Literacy in the middle years of schooling 2006 Understanding students in the middle years

coming to shared understandings about the contested nature of language and literacy education; examining literacy, multiliteracies and critical literacy pedagogy; developing shared understandings about reading practices, particularly the four practices of the literacy learner as elaborated by Luke and Freebody; and then working towards a shared consciousness of what efficient and successful readers know and are able to do when they engage with diverse and complex texts.

Young people need to be able to navigate, negotiate, control, deconstruct and manipulate complex and diverse traditional as well as multimodal texts. The students in our Middle Years classrooms must be explicitly taught to decode, interpret, use, analyse and critique texts in which written, visual, audio, spatial and other semiotic elements converge

that literary texts share classroom space with messages and radio broadcasts to explore the similarities and differences between written and spoken language; that computer games are clustered with traditional stories to examine narrative structures; that ‘texting’ messages (sent via mobile phones, chat rooms, etc) are aligned with advertisements as a way of exploring the dynamic and changing nature of language; that magazines share the stage with web pages in order to examine the codes and conventions of particular text types;

that documentary film and sports writing are critiqued to pose questions about how texts position readers; that political cartoons and current affairs programs are juxtaposed to draw out the textual and socio-cultural prior knowledge needed to make meaning from such texts; that picture books and billboards are read, contested and rewritten in response to their construction of gender; that product instructions, information brochures and ‘advertorials’ are compared as a way of examining how particular texts have particular social purposes.