Literacy

At Melba Copland Secondary School in Canberra, the library has been improving students' connection to recreational reading through an innovative program that allows students to select the books the library purchases. In this photo story, Teacher Librarian Mali Jorm shares how the program operates and the impact on student borrowing rates.

School strategic priorities such as improving literacy and numeracy outcomes involve all staff. In this reader submission, art teacher Kerry Kaskamanidis shares how she responded to a whole-school focus on literacy by building a partnership with a local art museum.

How can we support reading aloud in the early years, at school and at home? And how does reading aloud affect our lives in the long term? Today, we’ll be speaking with Professor Emerita Rosemary Johnston AM, who shares some of the research on the benefits and joys of reading aloud and how we can continue to support reading aloud at school and at home.

Home support of children’s literacy skills in the early years is a well-known indicator of their reading progress at the start of school. A new study has explored how different reading experiences at home have an impact on children’s continued reading development at school.

Readers often get in touch with Teacher to share how their school is making a difference to student outcomes. New South Wales educator Mary Semaan contacted us recently to talk about how the teaching and leadership team at Al Sadiq College has been working to improve primary students’ writing skills.

Season three of award-winning animated series Little J & Big Cuz features the very first Kriol episodes translated by students at Ngukurr School in the Katherine Region of the Northern Territory, as part of a real-world school education project.

Children’s experiences inform the development of their vocabulary and, subsequently, how they view the world around them. As we head into the third year of pandemic challenges and restrictions, interesting themes have continued to emerge through students’ writing.

With Term 1 just around the corner in Australia, it’s a great time to start brainstorming events and themes to tie in to your lesson planning for the new school year. We’ve rounded up some of the key dates in each term to help get you started.

A secondary school English teacher in Maryland, United States, who is passionate about supporting low-income students to access tertiary education has just been named the 2021 winner of the US $1 million Global Teacher Prize. In this article, we share the impact she’s having in her community.

What are the future directions of teaching writing? Do students write differently when supported by ICT? And, how often do teachers teach writing? In this edition of Researching education: Five further readings, we’re sharing resources on the topic of teaching writing that seek to answer these questions.