ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by outlining some of the writing challenges in the move to secondary schooling, before reporting on an intervention involving a cluster of six schools in an isolated rural area of Tasmania in Australia. Over a period of three years, the schools committed to improving the writing proficiency of their students by working through several iterations of a teaching and learning cycle based on the principle of gradual release of responsibility. Within each cycle, the teachers embedded a language and literacy focus into the curriculum tasks that the students were engaged in across a range of learning areas. A case study of one student’s writing development is presented to illustrate how specific pedagogic practices and explicit teaching of relevant language features led to significant improvement in the student’s writing, providing a sound foundation for the transition to secondary education. It concludes with responses from teachers involved in the project and a recognition that supporting students in meeting the demands of secondary writing requires that teachers themselves have a confident knowledge about the language of complex academic texts.
