SHUmphrey draft 16/01/13 1 And the word became text: A 4x4 toolkit for scaffolding writing in secondary English Dr Sally Humphrey Australian Catholic University Abstract While teachers of English have long recognized the vital role they play in developing students’ knowledge and effective use of language, the emergence of the Australian Curriculum: English has led to a great deal of discussion concerning the representation of language and the type of meta-language needed to share understandings of literacy and literature with students. Of particular concern is that teachers be provided with language resources which are not limited to either abstract representations of text structure or to decontextualized word level grammatical forms. This paper responds to these concerns by presenting a toolkit, developed as a 4x4 framework, to map the multi-faceted resources needed to understand and generate texts within subject English, from the more abstract whole text level to their concrete manifestations as words and forms. In framing language resources according to the meanings and levels which are most at stake for literacy development and literature response, the 4x4 aims to provide resources for teachers in working with the three strands of the Australian Curriculum in meaningful and creative ways. Introduction Since the drafting of the Australian curriculum: English, there has been a resurgence of interest in the place of language and language instruction in English. While a plethora of views, reflections and concerns have been represented in academic and teaching journals, in response to both the drafting process and published curriculum, it is evident that English teachers are for the most part open to the challenge of integrating explicit teaching of language, literacy and literature into their programming and classroom practice. This response may reflect the recognition that the work of subject English is far broader than the literature based discipline of academic English (Dixon, 2012: 20) and requires diverse though interrelated strands of knowledge. Unlike the singular discipline of academic English, subject English is multi-disciplinary (21). A related thread evident in discussions of language concerns the nature of the language resources and the related meta-language needed by teachers of subject English. Although the orientation of the language strand of the curriculum is towards function and meaning, the content descriptions and elaborations include many traditional class labels, such as nouns, verbs and adverbs. This has led to reflections by some of the ineffectiveness of literacy