Direct Instruction Fit for Purpose: Applying a Metalinguistic Toolkit to Enhance Creative Writing in the Early Secondary Years

This article describes teachers' use of a text-based pedagogy in which content related to the Language strand of the Australian Curriculum: English (Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority (hereafter ACARA), 2015) is integrated with content related to the Literature and Literacy strands. To illustrate the pedagogy, and its enabling metalanguage, we draw on data from four related projects undertaken with Australian middle years English teachers (Humphrey & Macnaught, 2015) to assist teachers to program for creative writing instruction. Findings indicating positive effects of the metalanguage of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in informing classroom interactions are reported elsewhere (Humphrey & Macnaught, 2015; Humphrey, Sharpe & Cullen, 2015). In this article we exemplify teachers' use of metalanguage in resources produced to teach specialised discourse patterns of narrative in three Year 8 classes.