Making the links: literacy across learning areas in secondary school settings

• This is a valuable resource for secondary schools implementing the Literacy general capability across all learning areas in the middle years (7-9). It highlights the concerns of subject teachers about students' spelling, word knowledge, vocabulary development and students' capacity to comprehend and create learning area texts. It identifies two critical factors for a sustainable literacy across the curriculum strategy. The first is an acceptance that literacy knowledge, including spelling, vocabulary development and reading comprehension, will enhance subject knowledge. The second is that organisational conditions ensure that these dimensions of literacy are taken up by all learning area teachers.
• The Results, Lessons learned and Next steps sections of the resource are particularly useful in highlighting what schools need to attend to for their students to progress to the upper levels of all the learning continuums in the Literacy general capability. Teachers need long-term mentoring support to develop a deep understanding of the developmental aspect of spelling and word knowledge, explore the links between vocabulary knowledge and comprehension, and provide students with explicit support in building and applying word knowledge. The resource also identifies a major challenge in that some learning area teachers see literacy pedagogy as incompatible with subject pedagogy.

7; 8; 9