Learning to teach grammatics: A multimodal ensemble performance

The paper will briefly discuss the recent Australian curriculum reform with respect to the explicit teaching about language and some of the challenges inherent in the processes of implementing a grammatics. It then describes recent work with teachers as they engage with the functionally oriented English curriculum, in particular one teacher's work as she redesigns her pedagogy to accommodate the new curriculum in the early years of school. The paper argues the importance of teacher's pedagogic knowledge in the successful implementation of a grammatics curriculum but suggests that we do not fully understand the nature of such knowledge, how it interfaces with other forms of knowledge (about language and about curriculum) in the production of teaching "expertise" and how such expertise is enacted for different age groups of learners.