High-challenge teaching for senior English as an Additional Language learners in times

of change.

By Jennifer Alford and Anita Jetnikoff

Abstract:
This paper will present a brief overview of the recent shifts within English and EAL/D
(English as an additional language/dialect) curriculum documents and their focus on critical
literacy, using the Queensland context as a case in point. The English syllabus landscape in
Queensland has continued to morph in recent years. From 2002 to 2009, teachers of senior
English and English as an Additional Language (EAL/D) have witnessed no less than four
separate syllabus documents that impact on their daily work. The Australian Curriculum,
when finally implemented, will also require teachers to navigate through and grapple with its
particular obligations and affordances. The combined effect of the shifts and tensions between
recent policy documents has led to confusion about exactly how to cater for EAL/D learners
in mainstream English. We discuss the possible effects of this on teachers as the agents of
policy implementation and argue that in spite of such contradictions, EAL/D teachers can
productively use syllabus frameworks to craft pedagogy to cater for their EAL/D learners’
language and literacy needs. Following this, we present aspects of the teaching practice of
four teachers of senior EAL/D, who provide intellectually-engaging, critical literacy
pedagogy that takes into account the language proficiency level of their learners, within the
required curriculum. Such practice provides teachers with valuable pedagogic possibilities to
meet EAL/D learners’ needs within continually varying policy terrain.

In this paper, we share practice that responds directly to the needs of senior EAL/D
(English as an additional language/dialect) students, in light of the myriad of policy
documents that recommend teachers cater for the needs of EAL/D learners in English
classrooms. It is not a simple picture, but in a social and political climate where ‘high equity,
high quality’ rhetoric is commonly discussed, (MCEETYA, 2008) mainstream teachers are
frequently no more equipped to deal with EAL/D students’ specific needs than when they
were initially trained. ‘Training’ or preparing to be an English teacher in previous generations
did not include specialist EAL/D training. In university pre-service teaching courses today,
tertiary educators are endeavouring to make new teachers more ‘EAL/D aware’ and there is
currently a resurging interest in pre-service teachers training as EAL/D specialists (Lucas &
Grinberg, 2008).

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 Against a backdrop of increasing responsibility for teachers to ‘implement’ the state
and now the national curriculum, we scrutinise various Syllabus and policy documents for
how they foreground one aspect of the teaching of senior English. Our specific focus is on
critical literacy concepts, using the Queensland context as a case in point. Critical literacy is
our chosen focus as it is an obvious dimension of high challenge English teaching, and
because some teachers have found this feature of literacy programs problematic with EAL/D
learners (Alford, 2001). ‘Critical literacy’ is defined as questioning the naturalised
assumptions within literacy -“its truth, its discourses and its attendant practices” (Janks, 2010,
p. 13). It involves teaching students how to examine texts and the semiotic choices that go
into their construction, to reveal power relations and ideologically-motivated reader
positioning. As most policy documents are rhetorical and offer aims and guidelines rather
than nuts and bolts strategies for teaching, we then offer some examples of effective
pedagogy drawn from interview and video data from four practising teachers of EAL/D
collected over the course of one year (2010). As the teachers in this paper demonstrate, it is
possible to engage EAL/D learners with higher order thinking 1 practices such as critical
literacy, rather than confine them to merely ‘functional’ English pedagogy. This paper offers
a pedagogical lifeline to those who have inherited an EAL/D program but who are not EAL/D
specialists.

EAL/D learners, teachers, and the current Australian English curriculum documents.
EAL/D learners comprise a significant proportion of student populations in schools.
For example, currently in Queensland, over 3000 migrant and refugee-background students
are eligible for funded EAL/D support (Education Queensland ESL Database, 2010). This
group also includes rural, remote and urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students,
and LBOTE (Language Background Other than English) students. Many of these find their
way into mainstream classrooms for a host of localised, institutional reasons. These include:
insufficient numbers in one school to warrant the employment of an EAL/D teacher; or the
student is deemed to have reached a satisfactory level of proficiency in English, despite still
requiring considerable assistance with academic English. Nationally, there were also 24, 278
international students enrolled in schools in 2010 with Queensland schools hosting
approximately twenty percent of these students (AEI, 2011). These cohorts are spread across
the whole range of educational sectors in state, catholic and independent schools. Many of
these students are in mainstream classes with teachers who are not specifically EAL/D
1
The authors are aware of the distinction between ‘critical thinking’ and ‘critical literacy’ (Janks, 2010;
Cervetti et al. 2001) and do not conflate the two. We argue that high challenge learning requires thinking at the
higher order end of the spectrum (e.g., analysing, evaluating and designing) and that critical literacy can provide
one avenue for doing so in the English classroom.
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trained. In addition, many English teachers in Queensland find themselves fronting whole
classes of EAL/D learners because there are not enough specialist EAL/D teachers to teach
the new Senior English for EAL/D (2009) syllabus. With the ACARA model echoing this
separate strand for EAL/D across Australia, the shortage of trained EAL/D teachers will also
arise. Notably, the original 2007 version of the Queensland Senior English for EAL/D
syllabus was redrafted with a reduced focus on language, without consultation with the expert
teachers of EAL/D who wrote it, in order for mainstream English teachers to be able to
implement it. This raises the question of who is the syllabus written for – the students and
their language needs or the human resources available to enact it? The current milieu places
the onus on education authorities to provide effective professional development in EAL/D
awareness. Workshops for teachers providing theory and practical strategies about EAL/D
learners in the mainstream have been sadly lacking over the past decade and need to be
urgently reinvigorated.
Given that the F-10 mainstream English course (ACARA, 2010a) renders EAL/D
largely invisible, the anomaly is that those EAL/D and LBOTE learners who make it through
the junior curriculum are entitled to the option of a ‘special’ EAL/D course in senior under the
current Queensland and ACARA frameworks. This raises some significant questions. First,
who will be teaching the national senior EAL/D course? If Queensland, which currently has a
separate senior EAL/D course, can be seen as an example, then these courses will often be
taught by mainstream teachers who may be EAL/D-aware but are not trained as EAL/D
specialist teachers. Second, how do teachers cater for those students who are not eligible for
EAL/D funding, such as LBOTE students who have been here for longer than 5 yrs? Such
students may not undertake the EAL/D course and may therefore be at a disadvantage in
either the English (for mainstream learners) course or the English Essentials course. We know
that although they might master interpersonal language quite quickly, it often takes EAL/D
students up to 7 years to master cognitive and academic language (Cummins, 2003).
Furthermore, LBOTE students may appear accent free, but still struggle with academic
English. Significantly in Queensland LBOTE Students are now provided with support
funding along with EAL/D students. The national position emphasises the range of EAL/D
learners and their needs but how this translates into more localised contexts is our interest.
EAL/D learners’ needs were first mentioned in an earlier version of the Australian
English curriculum document (ACARA, 2009a) in a generic way, however responding to
feedback from associations and teachers, the latest iteration of the curriculum recognises
EAL/D learners more specifically:

3
 EAL/D learners are simultaneously learning a new language and the
knowledge, understanding and skills of the English curriculum through
that new language. They require additional time and support, along with
informed teaching that explicitly addresses their language needs, and
assessments that take into account their developing language
proficiency. A national EAL/D document is being produced that will
support the Australian Curriculum. It will provide a description of how
language proficiency develops, and ….will allow English teachers to
identify the language levels of the EAL/D learners in their classrooms
and to address their specific learning requirements when teaching,
ensuring equity of access to the English learning area (ACARA,
2010b).
While this EAL/D reference document is a welcome acknowledgement of the
importance of language acquisition, the above statement positions the individual teacher as
ultimately responsible for the provision of targeted and explicit support for EAL/D learners.
This situation may escalate the work load and the multiple roles of the English teacher, who is
now expected to be an EAL/D specialist as well. As Clarence and Brennan (2010) argue:
....the [ACARA English] documents reveal... a particular imaginary
of the “teacher” who is to “implement” rather than co-produce
curriculum, where curriculum is reductively treated as largely a
matter of content sequencing. In turn, this further reduces the work
of teaching such that the ‘relations of ruling’ which are put in place
fail to recognise the complexity of the curriculum work involved
for the teacher. (Clarence & Brennan, 2010, p. 2)
This could easily lead to teachers bearing the blame for student failure, unless specific federal
and state policy is created to ensure English teachers are provided with meaningful
professional development in EAL/D pedagogy.
The most recent draft of the ACARA Senior English document (Nov, 2010) describes
a separate course in senior for EAL/D learners. The Australian Council of TESOL
Associations (ACTA) responded to the ACARA, EAL/D framework and has noted many
challenges arising from the proposed separate EAL/D course strand, including that not all
EAL/D students will be eligible for entry into the course. Enrolments will be left up to
schools. It is also unclear whether or not this EAL/D course will be substantial enough in
terms of English for academic purposes to prepare students for entry into university or further
educational institutions. In other words, it may not be on parity with the mainstream English

4
course in anything other than content; which seems less than adequate for the needs of EAL/D
students (ACTA, 2010). That the EAL/D course is rigorous enough to be on parity is
important in the light of goal two of the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for
Young Australians (MCEETYA, 2008): where, “all young Australians should have essential
skills in literacy... and be able to think deeply and logically as a result of studying
fundamental disciplines” and “be on a successful pathway towards further education, training
or employment” (MCEETYA, 2008, pp. 8. and 9). As the ACTA response to the ACARA
document notes, the existing EAL/D courses on offered in the states and territories:
...aim to extend and refine language acquisition and academic skills of
students with extremely disparate educational backgrounds and levels of
knowledge of English through a wide variety of text types and genre.
These ESL/D and EAL/D courses teach English through pedagogy that is
not solely based on the study of literary texts. EAL/D learners have
different needs to students studying English; they require different
pedagogy, different (negotiable) texts, and different assessment tasks.
(ACTA, 2010 p. 16)
The current iteration of the senior years’ English program in Queensland resembles
the ACARA framework in that it offers four separate courses: English; English as an
Additional Language; Literature; and English Essentials. At this point, it is unclear how the
English course will differ from the EAL/D and the Essentials course. The current senior
Queensland model also has four ‘strands’ or courses: English (2010), English Extension
(Literature) (2010), English for ESL Learners (2007, amended 2009) and Functional English
Study Area Specification (2006). In Qld, the first three of these courses allow university
entry, whilst the last one offers a pathway to TAFE only.

The Qld context as a case in point

Amidst serious bargaining over various approaches to literacy in Australia at present,
Comber (2001) reminds us that, “what counts as … literacy varies in relation to competing
ideologies, discourses and cultural practices” (Comber 2001, p. 277 ). Such a context is
currently driven by corporate and disciplinary discourses that insist on reporting, assessment
metrics and the standardisation of assessment (Comber & Nixon, 2009). Comber and Nixon
(2009) argue that teachers’ talk about their pedagogic work takes a back seat role in relation
to the bureaucratic processes that now dominate teachers’ everyday lives. Their research in
ten South Australian middle schools in low socio-economic areas found that teachers
“downplay their professional knowledge, judgement and practice with respect to student

5
learning” (2009, p. 338) in order to meet managerialist discourse requirements. This has
significant implications for teachers’ pedagogy. “Increasingly, it needs to be acknowledged
that the room to move, whilst still considerable in Australian schools, is lessening, and that
the disciplining of public education by government mandates is taking a toll” (Comber &
Nixon 2009, p. 344). The ever-shifting nature and requirements of English syllabus
documents, as we report here in this paper, is evidence of these government mandates. One
beginning Queensland EAL/D/ English teacher reports the consequent confusion at the
chalkface:
I went to a conference and they basically dropped the new syllabus
[English for ESL Learners, 2009] on us, and there was such an outcry
because... one syllabus was amended within a month of that new syllabus
coming up. And it was crazy... trying to keep up with it all...all of a sudden
there were three different sets of criteria sheets floating around, and
figuring out which was which, and which one came from the amended
version, and which came from the amended, amended version...
Two senior teachers of EAL/D also commented on the alarming lack of consultation and
collaboration that occurred around the publication of this amended syllabus. A signifcant
difference in the syllabus documents was the alteration of the wording to conceal critical
concepts.
The ways in which the Queensland syllabus documents have framed critical literacy
approaches in senior English have varied considerably since 2002. The 2002 Senior English
syllabus (QSA, 2002) contained a strong critical dimension based on Freebody and Luke’s
(1990) four Roles of Literate Practice model. The critical study of language was one of three
framing categories (operational, cultural and critical) and key foci within the critical
dimension included the “constructedness” of texts, ideological assumptions in texts,
representations/silences and reader positions. Revised in 2008, the next version saw the
critical dimension diminished with greater focus on literary appreciation and functional skills
development. Critical literacy was defined (in an appendix) as one of a range of sometimes
contradictory approaches teachers might optionally use, including literary criticism and
critical literacy. The 2010 revision of the mainstream Senior Syllabus remedied this to some
extent, with the “making and evaluating meaning’ replacing “text constructedness”. EAL
learners were taught from the mainstream syllabus with no curriculum differentiation, despite
their unique needs until 2007. After much lobbying by teachers of EAL/D, the first senior
English syllabus specifically for EAL/D learners was devised (QSA, 2007). This document
framed the study of English according to three strands: Academic English, Literature and

6
Media. While focussing on genre pedagogy and the teaching of functional skills, it did
mandate ‘critical reading’ to be a focus of all units (QSA, 2007 p. 11). The notion of critical
reading in this document drew on the understandings of critical literacy as explained above
(QSA, 2002). The revised document, hastily prepared by the QSA to align with the 2008
mainstream syllabus, appeared in 2009 (QSA, 2009). The critical dimension of language
study was recast in general terms like “analyse” and “evaluate” with no reference to earlier
versions of critical literacy; yet work program requirements still stipulated ‘critical reading’
be included in each unit. In the draft senior secondary Australian Curriculum for English
document (ACARA, 2011), critical literacy as a term is not used. There is, however, potential
to critically evaluate texts within any of the four units: language, texts and context;
representation; making connections; and perspectives, which run across the four ACARA
courses.
As the overview above illustrates, English and EAL/D teachers have been
experiencing rapid and significant change in the policies that guide their daily work. The
question for English teachers then is: how do we now continue to ‘move’ pedagogically –
designing responsive, inclusive and intellectually engaging curriculum (Comber & Nixon,
2009) for EAL/D learners?

High-challenge teachers for EAL/Ds - four teachers show us how:

According to Cross’s survey of 52 ESL teachers in Victorian high schools (2011),
higher order thinking should be a clear focus for ESL learners. High-challenge teaching, in
order to avoid ‘dumbing down’ the curriculum for EAL/D learners requires high levels of
support (Hammond, 2006: Hammond, 2008) but it is not always clear what type of pedagogy
will ensure this happens. The following exemplary practice comes from data that were
gathered as part of a large research project. The project involved interviewing and video-
recording four teachers of senior EAL/D (Year 11) over the course of two school terms, in
two metropolitan Queensland high schools, during 2010. As a collective case study
(Cresswell, 2007), the project was principally interested in the ways in which the teachers
enacted intellectually engaging learning episodes using critical literacy, that took into account
and utilised, rather than circumventing, the learners’ varying language proficiency levels. The
learners’ language levels ranged from 4 to 6 on the ESL Bandscales 2 (McKay, et al. 2007).

2
For example: Level 4 readers “can read simple prose, for pleasure, which does not assume significant cultural
knowledge; use bilingual dictionary extensively and rely on predictable, straight forward structure... Level 6
readers are able to comprehend lengthy, unfamiliar text, although slowly; will use a dictionary for precise
meaning ; can discern differences in style and register but have difficulty drawing inferences or discerning
authors’ point of view and intent ” (adapted from McKay, P., et al. 2007).

7
Two of the teachers, Riva and Margot, were EAL/D specialists and had been teaching EAL/D
and serving on district and state panels for many years. Another specialist, Marcus, was a
recent graduate from a local University in which he had specialised in English and EAL/D;
and the fourth, Celia, had trained in TESOL, after working in another field of education, five
years prior to this study. Due to the limitations of space in this article, only four salient
aspects of their practice will be presented here.
In this section, we present EAL/D teacher practice through the lens of Janks’ (2010)
orientations to Critical Literacy. In this model, Janks maintains that four orientations are
possible - Domination, Access, Diversity and Design - that they are interdependent and
ideally, that all need to be held in “productive tension to achieve what is a shared goal of all
critical literacy work: equity and social justice” (Janks, 2010, p.27). Domination assumes a
critical discourse analysis approach in which the language and images in dominant texts are
deconstructed to discover concepts such as foregroundings, silences and whose interests are
served. Access involves making explicit the features of the genres that carry social power,
e.g., analytical essays and reports, hitherto assumed to be already in the learners’ heads. This
has been a hallmark of EAL/D teaching in Australia since the 1980s and is an important part
of teachers’ pedagogy. Janks (2010), Lee (1997) and others caution, however, that access
without deconstruction can serve to naturalise and reify such genres without questioning how
they came to be powerful. Diversity involves drawing on a range of modalities as resources
and to include students’ own diverse language and literacies. Finally, Design asks teachers to
harness the productive power (Janks, 2010) of diverse learners to create their own meanings
through re-construction of texts. Students use a range of media and technologies to do so
without relying on traditional print media.

Four features of effective, critical teaching practice with EAL learners

1. Using multimodal texts – connecting with youth cultures
School EAL/D programs in Australia have been characterised by an access model of
literacy largely using print-based technologies and have been slow to keep pace with the
“intensification of digital practice” and changing communicational forms in mainstream
English classrooms (Jewitt, 2009; Jetnikoff, 2009). Such forms provide teachers with a means
by which to connect with aspects of youth culture encountered by students outside the
classroom. Alvermann & Hagood (2000) maintain that opportunities to learn the language and
discourse of schooling (a goal of EAL/D teaching) are, in fact, enhanced “when the cultural
texts that students experience outside the classroom are welcomed in and serve as a kind of
meeting place where affectively charged learning can occur” (p.196). Reading the world

8
critically through the type of texts students engage with frequently can show them a direct
link between what is addressed within the classroom walls and the meaning-making to be
navigated in the outside world.
In a unit on critical media literacy (Year 11), two of the teachers in this project used
various YouTube clips from John Safran’s documentary Race Around the World (1997) to
teach students the power of language and image choices in the construction of digital texts,
and the range of positions from which they may ‘read’ such texts. One of the clips, ‘Story 10:
Disneyland’, presents Safran’s account of Disneyland as a less than happy place to work. For
these students, this was the first unit in which the students explicitly engaged with critical
literacy in the senior EAL/D program. The assessment item for this unit was an analytical
essay on an unseen question about a different YouTube clip, written under exam conditions.
In class, the students explored three or four of the documentary clips (one per lesson) in order
to discern how the creator of the documentary had used language, music, camera angles,
colour, and images to create invited readings and to position viewers to accept their point of
view. Marcus and Riva also spent extensive time (2-3 lessons) modelling the text-type
structure required and the elements that comprise an A standard response to their critical
investigation of the documentary.
In terms of Janks’ (2010) synthesis model of critical literacy, both Marcus and Riva
successfully wove access, diversity and domination into their teaching. They helped students
gain access to a powerful academic genre – the analytical essay – using diverse popular
culture material through a process of deconstruction of dominant discourses and their textual
features. By Marcus’s own admission, design was lacking due to limited time in the final term
of the year. This was a source of frustration for him and something he hopes to address in the
future.

2. Contextual elaboration
Despite the debate about what constitutes ‘background knowledge’ and who gets to
choose it, elaboration of requisite field knowledge is fundamental in a required curriculum for
EAL/D learners. In addition, it needs to go beyond what is required for mainstream learners.
Scaffolding (Gibbons, 2002) is nothing new but it needs to be more explicit for EAL/D
learners than most mainstream teachers think. Elaboration often invokes a tendency to give
more information but often EAL/D learners need a more lucid explanation of the
topic/concept, not more unfamiliar information which adds to the already burdensome
cognitive load.

9
 At the beginning of a unit on media representations of a social issue, one of the
teachers, Margot, used digital images and TV media coverage to provide important
background knowledge for her Yr 11 refugee-background learners. Rather than simply
showing images which are loaded with cultural information that is unknown to EAL/D
learners, Margot took time to explain, the cultural references behind the images used in the
Ardmona Rich & Thick tomato advertising campaign in which Warwick Capper, Australia’s
‘playboy’ AFL player, poses wearing leopard print clothes with the words “Rich and Thick”
blazoned below. Margot’s recently-arrived refugee-background learners (mostly refugees
from Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Burundi with low to medium levels of literacy in their first
language) did not know the background to such a personality to which an older, Australian
target audience would have access, and therefore her students’ readings of these images
would have been constrained without her detailed magnification of insider knowledge: the
context and content of the images. In the process, she was demonstrating that all images,
which are also texts, have been purposefully constructed by the image-maker for a reason and
that they are also open to various interpretations. Ultimately, the students then had to research
how TV and newspaper reporting represented and constructed a particular societal issue like
attitudes to the aged or youth, and to present this in an investigative report.
Digital images alone, however, will not always engage some EAL/D learners, nor will
it provide the necessary amplification. Teachers need a raft of activity types that draw on
various intelligences and cater for the fact that many EAL/D learners are still acquiring the
behaviours and practices we take for granted in senior schooling, for example, reading
independently, getting gist from teacher talk and texts, and drawing conclusions. To address
this, Margot used kinaesthetic activities with her 28 learners in a lesson on media
representation of ‘truth’. Using a Russian newspaper report with the headline : “Russian car
comes 2nd; American car comes in next to last”, Margot distributed slips of paper with the
names of 5 countries and asked her students (in groups) to continually make the headline
‘true’, despite removing one country at a time. By casting the learners in an active role where
they were physically doing the manipulating of language, Margot showed how writers can
control language for certain purposes and how language choices can convey certain meanings.
The activity took up 30 minutes of the 70 minute lesson. By the end, it was clear that most, if
not all students took away a clear message that texts are constructed for particular purposes
and audiences, and that language choices wield power. She was then able to move into the
enhancing phase of the lesson in which she started to use the jargon of critical literacy:

10
 Margot: So, two things. One thing that we talked about last week is
how you use language. Language can give us very different
meanings, and you saw how language gave you a very different
meaning. Because when you first read (the headline) it makes it
sound as if Russia is good and America is bad, and yet you saw that
it wasn’t necessarily true….so what does this show? Okay, so I want
you to write this down- and these are important understandings.
These are things that we really need to understand for the next two
years. (Reading from the power point) - “the way in which language
and images are used influence the way we understand the message of
the text”. So the way that something is written, and not just written,
even the way a picture is shown, influences what we understand. So
when we read that newspaper headline, we understood something
because of the way language was used. (Margot)

Our interpretation here is that Margot used a combination of three critical literacy orientations
in this lesson. Domination is evident in her deconstruction of the language choices of the
headline. Access is also evident in that she draws attention to the dominant news genre and
parts of its structure. These two orientations characterise much of Margot’s work. To a lesser
extent, Diversity is apparent in her choice of resource – a Russian newspaper found on the
internet – and her choice of hands-on activity to meet the interests of her diverse learners.
Design does not feature heavily in this lesson or unit as the students are asked to write a
standard report on their research about a social issue. While Design offers possibilities for
new representations and increased student agency, the fact that this element is largely absent
in Margot’s and the other teachers’ pedagogy indicates the ‘unavoidably partial selection’
(Green, 2002, p. 9) that is part of the interpretation of curriculum. The pressure felt by
teachers to give EAL/D students access to dominant forms often overrides the opportunity to
challenge these forms and design new ones. This is a significant challenge for EAL/D
educators to address in the future.

3. Focus on writing from the outset.

Senior curricula demand students provide written evidence of their critical
engagement with text. As noted above, this often leaves teachers with no choice but to draw
on an Access orientation coupled with Domination. This is important for EAL/D students who
would otherwise not know how to master these ‘genres of power’ (Martin, Christie &

11
Rothery, 1987). In order to meet this imperative, the four teachers all expected their students
to write from the very first lesson and they maintained a strong focus on sentence level
grammar and text-level structure.
All of the teachers acknowledged that the students often had the capability to think
critically. It was the mechanism by which this thinking is assessed that is the stumbling block.
Marcus: I think that the biggest problem....is their communication. They
understand the concepts...but a lot of them don’t write as well...
they understand the critical terminology and how they are being
positioned; whether or not they can write it fluently is the big
ask for many… (Marcus)
In this excerpt, Marcus is aware that his learners have the intellectual ability to think critically
but their writing skills need developing if they are to communicate their critical interrogation
of texts. All four teachers scaffolded writing explicitly. Margot asked her students to write
paragraphs regularly for diagnostic and modelling purposes. Riva used peer-editing on the
white board as a regular feature of her practice with attention drawn to explicit sentence and
clause level grammar in almost every lesson. This requires detailed language knowledge
which not all English teachers feel confident to teach. Both Marcus and Riva asked their
students to co-construct a practice assessment response text in groups of 3 or 4. Each student
had one section to write and then the whole text was assembled and checked over for
expression as well as critical content by the other members of the group. This jigsaw activity
is widely used in EAL/D pedagogy but often overlooked in mainstream classrooms as it is
seen as time consuming. However, it can effectively address the issue of mastering written
expression as each learner only has one small section to write. They can also see what others
have written – a useful modelling technique.
Marcus and Riva also explicitly taught and regularly recycled the critical literacy
terminology to be used in writing.
JA: So how do you address (the writing) problem?
Marcus: .... we unpack ...the terminology that they are going to be hit
with. ....the first thing that we give them are cloze exercises
that have those words missing but have the sentence starters
and show them ...a few topic sentences and see what they
come up with after that. We scaffold them with regards to the
requirements of an essay, their introductory sentence, their
thesis, their preview - everything that has to do with the
genre as well. Every time that we speak about this I would

12
 be using the terminology that I expect them to have in the
essay. We do give them a model...so they can actually see
how the different critical aspects have been spoken [written]
about. (Marcus)

Marcus has no choice about the assessment instrument for this term, (an analytical essay in
response to an unseen question under exam conditions about a media clip), so he addresses
the students’ varied writing needs, explicitly and transparently, in his day-to-day pedagogy.
He teaches overtly, and repeatedly uses, the required terminology in his own teacher talk. One
whole lesson was designated to the students highlighting the key critical literacy terms (or
‘spice words’ as Marcus referred to them, such as marginalisation, foregrounding, and
positioning) in order to demystify an ‘A’ standard model, analytical essay (see Fig. 1). The
students’ attention was drawn not only to the words themselves (a typical EAL/D activity),
but to the ways in which these words served to construct the argument, through a series of
lexical chains, and how they contributed to the organisation of the overall text and therefore to
the quality of the argument.

Insert fig.1 – whiteboard summary

Fig 1. The critical literacy ‘spice words’ Marcus expects to see in their analytical essays
(whiteboard summary).

An Access orientation is clear in all of the teachers’ teaching, a decision driven largely by two
forces. First, many of their students are aiming for tertiary study – university or technical and
further education - which demands mastery of critical thinking and the genres of power.
Second, there is a social justice agenda that asks the teachers to “make students more aware of
the motives… behind particular texts so that they become better informed people, better
consumers” (Margot).

4. Active engagement through talk

EAL/D students bring with them a set of varying positive attributes, knowledge,
experience and skills, upon which teachers can draw. Powell (1998), who cautions teachers
not to fall prey to ‘producing’ deficit or incompetence in our classrooms, argues that “we
must differentiate between inherent incompetence and produced incompetence – which is
created when we expect children from ‘other worlds’ to be knowledgeable about ‘our world’

13
(p. 24). To this end, Cronje (2010) encourages teachers to see that “students need not only be
trained to listen to the voices of others, but also to acquire the practice to convey their own
experiences, stories and stances” (p. 4). This creates the possibility for teachers to draw on
Janks’ Diversity realisation of critical literacy whereby learners’ own ‘ways with words’
(Heath, 1983) are given prominence in the learning process.
Jigsaw tasks used by Marcus, Riva and Celia drew on students’ own knowledge,
insights, and ‘readings’ of the texts under investigation. For example, Celia asked her yr 12
students to form groups and to respond to provocative questions and famous quotes about
oppression, power and corruption, at the outset of a unit on Macbeth. There was no right or
wrong answer. One student scribed the group’s thoughts on paper and then transferred this to
the white board for whole class discussion. Marcus’s class formed groups of four (mixed-
ability) and pooled their critical investigation of various semiotic elements of the YouTube
clip: use of images, use of music and sound, and use of language. The lists generated revealed
significant complexity in their interrogation of the clip and provided weaker students with
valuable insights from their peers. Giving EAL/D students time to think and talk in small
groups, before a more public whole class performance, can generate fertile ideas and also the
confidence to speak, two areas that teachers often say are lacking in EAL/D learners’
contribution to classes.
The four aspects of practice described above are snapshots of much more complex
pedagogy and decision-making on the part of these teachers. We present them here as
possibilities for practice that other teachers might take up in assisting EAL/D learners to
engage with high-challenge learning.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have argued that English teachers are currently faced with a wide and
often confusing range of syllabus imperatives in an era of high accountability in education. At
the same time they are expected to address the needs of EAL/D learners without having
access to the professional development needed to do so. We have presented aspects of the
practical pedagogy of four teachers who specialise in making senior English curriculum
accessible, yet also intellectually–engaging, for EAL/D learners who are still developing
knowledge of the English language. We argue that these teachers demonstrate the kind of
high-challenge practice that can be of benefit to EAL/D learners, and that many teachers will
need significant professional development if the national English curriculum is to be
implemented as it is currently evolving.

14
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Glossary:

EAL: The term ‘English as an Additional Language’ replaces the term ESL and reflects a
recognition of the fact that ESL learners are often learning English not as a second language
but as an additional language (a third or even fourth). ESL is still used in many Australian
states and territories, and in some of the publications cited, however the ACARA framework
refers to EAL/D which is the term we prefer.

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EAL/D: English as an Additional Language or Dialect. ACARA’s addition of the term
‘dialect’ recognises Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learners and their language needs.
This is the term ACARA uses and had been used throughout this paper.

LBOTE: Language Background Other than English. Students who have English language
learning needs may have been born in Australia but have a home language that is not English.
They may speak English well but still have significant academic language learning needs.

18