This chapter discusses the nature of the Selbstzeugnisse left by the merchants in this study and locates the texts in the history of autobiography, ego-documents, and similar self-narratives. It also explains that no other regions in northern Europe produced texts like these during this period (1400–1600) and that the German-speaking regions from which they come was then emerging as a major center of early modern capitalism.

Juliette J. Day explores the profound meaning that texts have for liturgy. It is crucial, however, that texts are not considered as a narrow or equivocal category. To the contrary, texts provide an extraordinarily rich palette of genres, languages, and discourses, each of which deserves respect in its own right and which, moreover, has always to be seen in context.

This chapter provides theoretical and practical examples of how children’s meaning-making is enriched through teachers’ mediation. It shifts attention away from a traditional literacy perspective to a semiotic orientation that honours young children’s symbolic communication through art, music, play and dance. Exemplars are given of how children’s sign-making practices in the arts are of equal significance, and are the precursors, to sign-making in language and literacy. Indeed, the arts are children’s ‘first literacies’ because they help children find their way into the sign systems of reading and writing. Illustration of Practice 8.1 demonstrates the notable link between playing and drawing, and how children cross between graphic, narrative and embodied modes to communicate meaning. Illustration of Practice 8.2 foregrounds art making in a Reggio-inspired preschool classroom. Concluding sections focus on the building blocks of meaning-making, with an emphasis on its co-creation and the importance of documenting and interpreting children’s creative processes and learning.

It is difficult to think of anything more widespread and enduring than the lure of a good story. It is the warp and weft that weaves old, young, rich and poor of different cultures together and enables the opening of new worlds, concepts and understandings of past, present and future. We can empathise, imagine and live vicariously through stories that are an inseparable part of who we are as human beings. History documents these stories based on evidence interpreted through different lenses over time; Geography lends its knowledge to significance of place, space, time and perspective, providing context and reason; and Civics and Citizenship stories help us to understand our roles and responsibilities, as we seek models of the heroes and heroines found in a good story. For this chapter, a broad view of literacy has been adopted, one that defines it as a social practice which involves teaching learners how to participate in, understand and gain control of the literacy practices embedded within society. This chapter will examine the integrated nature of literacy in HASS through the inclusion of picture books to open and explore issues relating to HASS.

The transition to elementary school (i.e., 1st grade) is not the first major life-course transition that children have experienced. However, due to its nature and expanded intervention in children’s lives, transition to 1st grade is a significant, exciting, and magical event. In the academic domain, new elementary school students are expected to gain mastery over literacy. This is not an easy task, especially in cases of diglossia, and it is considered as a first step in school adjustment. However, elementary school adjustment is more than literacy; it includes a vast list of demands, such as: wake up earlier, wear uniform, carry/pull a (heavy) bag, sit on a chair for hours, exposure to punishments, concerns with toilet needs, managing well socially during class breaks, encountering parents’ questions, worries, and higher expectations, etc. Several figures are important along this process, especially the homeroom teacher. Yet, parental and familial reactions to various events are also crucial, calling for an efficient school–family collaboration. Altogether, successful adjustment to elementary school will significantly shape students’ feelings toward learning until graduation from high school.

This chapter explores much of the current research about the value and effect of the Arts in education and assists you to develop your own thinking about the importance of Arts education. This research is framed by an understanding of developing modes of engagement in Arts education, and a discussion of the importance of personal agency and Arts education as ‘praxis’. Finally, the notions of learning ‘in’ and ‘through’ the Arts are explored to enable you to understand the types of learning in which your students can engage.

Literacy is the ability to make use of visible language, and it is fundamental to language education. This chapter focuses on what teachers should know about digital technologies but begins with broad background and context related to multiliteracies, metaphors, and cultural dimensions of technology use. It then focuses on four key areas where teachers play an important role in the development of their students’ language and literacy abilities via technology: autonomy, mobility, creativity, and communities. It then discusses two controversial areas of current pedagogical research and practice: artificial intelligence and machine translation. It concludes with a call for greater attention to two additional areas highly relevant to language development: literacies related to film and digital communication in the context of study abroad.

Like reading, writing is an essential part of academic studies and professional work. Through writing, we form and communicate clear thoughts so that we can collaborate with each other and refine critical understandings. In the Australian Curriculum, writing is about students using expressive language and composing different types of texts for a range of purposes as an integral part of learning in all curriculum areas. Different text types include ‘spoken, written, visual and multimodal texts’, while students can also create ‘formal and informal’ written, visual and multimodal texts for presentation.

This chapter focuses on the knowledge pre-service and in-service teachers need to develop and evaluate oral communication (oracy) within a student’s first language, and it also explores its application in English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D) contexts. A range of practical teaching strategies, interactive activities and integrated approaches are suggested to promote speaking, interacting and listening capabilities in students. Multimodal integrated strategies are presented that focus on oral communication, but also help develop students’ reading, writing and viewing skills, fostering well-rounded learners capable of critical thinking, effective communication and cultural awareness.

As children learn to speak, read and write, they not only utilise and draw on the sounds of language, or phonemic and phonological awareness, they also implicitly and explicitly recognise and apply knowledge of how sounds are combined systematically in a language to form meaningful units called morphemes. A morpheme is a meaningful unit of a language that cannot be further divided, such as single word units (e.g. at, the, table) or parts of words that modify meaning (e.g. un-, mis) or grammatical forms (-ed, -ing, -s).

In Chapter 4, we discussed the two approaches to grammar that have been taught in Australian schools: traditional grammar, and Halliday’s functional grammar. We highlighted some limitations of traditional grammar and outlined the key concepts of functional grammar, which significantly influences English curricula in Australia and globally. While Chapter 4 emphasised explicit grammatical knowledge required by teachers, this chapter focuses on genres, text types, and the teaching of grammar and text types through explicit pedagogical methods.

This chapter outlines essential knowledge for pre-service and in-service teachers regarding the all-encompassing component of language and literacy development: critical literacy. In the current information-saturated world of ‘fake news’ and algorithms that decide the social media content we view, it is important to empower students with the ability to critically engage and knowingly accept or resist what they are reading or viewing. Critical literacy requires text users to approach their consumption of texts with a questioning mindset. It helps them develop an understanding of how texts work – the ability to analyse and identify the visual, linguistic and multimodal features of texts that create meaning implicitly and explicitly. Drawing upon foundational theories and critical literacy models, this chapter demonstrates how to integrate the five macro-skills of reading, writing, listening, speaking and viewing of both textual and multimodal sources to develop students’ critical comprehension and production of various text types.

Grammar has historically been an important component of language and literacy education. It has been understood and defined in various ways, depending on the different linguistic perspectives throughout history. This chapter discusses two main historical perspectives on grammar: traditional grammar and functional grammar. Both implicitly and explicitly underpin the Australian Curriculum: English. The metalanguage and concepts used in the Curriculum and the National Literacy Learning Progression are a combination of traditional and functional grammar terms. Many traditional grammar terms (e.g. nouns, verbs, subject-verb-object) are used alongside functional grammar terms (e.g. participants, processes, circumstances, noun groups, verb groups) to describe sentence-level components, but functional grammar terms are mostly used to describe text-level components. Therefore, it is crucial for pre-service and in-service teachers to be equipped with explicit knowledge of these two grammar traditions to be able to teach in contemporary English classrooms.

Phonemic awareness is a subcategory of phonological awareness. Phonemic awareness is the more specific ability to recognise and manipulate the speech sounds (phonemes) of spoken language as a developmental pathway to learning to read and write. It is the topic of this second chapter because it is developed alongside a method of teaching called phonics. Phonics is an explicit teaching method that involves learners understanding the relationship between the sounds of spoken language and the letters or letter patterns used to represent those sounds in written language. It involves learning the connections between individual phonemes and the written code of letters (graphemes).

Our goal in writing this book was to address a notable gap in the availability of essential resources dedicated to this critical content area. Despite its foundational importance, no existing text offers a focused, in-depth exploration of language and literacy knowledge tailored for pre-service and in-service teachers working in Foundation to Year 10. The 2008 Bradley Review highlighted a deficiency in teachers’ language and literacy awareness and proficiency, a concern that was addressed by the introduction of the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students (LANTITE) in 2016. Consequently, initial teacher education programs have initiated courses and support services in English language and literacy to bolster teachers’ personal knowledge and skills, enabling them to pass the LANTITE’s literacy component.

Language use involves the activation of phonological, morphological, grammatical and lexical systems for meaning-making with other people in specific contexts. Therefore, we not only need to acquire and develop these linguistic systems for language use, but we also need to develop an awareness and understanding of these linguistic systems as meaning-making resources for appropriate use in a given context. For this reason, it is necessary to focus on the social use of language as a key aspect of language development.

This chapter highlights the knowledge required to work with diverse students who communicate using the different varieties of English that exist in Australia. In line with the ‘Language variation and change’ sub-strand of the Australian Curriculum: English, we discuss linguistic and cultural diversity through the concept of plurilingualism, and the transcultural and sociolinguistic competence and knowledge required by teachers working with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) learners. We highlight the challenges and rewards associated with instructing students from varying linguistic and cultural backgrounds. We also stress the crucial role teachers play in nurturing learners of English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D) students.

Spoken language consists of a complex system of sounds that infants first learn to perceive and produce through social interaction in their linguistic community. This initial exposure before school is critical in preparing them for school, where they learn to encode their spoken language into written language. Once children can sufficiently speak and understand most language at around the age of five, it becomes the role of educators, and parents/care providers to assist them in the development of their explicit phonological awareness. Phonological awareness, which refers to the broad understanding of the sound structure of language, plays a critical role in the development of reading and writing. For instance, before children can effectively start learning to read, they need to develop an awareness of the sound structure of words, including syllables, rhymes and individual speech sounds called phonemes, as well as the ability to segment and blend phonemes.

British linguist David Wilkins once said that ‘without grammar, very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed’. The quote is often used to highlight the importance of vocabulary learning for students. Range and accuracy in vocabulary use are considered the most significant linguistic differences between students of English as a first language and as an additional language/dialect (EAL/D). For this reason, developing vocabulary is regarded as a major task for EAL/D students alongside other tasks such as developing grammar. To prepare EAL/D students for learning subject content, teachers often need to explicitly teach students key words beforehand so that students can develop the linguistic capacity to decode subject content texts and encode their understandings for future applications. Acknowledging the critical role of vocabulary in learning, this chapter is devoted to presenting and discussing the complexity of learning vocabulary.