School Discourse

Christie, F., & Derewianka, B. (2010). School Discourse. London: Continuum.

Background

The book reports on a study by the authors on texts written by students in different subjects. The students were from different age levels and came from a group of schools in Australia.

Aims

The authors aimed to provide a comprehensive study of the developmental stages of writing from childhood to adolescence in different subject areas using a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) framework.

Sample

A group of representative texts were selected from a database of around 2,000. The selected texts were chosen partly because they were representative of the type of texts produced by their age group but also because the teachers involved assessed the texts as good or promising.

Method

The authors used SFL to analyse the features of the types of text by age, dividing the texts into three broad subject areas: English, History and the Natural World.

Findings

The authors showed that the texts became grammatically more complex and lexically denser as the writers got older. The increasing ability of the students to produce the different types of text relevant to different subjects was also identifiable. They proposed four developmental stages: early childhood (6-8 years), late childhood-early adolescence (9-12 years), mid-adolescence (13-15 years) and late adolescence (16-18+ years). They argued that development was ‘nature via nurture’, i.e. a combination of both. They also noted that literacy programmes (research and curricular) tended to emphasize reading rather than the other skills and called for a greater emphasis on writing. They thus provided guides for teachers on how they could help their students’ writing at the different developmental stages.

Implications

The authors felt that teachers needed to focus more on helping students with the different types of writing through modelling and through the use of some metalanguage from both traditional and functional grammars. They suggested the prime responsibility for this lay with English teachers but suggested that subject teachers should also be involved.

Book available at READ@Academy on the AST campus.