Reading to Learn: Powerful pedagogy for disciplinary teaching in a high-stakes examination curriculum

Authors

  • Claire Acevedo Open University, United Kingdom

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1344/did.2023.14.30-53

Keywords:

genre pedagogy, disciplinary reading and writing, Reading to Learn, Systemic Functional Linguistics, teacher training

Abstract

The qualitative study presented here shows how a secondary school history teacher in the United Kingdom transformed her lesson planning and classroom interactions with students following professional development in the genre-based Reading to Learn pedagogy grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics. The teacher undertook Reading to Learn while teaching a history class preparing for the General Certificate of Secondary Education. The professional development enabled her to analyse the genres and linguistic features of history texts in order to support the development of subject knowledge via the implementation of the teaching strategies designed to support student reading and writing of the texts required by the examination curriculum. The study reporting on the teacher planning and classroom practices includes examples of teacher-student interaction that demonstrate how the teacher was able to approach her disciplinary texts through the lens of genre, thus identifying the existing gap between the reading of informative genres in textbooks and the requirement to write in less familiar evaluative genres in exams. Moreover, the careful planning of strategies to support reading and the annotation of texts, had a positive impact on the joint construction of the less familiar argumentative genre required.

Author Biography

Claire Acevedo, Open University, United Kingdom

Claire Acevedo is an Australian educator now based in the United Kingdom where she is an affiliated researcher in Language and Literacies at The Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology (CREET) at the Open University. She concurrently provides educational services to schools and education sectors across Europe and South America where she leads professional development (in English, Spanish and Swedish). She is experienced in using Systemic Functional Linguistics via ‘Sydney School’ genre pedagogy to improve reading and writing outcomes for under achieving students in all areas of the school curriculum. She has collaborated with Dr David Rose, University of Sydney, over two decades on the latest research into genre-based reading and she specializes in delivering Reading to Learn literacy acceleration professional development to teachers and teacher educators. She is the co-founder and deputy chair of Reading for Life (http://reading4life.org) a non-profit association that promotes social justice in society and equity in education all over the world.

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Published

2023-10-30

Issue

No. 14 (2023)

Section

Monographic section

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Claire Acevedo

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