African popular intellectuals in colonial Freetown, Sierra Leone, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced public writing in which they lamented the danger of reading ‘like a European’, or quick and mechanical reading practices, which they argued led to the degeneration of the ‘African mind’. This chapter’s case study of Orishatukeh Faduma’s 1919 Sierra Leone Weekly News column, ‘How to Cultivate a Love For Reading,’ reveals how contributors in Freetown reimagined transatlantic public anxieties about race, nationhood, and madness to encourage local readers to ‘read like an African’, which meant slowly, selectively, and critically. Through public writing, Faduma and other popular intellectuals turned globally popular understandings of racial madness on their head to generate the ‘right’ kind of African reader. They used the press to produce a distinctly African literary culture in between the local and the global, and thus used literacy as a social vehicle of colonial self-making.

In colonial West Africa, where the level of literacy, in European language, was low, movies served as an accessible means to convey attitudes, ideas or stories. This chapter addresses the dialogue between movies and the written text (posters, advertisements, etc) to explore the ways in which African film spectators made sense of foreign images brought to them on screens. Urban movie goers read newspapers to look for schedules or film reviews, and the general public depended on posters displayed in front of movie theaters and also on word of mouth for information about movies. Sometimes posters were printed locally but most of them came with the movies, conveying foreign cultural messages which passers-by had to decipher according to their own cultures and cinematographic knowledge.

This chapter explores the link between education and linguistic innovation in the early history of English, by looking at the evolution of the school system and the languages of school instruction. Varieties of spoken and written Latin and Latin as a second (and third) language are among the other sociolinguistic anchors of this chapter. The turning points are located at about 650 CE, the spread of Christianity and formal schooling in Latin among the Anglo-Saxons, at 1066, the introduction of French as a second vernacular and language of school instruction, and at 1349, the reversal of the latter situation in the wake of the socio-demographic changes caused by the Black Death. The survey starts on the eve of the Germanic migration to Britain and ends around 1500; it is illustrated with a selection of lexical and structural features introduced into English through contact with Latin.

English historical sociolinguistics traces the transition of a ‘small’ language into a ‘big’ one. Old English was a small language in terms of its regional coverage and number of speakers, whereas Present-day English is a comprehensively documented world language with hundreds of millions of first-language speakers. Its 1500-year history involves gradually developing social structures of different timescales, but it was also affected by abrupt changes brought about by forces such as invasions and pandemics. Sociolinguistics highlights the agency of language users in shaping and changing their language and, consequently, the society they live in. Written records on individual language use are sparse from the earliest periods but multiply as people from different walks of life become literate and pass on data on their linguistic practices. With time, increasing efforts are, however, also expended on regulating usage with the aim of language standardisation.

The chapter is concerned with ego documents, that is sources like autobiographies, diaries and letters, as a data source for historians of the English language. First, the term ego documents is defined and its merits for historical sociolinguistic research are outlined. Thereafter, literacy and education opportunities, and the availability of and approaches to ego documents, are traced from the later Middle Ages to the Modern English period, followed by an illustration of language use across social layers, and a comparison to another contemporary text type. A particular focus is put on ego documents as a source of vernacular speech, for example as data for varieties of English for which there is no other contemporary documentation. The examples given illustrate the sometimes more speech-like and informal nature of ego documents and highlight the value of the text category for historical linguistics.

What counts as scientific writing has undergone massive changes over the centuries. Medical writing is a good representative of the register of scientific English, as it combines both theoretical concerns and practical applications. Ideas of health and sickness have been communicated in English written texts for over a thousand years from the Middle Ages to the present, with different traditions and layers of writing reflecting literacy developments and changing thought-styles. This chapter approaches the topic from the perspective of registers and genres, considering how texts are shaped by their functions and communicative purposes and various audiences. Some genres run throughout the history of English: remedy books were already extant in the Old English period. Another core genre, the case study, mirrors wider scientific developments in response to changes in styles of thinking: medieval scholasticism is gradually replaced by a growing interest in increasingly systematic empirical observation. The establishment of learned societies from the seventeenth century onwards gives rise to new genres like the experimental report, and concomitant disciplinary advances and technological developments in the following centuries gradually pave the way for modern evidence-based medicine. Today medical advances are communicated in digital publications to a worldwide readership.

A closer look at changes in women’s education, age of marriage, employment, and the reasons for the enduring value of women’s skilled domestic work. Women’s postrevolutionary legal position as second-class citizens exists in tandem with gains in women’s social status indicators: improvements in women’s literacy, later and more egalitarian age of marriage, lower fertility rates, and improved indicators of basic household consumption. Women’s stubbornly low contemporary participation rate in formal employment is complicated by the prerevolutionary prevalence of child labor, and postrevolutionary improvements in girls’ school attendance. Low rates of formal employment also mask women’s crucial contributions to household economies through social labor. Local food culture and the premium attached to women’s skilled home cooking provide the basis for social and economic networks that bypass state control. The common value of local food culture provides a foundation for social identity and a recognizable form of capital that offsets the frustrations associated with limited the opportunities of the formal market.

To study the history of spoken English is to study its extant vestiges in written texts. This chapter draws upon work that connects speech and writing in historical English to present a framework for contextualising written documents and the particularities of their relationships to spoken language. It examines how written English represents spoken English through different styles and genres of text and across different chronological periods. A late medieval deposition might provide certain clues to the English spoken at the time owing to the non-standard orthography and the regional morphosyntax. By contrast, a contemporary poem might provide different clues to the twentieth-century English spoken in the Caribbean owing to the representation of local English through lexical, syntactic and orthographic means. Neither of these is a perfectly faithful record of speech, however, and each reflects different constraints of genre, style, writing practices and pragmatic pressures in the Englishes that they depict.

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).