Scaffolding Literacy and the Year 9 Boys: Developing a Language-Centred Literacy Pedagogy

Abstract

This paper provides an account of a highly successful teaching program undertaken by one of the authors, Pam Harders ('Pam'), with Year Nine boys in a Canberra high school. The pedagogy is interesting not only because it has been adapted to meet the needs of both mother tongue (Ll) and second language (L2) users of English but also because it aims to equip students with literacy difficulties to read and write age-appropriate texts. It is based on the scaffolding literacy program developed at the Schools and Community Centre in Canberra. It is centred on deep understandings of language but draws on these understandings in some counter-intuitive ways for TESOL teachers. Rather than adapting and simplifying the language of challenging texts, it aims to scaffold students into fluent and meaningful decoding of literate texts. In this paper, we explore the strategies Pam used to teach the boys to read Tim Winton's 'Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo' and then to write creative pieces based on the novel. Drawing on transcripts of selected moments of classroom interactions and some examples of students' writing, we explore the pedagogic and linguistic assumptions on which Pam's successful literacy teaching is based. The paper emerged from an ongoing dialogue between a literacy teacher and an educational linguist with an interest in TESOL and reflects on the implications of a language-centred pedagogy for building students' capacities to read and write literate discourse.