The New Zealand Curriculum is comprised of eight compulsory learning areas: English, the arts, health and physical education, learning languages, mathematics and statistics, science, social sciences, and technology. Collectively, these learning areas are intended to provide children with a broad and balanced education. Despite this, the…

Reported trends signal that current approaches to teaching writing are not working as well as they could to engage all students. This review of literature focuses on a culturally responsive ethos for the teaching of writing in Aotearoa New Zealand, incorporating information from over 80 publications from 2000 to 2020. The new understandings…

A guide to understanding dyslexia in children and youth, with strategies for assessing and teaching reading and spelling. In today's digital world, reading and writing are more important than ever. Students are reading and writing text on smartphones, tablets, and laptops as well as in school for hours every day. Yet many of these students will…

This paper reports a systematic narrative synthesis review conducted on the educational effectiveness of genre theory/systemic functional linguistics pedagogies for improving reading and writing outcomes in K-10 education within mainstream classrooms in Australia, the UK, the USA, New Zealand, and Canada. This framework has significant influence…

In this study, we use qualitative research methods to explore how discourses about language manifested within two university writing teacher education classes, one in New Zealand and one in the United States. We used a collaborative teaching journal and student work as main sources of data, which were analysed inductively at key points before,…

In the present study, the effects of teachers' beliefs and practices about writing pedagogy on students' progress were investigated in the context of the New Zealand primary school system. A total of 626 teachers completed a survey on their beliefs and practices. Principal component analysis of beliefs isolated three dimensions, reflecting…

Prior to the March, 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in New Zealand I was invited to offer professional development on ways that the writing of poetry could be facilitated in a Rotorua primary school. In March/April of that year, I engaged around 18 teachers (including the school principal) in four, twohour PD sessions using Zoom. A year on, in May 2021, I…

Teaching writing is complex, and a number of ideas circulating among schools and teachers often belie the difficulty of how to teach the techniques and processes of writing. I've come to believe that authorship is not a passive undertaking and does not originate in the struggle to put something onto the page. Rather it emerges by living with a…

Underpinning this consideration of writing instruction in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) is the premise that acts of teaching interact with the context in which they occur; they are shaped by the socio-cultural milieu, philosophical and socio-political traditions, curriculum and assessment systems, and the nature of individual classrooms. This…

Drawing data (N = 625) from the 2004 Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning Version 4 database, this article explores how New Zealand Years 11-12 secondary students perceived the importance of learning to read and write in English and how those perceptions related to their reading attitudes and performance. More positive student perceptions of…

Although peer interaction has received attention in second language (L2) collaborative writing (CW) research, the manner and quality of peer interaction have been less investigated. Previous studies usually examined peer interaction by looking at language-related episodes, overlooking the ways students negotiate for different types of knowledge…

Recent developments in the sociology of education highlight the importance of the school as a site for the transformation of students' everyday knowledge into a more ordered and systemised form that provides the means for the development of creative conceptual higher order thinking. However, in recent times there has been a shift towards a…

We investigated the effectiveness and social validity of a 17-week teacher-implemented whole-class Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) story writing intervention with 6-7-year-old students in New Zealand. We used a mixed methods intervention design. In the quantitative strand, we conducted a quasi-experiment in which students either…

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a research-based theoretical framework that can be used to design teaching and learning opportunities that are more responsive to the variability of student need in any classroom, although a vast number of teachers appear to know nothing about UDL. One population whose needs are becoming increasingly visible…

As doctoral enrolments have soared in many countries around the world, considerable attention has been devoted to how an increasingly diverse candidature can succeed in thesis writing. Along with supervisory guidance during the student's research project, various publications have emerged to help students with thesis writing requirements. However,…