Bronwyn Custance

ESL Consultant, Catholic Education South Australia

Language and Literacy Education at St Brigid’s Primary School: The Development of a Systematic Approach to genre-based explicit teaching of grammar.

Participants will be guided through the creation of a whole school genre map, constructed in 2003 by the staff of St Brigid’s School, Kilburn South Australia, a small Catholic school in a disadvantaged area with a high ESL population. The genre map was developed to assist in the implementation of the ESL Scope and Scales as part of the South Australian Curriculum Standards and Accountability framework. The ESL Scope and Scales describe student literacy development from 5 to 15 years of age using the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The map includes genres and relevant grammar, in relation to the language features of the genres, to be taught at each year level according to the variables of genre, field, tenor and mode.

The paper will include discussion of the development of the map including activities that were part of teacher professional development and some of the reactions to and consequences of the initial stages of implementation in 2004.