such interactive screen from Unit 7 of LASS.
Through workshops and reflective tasks, TCs relate their understandings of these
issues to their ongoing teaching practice, drawing on systematically collected evidence
from their own classrooms. The first reflective task required them to transcribe a critical
teaching episode and to reflect on how their own use of oral language supported their stu-
dents’ learning. Here, TCs were provided with a technical metalanguage for more closely
examining the minute-by-minute co-construction of disciplinary forms of reasoning
through classroom talk, as illustrated in Unit 3 of LASS (see Love, 2009, for further
details). The second reflective task involved TCs identifying the literacy demands inherent
in a unit they were planning and teaching in their disciplinary area. Despite the brevity of
the 18-hour language and teaching programme, it was hoped that through the targeted use
of a custom-designed video-based DVD and reflective tasks that were clinically integrated
with teaching practice, TCs with no prior linguistic knowledge could develop sufficient
LPCK to support their diverse groups of adolescent learners in the specialized demands of
their discipline subjects.
In a cohort of just over 300 secondary TCs, approximately 40% were specializing in
the humanities areas (English, history, psychology); 20% in the visual and performing arts
(music, art, media studies, drama); 30% in mathematics and sciences; and 10% in physical
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 345

Figure 2. Screen 14 from Unit 7 of LASS (Love, Baker, & Quinn, 2008).

education, business studies and information technology. In a hands-up survey in the first
lecture with this cohort, approximately 30% indicated that they believed most of the liter-
acy groundwork had been laid at primary school and literacy development was not the
concern of the secondary school teacher; 15% spoke English as an additional language at
home; 75% worked with students who spoke English as an additional language; and 80%
taught students who struggled to meet the academic demands of their subjects. These
graduates had all been trained in non-linguistic specializations, and their own disciplinary
‘consciousness’ (Bernstein, 1996) had been consolidated through their specialized under-
graduate study (and in many cases professional experience and postgraduate study) as artists,
scientists, historians, mathematicians, IT specialists and business people. There would
clearly be challenges in developing LPCK of any depth with these subject specialists,
especially given the brevity of the language and teaching course. However, we were heart-
ened by evidence presented in these TCs’ reflections on the literacy demands inherent in
their planning of a unit of work.

Planning for literacy in a unit of work

In the remainder of this paper, I want to illustrate the extent to which TCs across a range of
secondary disciplines were able, after a short six-week introduction to LPCK, to identify
the literacy demands inherent in a unit of work they had planned and to outline strategies
for supporting learning through literacy. None of these TCs had any undergraduate experi-
ence with language, literacy or linguistics prior to this course. Elyse, Claire, Felicity,
Bryce and Lilian taught in very different discipline areas, but they represent the capacities
of their peers to integrate important understandings about their role in supporting the content
learning of diverse groups of students through their knowledge of literacy. I am grateful to
them all for their generosity in making available here their reflections on their planning
346 K. Love

and teaching around literacy. In so doing, they illustrate how a little LPCK can provide a
strong foundation for subject specialists to further scaffold their diverse learners into the
advanced literacies required of their specializations. The extracts in the remainder of this
paper are taken from these five TCs’ reflective journals, from May–June 2008.

Solids, liquids and gases: literacy in Year 7 science

Elyse was teaching a unit on ‘Solids, liquids and gases’ to a group of Year 7 students, in
the very first semester of their apprenticeship into the ‘discourse community’ of secondary
science. While being supported in developing content knowledge, the students were
simultaneously being scaffolded into writing their first science reports, requiring as this
did an understanding of the particular purposes of practical reports, their structural fea-
tures, and their key language features. Elyse first engaged her students in the topic of
states of matter by getting them to produce ‘sticky putty’, a task that required them to read
and follow a written procedure. Given the linguistic diversity of students in her group, she
prepared them for this reading task by first explaining unfamiliar technical terms they
were likely to encounter, thus setting them up to produce the sticky putty successfully. Her
students would then identify the properties of the putty and consider whether it was a solid
or a liquid. Anticipating that as part of their final practical report, students would be
required to describe the states of matter in scientific rather than everyday discourse, Elyse
planned to scaffold her students into this construction by getting them to:

. . . brainstorm in small groups, a list of adjectives which describe solids and liquids. The term
adjective will be explained prior and an example given to model appropriate ‘describing
words’ to students. Using the subsequent adjective list, students will form their own definition
of a solid and a liquid by completing the sentence starter: ‘A solid/liquid is . . .’ and being told
to include three adjectives and one example. This technique gives students clear structure in
their writing and ensures that they include all necessary elements, thereby scaffolding them
into writing their own technical definitions. (Elyse, Reflective journal, May–June 2008)

Following this engagement activity, Elyse planned to move into a more explicit build-
ing knowledge stage, getting students to observe the properties of ice, water and steam as
solids, liquids and gases respectively, and then to read relevant sections of the textbook for
a scientific explanation of the conditions for each of these states. In scaffolding their com-
prehension of the text, Elyse explicitly taught her students how to skim and scan for relev-
ant information, in particular to ‘skim the headings, illustrations and first and last
sentences of each paragraph in order to establish what the text is about’. The selected text
was linguistically dense for Year 7 students and Elyse anticipated that students might have
difficulties with highly nominalized constructions such as ‘The reverse of melting is solid-
ification or freezing’. Towards this end, she drew on her knowledge of the four roles of the
reader (Freebody & Luke, 1990) and organized her students, in groups of four:

. . . to read the text as the ‘text decoder’, ‘meaning maker’, ‘text user’ or ‘text analyser’ – the
text decoder focusing on finding unknown words, and interpreting the visual information, the
meaning maker focusing on identifying and explaining new concepts, the text user deciding
how to use this information to answer the questions, and the text analyser considering how the
text might be biased in some way. Reading from a specific viewpoint focuses student reading,
and through subsequent group discussion and the development of a group data chart, students
can gain a deeper understanding of the text. As a whole class, a glossary of technical terms
will be established, and post-reading questions will be used to confirm that all students have
grasped the concepts presented. (Elyse, Reflective journal, May–June 2008)
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 347

In the next stage of the unit (referred to as the ‘Transformation’ stage in the language
and teaching course), the Year 7 students would use this acquired knowledge to complete
an experiment of their own on particles and states of matter. Again, Elyse planned the lit-
eracy components alongside the scientific content and, in particular, supported her stu-
dents extensively towards the written requirements of their final practical report:

The Transformation Stage presents the largest literacy challenges of this unit. Students are
asked to write their first practical report, and for many this is a daunting task. In order to assist
students in this, a strict report structure will be given, along with a modified model report.
After studying the structure, students will consider the terms ‘prediction’, ‘observation’,
‘inference’, ‘contrast’ and ‘compare’ used in the model report. They will complete a series of
worksheet activities in pairs to assist in their understanding of these terms, before returning to
the model report and highlighting in which sections these terms appear. In a following lesson,
students will use their acquired knowledge to construct their own model report in pairs, by
placing in order a second model report whose sections are in disarray. Students will then be
given a copy of the assessment criteria and list of compulsory key terms, before completing
the experiment and writing their own individual reports. The Transformation Stage has been
designed to reflect a deconstruction, joint construction and finally an independent construc-
tion of texts so as to scaffold students through this activity, and every effort has been made to
provide a clear report structure designed to support students through their assessed writing
task. (Elyse, Reflective journal, May–June 2008)

Elyse’s literacy-informed understanding of scaffolding is evident here as she plans

around the supporting processes of deconstruction, modelling and joint construction,
before requiring her students to independently construct a written scientific report. Her
assessment strategy also articulates with this carefully scaffolded approach to writing a
practical report, as indicated in her planning for the final two stages of the learning/teach-
ing cycle used in the language and teaching course:

Finally, in the Presentation and Reflection Stages, students will be asked to submit their reports to
the teacher for assessment and feedback. Reports will only be assessed on use of the model struc-
ture, and inclusion and understanding of listed compulsory key terms, in order to maximise the
chances of students mastering these base-elements and receiving positive feedback on their first
practical reports. Students will also be asked to reflect on their learning so far, by engaging in a
class discussion, and by finishing the sentence: ‘I have learnt . . .’ on pieces of coloured card for
display around the classroom – in this way again, student writing is scaffolded and given direction.
(Elyse, Reflective journal, May–June 2008)

Elyse’s reflections indicate her clear-sighted ability to scaffold her Year 7 students
into the reading and writing requirements of science, thus apprenticing them, through a
more explicit awareness of the linguistic and structural elements of science reports, into
the discourse and specialized forms of reasoning required for success in high school sci-
ence. In the same way, TCs specializing in a range of other discipline areas have demon-
strated their capacities, after a relatively brief introductory course, to identify the literacy
demands inherent in the planning of a unit of work, and thus support their students into
specialized content knowledge through understanding of language. The discourses of art,
for example, are often seen as very different to those of science, and indeed the required
written genres reflect the distinctive and specialized purposes of each discipline.

Techniques of enamelling: literacy in Year 9 art

Claire planned to introduce her Year 9 jewellery students to the technique of enamelling,
with colour theory as a secondary focus. In the unit, the students would design and produce
348 K. Love

one enamelled pendant that uses at least two different colour enamels and would complete
three writing tasks. Claire anticipated that many students in her highly diverse group
(many were refugees from the Horn of Africa) would not know what enamelling is, that
many technical terms used in the unit would be foreign to the students, and that she would
need to prepare a glossary and explanation of these terms. Like Elyse, Claire is able to
identify how she would support her students in writing the three rather different genres
required in this unit, with their particular linguistic features. She also used the five stages
of the learning/teaching cycle for staging her planning.
In the engagement stage, Claire planned to show students samples of enamel work,
including an example of the type of pendant the students would create, then discuss the
physical qualities of enamel together, with responses being recorded on the whiteboard as
a support for the subsequent writing task. In the building knowledge stage, where she
sought to extend students’ knowledge, Claire had designed an enamelling project booklet
to support students’ learning. She recognized the generic complexity of this booklet as:

. . . a multi-genre text containing explanations, an historical recount, a map, images, diagrams

and instructions. To support students in their role as decoders and meaning-makers of the
various texts within the booklet, it will be necessary to go through the booklet with the class
and make the purpose of each section of text transparent through oral instruction and discus-
sion. For example, some students may need to be told that the ‘Brief History’ page provides
an historical recount of the origins of enamelling. The map on this page showing the Byzan-
tine Empire in 565AD may need quite a bit of decoding for some students who may not be
familiar with the conventions used. (Claire, Reflective journal, May–June 2008)

As part of their larger project, Claire’s students would have to write three different
genres, and she provided specific reading and writing support for each. The first was a
short descriptive report on the physical qualities of enamel, and Claire scaffolded this by
drawing on the whiteboard recording of the class discussion earlier. The second writing
task was a written explanation for why students chose certain enamel colours to use in the
design of their enamelled pendant, and Claire modelled the writing requirements by:

. . . using my sample enamelled pendant which contains green and blue enamel to explain the
reasoning behind my decision to use these colours. I will write my explanation on the white-
board to demonstrate a key feature of explanatory text that I expect the students to use –
causal connectives. My model text might look something like this: “My pendant design con-
tains imagery of foliage. I associate foliage with the colour green therefore I have decided to
use green enamel to depict the foliage. (Claire, Reflective journal, May–June 2008)

Claire’s awareness, not only of the generic structure of written explanations but of the
importance of linguistic elements, such as causal connectives in helping such texts achieve
their purpose, would be invaluable as she models what have often been invisible features
of such texts. For their third writing task, Claire’s students are to record a set of instruc-
tions for each step in the process of creating their own enamelled pendant. Claire does not
presume that her students are expert instructional text writers yet, and she supports them
by providing a chart which divides the steps of the enamelling process into stages – prepa-
ration, firing and after firing – and a section to record which tools are used at each step.
This, along with a glossary that allows them to check their spellings and understandings of
technical terms, will offer a very real scaffold for her students in organizing their own
writing of procedural texts. In these and other ways, Claire, an artist with no prior experi-
ence with literacy prior to this course, has demonstrated a LPCK that will go a long way in
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 349

supporting her diverse group of students as they continue to engage with the specialized
spoken and written discourse of high school art.

Linear equations: literacy in Year 9 mathematics

In that one morning, Claire’s Year 9 students could conceivably move straight from their
art class to a mathematics lesson, with its very different set of content demands, forms of
reasoning and discourse structures. Here too, key literacy demands have often remained
invisible, especially for the migrant and refugee students being taught by TCs like Felicity
below. As a mathematician, Felicity had no background in linguistics or literacy prior to
the language and teaching programme, yet was able to make explicit the role of spoken
and written language in learning as she designed a unit of work in mathematics:

Whilst the role of literacy in supporting learning in a Year 9 maths lesson sequence on linear
equations may not be immediately apparent, it plays a critical part in enabling students to
develop an improved understanding of the topic. Mathematics is a subject with a fairly unique
discourse and hence the language and literacy demands can be quite exhaustive for students
when attempting to gain proficiency in mathematical concepts. (Felicity, Reflective journal,
May–June 2008)

As the final stage in their learning about linear equations, Felicity’s students would be
required to produce two key written genres – a mathematical account of a series of given
equations and a procedural recount outlining the steps they had undertaken in solving a
number of linear equations. Producing these written genres would require her students to
simultaneously understand the structures and demands of two semiotic systems – the
mathematical and the verbal. To support them in producing these final products, Felicity
first planned to engage her students’ interests in the topic of linear equations by using a
scale and weights to visually demonstrate the concept of balance. This and subsequent dis-
cussions would:

. . . scaffold the connection between their visual understanding of equivalence and the alge-
braic representation of that same concept, since in mathematics, algebraic and symbolic rep-
resentations are seen to constitute a type of literacy in which students must become proficient.
By writing a balanced linear equation on the board and drawing parallels between students’
everyday language and the mathematical terminology, students would be supported in decod-
ing the meaning behind new mathematical terms and expressions. This would also assist in
their reading comprehension of mathematical texts. In addition, the activity would reveal the
existing proficiency level of students’ mathematical language and symbolic understanding
and would impact on the attention given to its development in future lessons. (Felicity,
Reflective journal, May–June 2008)

This engagement activity provided Felicity with a means of diagnosing students’

understandings of algebraic concepts (e.g., the meaning of brackets), and provided a plat-
form on which to build understandings of increasingly more complex equations. Felicity
recognized the centrality of students’ understanding of key process words in their compre-
hension of the exercises in the handout and has them underline key words describing the
mathematical action to be undertaken, for example, ‘solve’ or ‘write an equation’. Much
of the recent research into the linguistic demands of mathematics (see Huang & Norman-
dia, 2008; O’Halloran, 2003) indicates that understanding what is required of them
through process words like these is an almost insurmountable challenge for some students,
particularly those from cultural or language backgrounds where such terminology is not
350 K. Love

part of their everyday discourse. Studies done in some Australian Aboriginal communi-
ties, in particular, have found that it is only through teachers’ careful deconstruction of the
cognitive demands inherent in mathematical word problems that Aboriginal students are
assisted in accessing the mathematics ‘hidden inside’ (Parkin & Hayes, 2006, p. 34).
Mindful of these and other challenges posed by the highly nominalized and abstract lan-
guage forms discussed earlier in this paper, Felicity prepares her students to write their
mathematical account by focusing on ‘the language features of typical worded equations’,
using a ‘jumbled maths activity’ where students have to match worded procedural steps
for linear equations with their associated algebraic representations:

By recording on separate pieces of paper each verbal phrase that contains discrete mathematical
information, such as ‘A number Y’, ‘in its negative form’, ‘is multiplied by four’, ‘to get a res-
ult’, ‘of negative thirty two’, and the equivalent consecutive algebraic steps (‘y’, ‘−y’, ‘4y’, ‘=’,
‘4y = −32’), students are able to review the language features of worded equations (e.g., the use
of the present tense), the generic structure or sequencing of information in these equations, and
the technical terminology. This explicit deconstruction and analysis of the text support the stu-
dents in producing their own worded equations. (Felicity, Reflective journal, May–June 2008)

In a climate where reform-oriented mathematics is making particular demands on ado-

lescents’ language proficiencies, Felicity is well-positioned to support her students in par-
ticipating in the verbal and written discourses of the various genres of mathematics,
including explaining solution processes, describing conjectures, proving conclusions and
presenting arguments.

LPCK and advanced literacies

Across the cohort of 300 TCs, the vast majority demonstrated similar awareness of how
language, both spoken and written, mediates the development of important forms of disci-
plinary reasoning, and about language strategies for supporting secondary students in
ways that might avoid the high incidences of disengagement with schooling documented
earlier. For example, Bryce, in a history unit on the topic of World War I was able to support
his diverse group of Year 9 students firstly to comprehend and produce the more accessible
story-like genres of autobiographical recounts (of a soldier on the Western Front), and sec-
ondly to build their more detailed historical accounts of the war where they would elaborate
on the chronological details by explaining the factors that contributed to particular outcomes.
These were two of the genres of history identified by Coffin (2006), who sees the increased
sophistication of thinking and writing about history as a movement from history as narrative
(through a process where time is ‘dismantled’) to a concern with explaining and arguing his-
tory. This shift from thinking, reading and writing about history as a story, to history as a set
of issues to be explained and argued about (outlined in Table 2) is generally not made
explicit or even understood by secondary school teachers, often causing more fragile learn-
ers, and in particular the cohorts of ESL students described above, a great deal of confusion.
Bryce could likewise recognize that highly abstract terms such as ‘alliances’, ‘imperi-
alism’, ‘militarism’ and ‘nationalism’ would present reading challenges for his diverse
groups of learners. One of his teaching strategies was to explain the abstract concepts con-
tained in the nominalization ‘the growth of nationalism’ using more spoken-like forms
such as: ‘Some countries or nations started to think of themselves as distinctive from other
countries’. In teaching a unit on the Chinese Revolution in the senior history curriculum,
another TC, Lilian, could support her students into the even more sophisticated tasks of
interpreting and arguing as well as chronicling historical phenomena (see Table 2). For
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 351

Table 2. Generic requirements of school history (adapted from Unsworth, 2000, p. 248).
Text type
Chronicling history Autobiographical recount
Biographical recount
Historical recount
Reporting history Descriptive report
Taxonomic report
Historical account
Explaining history Factorial explanation
Consequential
explanation
Arguing history Analytical exposition
Analytical discussion
Challenge
Social purpose
To retell the events of your own life
To retell the events of a person’s life
To retell events in the past, not
necessarily of a person
To give information about the way
things are or were
To organize knowledge into taxonomy
To account for why events happened in
a particular sequence
To explain the reasons or factors that
contribute to a particular outcome
To explain the effects or consequences
of a situation
To put forward a point of view
To argue the case from two or more
points of view
To argue against a view

their exams, her students were required to write an analytical exposition where they must
take a position about Empress Cixi’s role in bringing about the revolution. The historical
texts they read and evaluated (such as the one on the Boxer Rebellion used earlier in this
paper) were laden with the abstract, technical and highly nominalized lexis of historical
enquiry and critique. In such texts, various historians make more or less explicit judg-
ments about the people and events in history, and Lilian built into her lesson plan ways of
supporting her students to navigate their way through this complex language of evaluation.
The capacity of Lilian, Bryce, Felicity, Claire and Elyse to reflect systematically on
literacy and disciplinary content is representative of the Master of Teaching cohort,
despite the brevity of the programme. In a formal questionnaire distributed at the end of
their first semester (n = 191; submission was anonymous and voluntary), TCs indicated
their beliefs about the importance of their knowledge of language and literacy, both before
and after the course. By the end of the course, 95% of TCs indicated that they perceived
themselves as having significant responsibility for supporting learning through literacy.
This recognition of their critical roles in supporting the advanced literacy practices
required in the secondary school curriculum suggests that this cohort have a strong attitu-
dinal platform, as well as a workable LPCK on which to continue to build, as they move
more autonomously into the professional community.

Conclusion
So, how effectively will TCs maintain these attitudes and translate the LPCK learned over
such a short component of their pre-service preparation into their active professional
knowledge and practice? It is well understood (see Freeman, 2002; Johnson, 2006) that
the extent to which teachers absorb externally produced ‘expert’ knowledge depends on
complex factors such as the context of the teaching, the perceived relevance of the ‘expert’
knowledge, the degree of autonomy available, the opportunities for sustained professional
development, and the presence or absence of a like-minded professional community. In
the clinical conditions of their preparation as master teachers, these TCs have been able to
incorporate previously alien knowledge about language into their professional repertoires,
352 K. Love

as evidenced in the reflections on their pedagogical planning and practice. If their reported
beliefs are any indication to go on, it appears that even after a relatively short clinically
focused programme, prospective teachers can develop valuable and potentially transferable
insights on the important role of oral language in disciplinary learning. It remains to be
seen how resilient this LPKC will be as these TCs deal with diverse institutional chal-
lenges in their ongoing teaching contexts.
These institutional obstacles are much cited in recent research, highlighting secondary
teachers’ traditionally strong resistance to incorporating language and literacy practices in
their teaching. More than a decade ago, O’Brien, Stewart, and Moje (1995) noted that both
in schools and in teacher preparation programmes, struggles around limited resources and
territory contributed to this resistance as so-called high status subjects (such as mathematics
and science) protected their rights, privileges and power by actively working to maintain
conceptions of their subjects as distinct, difficult and important. Ironically, even English
teachers subscribed to this view, arguing that literacy is not the preserve of the high school
English teacher and that a focus on literacy would dilute the academic content of secondary
English (Moje, Dillon, & O’Brien, 2000). In a programmatic attempt to mainstream content
literacy in New Zealand schools, May and Wright (2007) indicated that a significant chal-
lenge was the ‘(re)emergence of high stakes testing, and the pre-occupation with a narrow
technicist view of literacy, alongside an increasingly rigid compartmentalisation of curricula
and the related de-skilling of the teaching profession’ (p. 372). Their project targeted key
participants at classroom, faculty and school administrative levels, and concluded that a pro-
found institutional change was both urgent and achievable, if properly resourced.
Such authoritative and empirically-based recommendations echo many made since
David Corson (1990) argued that teachers’ content area knowledge of the fundamental
role of spoken and written language in learning should be ‘an integral and necessary part
of the administrative and curriculum practices of modern schools’ (p. 1). More recently,
extensive and authoritative reports in the US (see Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008, for an
overview) and in Australia (see Luke & Elkins, 2003) have proposed even more program-
matic strategies to support adolescents’ subject-specific literacy skills, strategies that are
responsive to individual learners and communities and that address some of the institu-
tional constraints mentioned above.
In the context of the Master of Teaching programme reported in this paper, there is
considerable optimism that the literacy expertise of TCs is recognized by their mentors in
their ongoing clinical practice. An unmediated survey sent to schools at the end of the first
semester asked supervising teachers, student-teacher co-ordinators and principals to rate
the standard of achievement of the master of teaching candidates on 14 indicators, one of
which was their ‘ability to address students’ literacy development’. Of 63 respondents on
this indicator, 43 indicated that the TCs they supervised were advanced for this stage of
their course. This suggests that the TCs’ awareness of language and its role in content lit-
eracy has been at least partially evidenced in their ongoing practice. The problem of
‘enactment’ (Kennedy, 1999, as cited in Darling-Hammond, 2006, p. 35) has to some
extent been addressed, in that TCs have been able to apply their literacy pedagogic content
knowledge in the complex ongoing contexts of real classrooms, which every week make
multiple demands on their own learning about content literacy.
Their mentors’ recognition of TCs’ knowledge of the role of literacy in learning comes
at a time when schools themselves are seeking ways to change cultural attitudes towards
content literacy. These mentors and supervising teachers, without formal training in the
literacy demands of their disciplines, have themselves struggled with infusing content lit-
eracy into their teaching (O’Brien, Stewart, & Moje, 1995). It may be that educating a new
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 353

generation of subject specialists in LPCK represents a better investment by governments

and policy makers in their attempts to raise educators’ consciousness about issues of stu-
dent literacy achievement. Such an investment will ideally ensure that better informed and
more diffused responsibility will be assumed by secondary teachers for developing what
we now know as the advanced literacies required for success across the years of schooling.
Such an investment in prospective teachers is a crucial means of supporting the diverse
groups of secondary students who represent the so-called ‘at risk’ literacy tail. I will leave
Liz with the last word, since the potential impact of her learning about content literacy on
her own practice with diverse learners, but possibly also her mentor’s pedagogy, offers
some optimism that a cultural change is imminent. This is an extract from an email Liz
sent six months after she had completed the language and teaching course:

I’m teaching drama at the moment and my supervisor really doesn’t see the value in scaffold-
ing literacy tasks into her curriculum as much as I now do. I told her about how they could
help all of the kids and tried a few out, and they worked so well! The senior drama students
were doing their school assessed tasks and they couldn’t understand the metalanguage of the
discipline, nor what their outcome questions were asking them to do. So I ran through on the
board the words in the questions and what they meant and used examples for them. I was
scared that perhaps I hadn’t really made that big a deal but most of the kids expressed their
relief at now knowing how to understand something I really took for granted. I’ve now started
really thinking about the words I use in other assignments and making sure I run through with
the kids how to understand and use the language and now we practice it more in class. My
supervisor thanked me for helping her!!! It is amazing the way language can affect your life,
especially at the school I am in, with a lot of refugee and Sudanese kids especially, they have
so much trouble and it makes me proud to see how well they are doing and how much more
they get out of the drama lessons. (Liz, personal communication, 6 December 2008)

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