Of the 15,000 newly graduated teachers, less than half will find permanent employment in Australia. Now’s the time to decide if you stay on to do casual teaching or work abroad.
- Associate Professor in Language, Literacy and TESL, University of Canberra
Students reach the middle years of high school with poor vocabularies and unable to work with language in sophisticated ways.
Phonics programs can be helpful for students with very particular learning needs - but it’s not a one-size-fits-all literacy solution. Here are some things you should be wary of.
Under the current system, nobody is accountable for the progress of students learning English in schools – or whether funding is being used appropriately.
Last week the states agreed to the implementation of changes to the national school curriculum brought about by the National Curriculum Review undertaken last year.
Spelling bees don’t do much for the self esteem of the rest of the population that struggles with spelling. However, we CAN all be good spellers and if we are not, it is because we haven’t been taught how words work.
The long awaited literacy and numeracy test for teachers in Australia will finally make its appearance in 2016.
About 20% of the Australian population speaks a language other than English. However there is little connection between the languages taught in schools, and the languages spoken in homes.
A heavy focus of Bill Shorten’s budget reply speech was preparing for the future with science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. While this focus is a step in the right direction, the policies probably aren’t the right way to go about it.
The national testing season begins on Tuesday May 12th as children in Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 around the country sit the writing, spelling and grammar tests of the National Assessment Program for Literacy and…
When the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority published their list of “big improvers” from the 2014 national literacy and numeracy testing (NAPLAN), the media popped out to these star…
The Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group report released today has much to live up to. After all, there have been a couple of dozen reports into teacher education over the past three decades. Is…
Handwriting is dead, long live keyboard skills! So says the Finnish education system. From 2016 handwriting will no longer be taught in Finnish schools. And when a high-performing country like Finland…
The new school year has just begun. Parents may be feeling nervous about sending their children off to school. What if they don’t like school? What if school doesn’t like them? What if they don’t do well…
Looking for a New Year’s resolution? Forget losing weight, exercising more and quitting the bad stuff. How about we all resolve to spell “definitely” correctly … and “separate” … and “lose” … and “you’re…
We know a good piece of writing when we read it. But what makes the writing “good” and how can we teach all our kids the skills that seem to come naturally to a few. Here are six principles teachers and…
The Australian Curriculum describes what Australian children should know and do. The purpose of the recent review of the curriculum was to investigate whether the content of the curriculum was adequate…
The much awaited review of the National Curriculum has finally been released with the reviewers calling for more of a focus on Western literature, and recognition of Australia’s “Judeo-Christian” heritage…
Tony Abbott has given his ministers their report cards for the year. Apparently they are all receiving As and A+s. That might mean they are very, very clever compared to all other ministers who have done…
Why do kids prefer playing video games to doing homework? The easy answer is - it’s more fun to play games than do homework. The real answer is much harder to stomach - game designers have become better…
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry every time (predominantly monolingual) politicians and policy makers lament the fact that we don’t have enough students in schools studying foreign languages…
New South Wales Education Minister Adrian Piccoli has announced no teacher will graduate in his state without having successfully completed a literacy (and numeracy) test. This follows an announcement…
There are a few key pieces of grammatical knowledge that can make an immediate difference to the quality of children’s reading and writing. In this column I look at verbs, and suggest four actions that…
The Education Minister has asked us all to contribute to a public consultation on how to get quality teachers in front of our children. But what does ‘quality teacher’ mean? We can crowdsource a national…
I’m going to put it out there - most teachers don’t know enough about how the English language works [aka grammar], and this inevitably impacts upon student literacy outcomes. There are grammar pundits…
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