Abstract:
In New Zealand, and internationally, too many students fail to meet the increasingly sophisticated and subject-specialised literacy demands of senior secondary schooling. While efforts to improve students‘ literacy levels in the earlier years of schooling have had some success, these gains do not necessarily translate into higher literacy levels in later years of schooling. A common response to this issue has been to implement literacy professional development (PD) programmes for secondary school subject-teachers. Typically, the content presented at these programmes has consisted of generic literacy principles, teaching activities, and strategies. An explanation for the generally limited impact of these programmes has been their generic nature and it has been proposed that a disciplinary or subject-specific approach would facilitate more effective transfer from PD to subject classroom settings. This study examined the hypotheses that adding a subjectspecific literacy (SSL) component to an existing programme of generic literacy (GL) PD would increase subject teachers‘ subject literacy pedagogical content knowledge (SLPCK) and their students‘ subject-area achievement. Participants in this study were Year 11 (about 16 years old) students and their English, mathematics and science teachers from a cluster of seven small-town and rural secondary schools in the West Coast region of the South Island of New Zealand (NZ). A quasiexperimental design was used to test whether adding a strand of subject-specific literacy (SSL) PD in 2010 to an existing generic literacy (GL) PD programme would increase the teachers‘ subject literacy pedagogical content knowledge (SLPCK) and their students‘ pass rates in national assessments. The main comparison was between the subjects for which a combined SSL+GL treatment was implemented (English and mathematics), and science, one of the subjects for which a single GL Only (GLO) treatment was implemented. The findings suggest that the additional subject-specific component did indeed add to students‘ achievement but noticeably more so in English than mathematics. For example, between 2009 and 2010 science pass rates worsened from 5% below to 12% below national pass rates; the mean percentage pass rate for English increased from 21% below to less than 4% below, suggesting a marked shift; and mathematic pass rates increased from 5% below to 1% below, suggesting a small, possibly insignificant, shift. A similar pattern was evident for teachers, with both groups of SSL+GL teachers making greater shifts than GLO teachers, but English teachers shifting more than mathematics teachers. The results provide qualified support for a blended PD model that incorporates SSL and GL components. They support a model of literacy development that sees subject-specificity increase but for which both generic and subject-specific literacy knowledge is required of both teachers and students.