Resourcing teachers to tide the semantic wave to whole school literacy development

In this paper we report on a whole school literacy research project, Embedding Literacies in the KLA's (ELK). The starting point for this endeavour is the theory of knowledge development conceptualised within the sociology of education as the semantic wave (Maton, forthcoming). As discipline knowledge typically resides in the "high stakes" texts students need to read and write, knowledge of the language resources used to create academic language is essential, as is a meta-language, which is accessible for use by teachers, students and parents but is sufficiently robust to make visible the resources of specialised academic discourses. To this end, educational linguists involved in the project have developed a framework of language resources, which was originally developed by academic literacy researchers (Humphrey, S. Martin, J., Dreyfus, S., and Mahboob, A., 2010). We report specifically on how we have adapted this framework to form a "4x4 toolkit for academic literacies", The literacy context for exploring this toolkit is the persuasive writing required by the Australian national literacy test (NAPLAN)., the 4x4 not only provides a framework for teachers to interpret the criteria provided by NAPLAN but to map their own and their students' development of language for learning.