ABSTRACT
Increasingly, young children are developing their experience in English as a second language (ESL) in the context of their regular classroom learning in a range of curriculum areas. This is consistent with recent developments in communicative language teaching (CLT) focusing on content-based instruction (CBI) and is typical of the school language-learning context for many young children in Australia whose first language is not English. This chapter is based on the experience of one of the authors, Robyn Bush, working in one such context in a primary (elementary) school in the south-western suburbs of Sydney. In this school 92% of the children have a language background other than English. The major cultural groups are Arabic, Vietnamese, Macedonian and Chinese. Many of the first languages of the students have different scripts, writing orientations and/or sounds from English. These factors are routinely incorporated in the kinds of learning experiences described in this chapter. However, since the focus here is on explicit teaching about the meaningmaking role of images in multimodal texts, due to the constraints of space, the usual work dealing with orthographic and phonological issues will not be included. Cultural differences such as those related to the direction of writing, along with cultural “norms” about how texts are constructed affect the way a person reads an image/text. Such variations also need to be emphasized and investigated as part of the incorporation of visual literacy in ESL literacy teaching. The classroom pedagogy outlined here derives from the Curriculum Area Multiliteracies and Learning (CAMAL) framework (Unsworth, 2001). This framework draws on and extends previous work applying systemic functional accounts of language and image to the articulation of pedagogic models of literacy and learning in school curriculum areas (Derewianka, 1990; MackenHorarik, 1996, 1998; New London Group, 19961). More specifically, the classroom work described in this chapter utilizes from the CAMAL framework parts of the Literacy Development Cycle (LDC). In its most generalized
form the LDC (Figure 4.1) incorporates modeled, guided and independent practice in the comprehension/composition of multimodal texts in conventional and electronic formats. The cycle can be entered at any point in planning learning experiences within a unit of work. If students are very familiar with a particular genre, modeled and guided practice may not be necessary. On the other hand, in introducing new genres, it may be advisable to extend modeled practice, curtail guided practice and postpone independent practice until a subsequent unit of work. It may also be the case that the LDC is applied differentially to a range of comprehension/composition activities within a unit of work. Some activities might involve modeled, guided and independent practice, while some require extended modeling, and others are undertaken as independent practice. The ways in which the parameters of the LDC are adapted will depend on the prior learning of the group and the range of experiences among students within the group. The broken lines indicate this kind of flexibility, as well as the lack of rigid boundaries around the categories of practice. The development of students’ reading of curriculum area materials is integrally related to the development of their capacity to compose the texts. The organization of teaching needs to take this into account. The LDC maintains the strategies of modeled, guided and independent practice for both reading and writing development, but the implementation steps differ for reading and writing. However, within reading and writing, the same implementation steps are used for modeled, guided and independent practice, as shown in Figure 4.2.
