Len Unsworth

E-literature for children : enhancing digital literacy learning

1. Childrens Literature and Literacy in the Electronic Age 2. Describing how Images and Text Make Meanings in E-literature 3. Learning Through www Context of Book-Based Literary Narratives 4. Classic and Contemporary Childrens Literature in Electronic Formats 5. Emerging Digital Narratives and Hyperfiction for Children and Adolescents 6. Electronic Game Narratives: Resources for literacy and literary development 7. Practical Programs Using E-literature in Classroom Units of Work

“Sound” explanations in school science: A functional linguistic perspective on effective apprenticing texts

This article pursues implications of recent work by Wells (1994) arguing that “it is written texts—and the talk around them—that provide the discursive means for the development of the “higher mental functions.” The concern here is with the role of linguistic analyses in describing language choices that will optimise the effectiveness of science explanations in school texts. This role is demonstrated with two explanations of sound waves from junior secondary school science books, analysed using concepts from systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994a; Martin, 1992). The texts are compared to suggest that in one of them a particular co-patterning of choices in transitivity, conjunction and grammatical metaphor effectively explains sound waves through a reconstrual of technical implication sequences at progressively greater levels of abstraction. In the second text the absence of this co-patterning produces an ambiguous and distorted explanation of the phenomenon. Further co-patterning with selections for Theme and New also distinguishes the explanations in terms of effective texturing of the flow of familiar and new information as the texts develop. The analyses discussed indicate that effective writing of explanations in school science books is identifiable and amenable to specification.

Multiliteracies, E-Literature and English Teaching

The impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is changing the nature of literary narratives for children and the contexts in which they experience and respond to such narratives outside of school contexts. However, in the main, teachers do not feel confident or comfortable in the world of digital multimedia. Childrens literature can bridge this intergenerational digital divide in the English classroom. This paper introduces frameworks that may assist teachers in negotiating curricular and pedagogic approaches with children using digital resources for developing literary understanding and literacy learning.

Re-Valuing the Role of Images in Reviewing Picture Books.

This paper discusses the narrative role of images in three prize–winning children’s books: ‘The Rabbits’ by John Marsden and Shaun Tan; ‘Joseph had a Little Overcoat’ by Simms Taback; and ‘The House that Jack Built’ by Gavin Bishop. It is argued that the contribution of images to interpretive possibilities of the narrative are typically not sufficiently addressed in reviewing picture books. In dealing with this aspect of images in picture books, an approach to ‘reading images’ as described in the book of that title by Gunther Kress and Thao van Leeuwen is suggested as a productive resource for reviewers and teachers.

Scaffolding Reading of Science Explanations: Accessing the Grammatical and Visual Forms of Specialized Knowledge

A major problem which children come up against as they move through their schooling is learning to work with and produce texts with a range of distinctive structures and language features. Texts used in each curriculum area differ in their structures and features and unless children are prepared to cope with these differences they will be handicapped in their use of literacy across the curriculum. Len Unsworth explores this issue in some depth in this article by examining in detail the textual problems caused by science explanation texts.

Linguistic Form and the Construction of Knowledge in Factual Texts for Primary School Children

Abstract This paper focuses on the selection of factual books for children in the early school years. Some texts, which are attractive to young children, take account of the needs of developing readers and at the same time introduce them to the kinds of understanding which characterise the systematic knowledge of discipline areas such as science and social studies. Other texts tend to present information about the real world in the form of games, puzzles and stories or in terms of the reconstruction of directly observable experience from a local or individual perspective. These differences can affect childrens access to the forms of language which are highly valued in the construction and exchange of knowledge in the culture. The paper offers an informal approach to the evaluation of factual texts from this perspective.