ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses academic writing instruction within the context of school education. It also addresses the notion of “literate talk” and the insights offered by this concept for teachers of academic writing across different curriculum disciplines. The research involved working with teachers in schools where 60 percent or more of the student population were English is an additional language students. The challenge for the Year 6 Science teacher lay in recognizing, but in understanding the more subtle shifts in language demands that occurred in the middle tasks in the program, and in being able to plan and implement those tasks in ways that supported students in sufficiently small steps to build their knowledge both of science and of academic language. Teachers reported that the collaborative exercise of plotting the classroom tasks, and of justifying the location of tasks along the continuum, pushed them to reflect on their students' language abilities, on their program goals, in more detail than usual.
