View Chapters

Book: Reading to Learn, Reading the World

Chapter: Foreword

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.41260

Blurb:

Reading to Learn, Reading the World celebrates stories from around the world, of teachers and learners applying the teaching methodology Reading to Learn, or R2L. R2L is a genre-based literacy pedagogy, that embeds literacy learning in curriculum teaching, and aims to support every student to achieve success, at all stages of education. The volume provides practical, inspiring illustrations of applications of the methodology, that will be useful for teachers, teacher educators, and education researchers. The methodology itself is described in the Equinox book, Learning to Write, Reading to Learn: Genre, Knowledge and Pedagogy in the Sydney School, by David Rose and J.R. Martin (2012).


The sixteen stories in this volume are astonishingly diverse. They range from the Cantinflas project in Florida, USA, supporting Spanish speaking mothers to read English stories with their children to prepare them for school, to large scale teacher education, such as the TeL4ELE project of the European Union to train teacher educators in Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark and the UK. Smaller programs include a South African project to support teenage mothers to succeed with secondary school, a multilingual project in Indonesia to teach scientific literacy in primary schools, work with deaf students in Sweden to teach school literacy, teaching Chinese literacy to ethnic minority students in Hong Kong, mathematics teaching in Chile, and engaging students with disabilities in primary schooling in Brisbane, Australia. In Lisbon, resources are being developed for using the pedagogy in Portuguese. In Spain and Colombia it is being applied to support university students in Spanish. Larger scale teacher training projects are described from Gothenburg, Sweden, from KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, and from Melbourne, Australia, that illustrate how the knowledge about language and pedagogy in R2L can be provided to diverse groups of teachers.

Chapter Contributors

  • J.R. Martin (jmartin@mail.usyd.edu.au - jimmartin) 'University of Sydney'