Hello again. It is nice to be acknowlegded once in a while. The Literacy Secretariat recently obtained some data about its website. It makes very interesting reading. For the year ending April 2012, the site had about 77 000 visitors who viewed 214 000 pages. 67% of the visitors were from Australia. No surprise but there were 8 000 visitors from the UK, over 2 000 from each of the USA and Japan and even 151 from Pakistan. Obviously they come for different reasons but the work of the ESL team features very highly in regards to what they took from the site. The three top downloads were all created by the ESL team! Over 6 000 visitors downloaded the Persuasive Writing resource paper. About 3 000 took the Procedural Writing and Explanation Writing papers. Many other ESL resources were also downloaded in large numbers. If you are yet to visit the site yourself go to www.decd.sa.gov.au/literacy/
Despite the work of the ESL team being in demand, corporate salary cuts have been announced. At yesterday's ESL Team meeting the recommendations of the review was presented. The review acknowledges that those positions to be cut are simply those whose tenure is first to expire. Therefore, one of the two ESL psychologist postions will finsh at the end of this school term. There has not been a 50% reduction in the number of new arrivals with psychological needs. The other recommendation is that two of the eight ESL consultant positions not be re-advertised for next year. These are primarily the people who created the most popular resources on the Literacy Secretariat site as well as other resources and training and development to meet the needs of 12% of the students in ECD schools. This is unlikely to be the end of the changes because these cuts will also be followed by a round of "1 in 7 cuts" and then another round of cuts in response to the recent state budget. The ESL team may be very small by the time all these cuts take place.
In the meantime schools are in the midst of assigning ESL Scales. It is rewarding to see so many teachers becoming more familiar with language in this process. This "backdoor" literacy training enables some teachers to then begin explicitly teaching the language that makes their students' work more written-like.