In this paper, we describe part of an Australian national research project that aimed to find out how well prepared beginning teachers are to teach literacy. A majority of beginning teachers participating in a series of national surveys and focus group meetings were confident about their personal literacy skills, their conceptual understandings of literacy, their understanding of curriculum documents and assessment strategies and their broad preparation to teach. Fewer beginning teachers were confident about their capacity to teach specific aspects of literacy such as viewing, spelling, grammar and phonics, or about their capacity to meet the challenges of student diversity. Senior staff working with beginning teachers were generally sceptical about the quality of teacher preparation for teaching literacy and were less confident than the beginning teachers about personal literacy skills. We discuss these findings in relation to the relative importance placed on particular substantive and structural issues by the study participants and in terms of previous findings.
This paper reports the findings of an Australia-wide survey conducted as part of a national teacher education research project that explored the preparation of teachers to teach literacy and numeracy in Australian schools (Louden, Rohl, Gore, Greaves, McIntosh, Wright, Siemon & House, 2005) 1 . The project included various phases of inquiry, beginning with a desk audit of teacher education program characteristics and an international literature review (Gore & Griffiths, 2002) , that drew on literature published in English in the last few decades. The issues identified in the literature review guided the construction of a set of national focus groups that targeted early years, primary and secondary teachers and teacher educators. Data from the focus groups informed three nationally representative questionnaire surveys, the purpose of which was to determine the preparedness of new graduates to teach literacy and numeracy to a range of school students. A survey was designed for each of the following three groups: senior school staff, primary beginning teachers and secondary beginning teachers.The focus of this paper is the survey designed for teachers working with secondary aged students. (Other aspects of the study have been published elsewhere, for example Louden & Rohl, 2006;. The secondary survey adds further insights to the recently released report of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (Rowe, 2005) which found that the preparation of teachers to teach literacy was 'uneven across universities' (Rowe, 2005, p.12), and recommended that 'literacy teaching within subject areas be included in the coursework of secondary teachers' (Rowe, 2005, Recommendation 12, p.20). There has been much concern in recent years about the requirements for teacher education courses. Over the past 20 years there has been an average of one national or state inquiry into teacher education each year and in 2005 there were two national inquiries: a national parliamentary inquiry into teacher education and a national inquiry into the teaching of literacy that included preservice education for literacy teaching (Rowe, 2005). Some have pointed to the need to develop national standards (for example Louden, 2000;Rowe, 2005) and within the standards debate there are calls for graduating teachers to have adequate understandings of literacy and numeracy (Ministerial Advisory Committee on the Quality of Teaching, 1998) and a knowledge of 'what and how to teach literacy' (Rowe, 2005, p.12 ). At the secondary level, literacy and numeracy are embedded across the curriculum and teachers need to be able to foster those skills within their subject areas. There is some question as to whether beginning teachers achieve 'adequate' understandings and know how to incorporate literacy and numeracy instruction into their teaching when and where necessary. Changes to pre-service preparation for teaching are often suggested. 38Many secondary teachers undertake one-or two-year graduate diploma courses, following first degrees. Some educa...
A spelling-age match design was used to test the hypothesis that deficits in phonologically related skills may be causally related to difficulties in acquiring basic spelling knowledge. Poor grade 5 spellers, average grade 3 spellers, and good grade 2 spellers matched on a standardized spelling test, and a group of good grade 5 spellers matched by chronological age with the poor grade 5 spellers were administered a phonemic segmentation test containing nondigraph pseudowords and an experimental spelling test containing words of the following four types: exception, ambiguous, regular, and pseudowords. Consistent with the hypothesis, it was found that when compared with the poor spellers, the average and good spellers performed better on the phonemic segmentation task, made fewer errors in spelling pseudowords, and made spelling errors that were more phonetically accurate.
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