The University of Wollongong is an Australian public research university located in the coastal city of Wollongong, New South Wales, approximately 80 kilometres south of Sydney. As of 2023, the university had an enrolment of more than 33,000 students, an alumni base of more than 176,000 [LC1] and over 2,400 staff members including 16 Distinguished professors.
Composition studies is the professional field of writing, research, and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college level in the United States.
Allan Luke is an educator, researcher, and theorist studying literacy, multiliteracies, applied linguistics, and educational sociology and policy. Luke has written or edited 17 books and more than 250 articles and book chapters. Luke, with Peter Freebody, originated the Four Resources Model of literacy in the 1990s. Part of the New London Group, he was coauthor of the "Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures" published in the Harvard Educational Review (1996). He is Emeritus Professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia and adjunct professor at Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada.
Peter Freebody is an Australian Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Past appointments included Professorial Research Fellow with the Faculty of Education and Social Work and a core member of the CoCo Research Centre at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. His research and teaching interests include literacy education, classroom interaction and quantitative and qualitative research methods. He has served on numerous Australian State and Commonwealth literacy education and assessment advisory groups. Freebody, with Allan Luke, originated the Four Resources Model of literacy education.
James Robert Martin is a Canadian linguist. He is Professor of Linguistics at The University of Sydney. He is the leading figure in the 'Sydney School' of systemic functional linguistics. Martin is well known for his work on discourse analysis, genre, appraisal, multimodality and educational linguistics.
Wilga Marie Rivers was an Australian linguist and Professor of Romance Languages. While she taught at both the secondary-education and college level throughout her life, she spent the majority of her career on the faculty of Harvard University. There, she served as a Professor of Romance Languages and Coordinator of Language Instruction in Romance Languages, fulfilling these roles until her eventual retirement in 1989.
Gayane Hovhannisyan is an Armenian linguist, Doctor of Sciences in Philology/Linguistics (2000), Professor (2005). Hovhannisyan was the first Chair of English Teaching Methodology at Armenian State Pedagogical University after Khachatur Abovyan, Yerevan. Currently she is the (acting) head of English Communication and Translation Chair at Brusov State University.
Rosalind Ivanić is a Yugoslav-born British linguist. She is currently an honorary professor at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. Her research focuses on applied linguistics with a special focus on literacy, intertextuality, multimodal communication, adult literacy, educational linguistics, critical language awareness, punctuation, and second language writing. Along with Theo van Leeuwen and David Barton, she is considered one of the most prominent researchers on literacy.
The Sydney School is a genre-based writing pedagogy that analyses literacy levels of students. The Sydney School's pedagogy broadened the traditional observation-based writing in primary schools to encompass a spectrum of different genres of text types that are appropriate to various discourses and include fiction and non-fiction. The method and practice of teaching established by the Sydney School encourages corrective and supportive feedback in the education of writing practices for students, particularly regarding second language students. The Sydney School works to reflectively institutionalise a pedagogy that is established to be conducive to students of lower socio-economic backgrounds, indigenous students and migrants lacking a strong English literacy basis. The functional linguists who designed the genre-based pedagogy of the Sydney School did so from a semantic perspective to teach through patterns of meaning and emphasised the importance of the acquisition of a holistic literacy in various text types or genres. ‘Sydney School’ is not, however, an entirely accurate moniker as the pedagogy has evolved beyond metropolitan Sydney universities to being adopted nationally and, by 2000, was exported to centres in Hong Kong, Singapore, and parts of Britain.
Dr. Carol Diane Lee is an American professor, educational researcher, school director and author. Now retired, Lee was the Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education and Social Policy, Professor of Learning Sciences, and Professor of African-American Studies at Northwestern University. Her scholarly interests focus on the influences of culture and literacy on education, particularly among students in the African-American community. She chairs the Board of Director of the Betty Shabbazz International Charter School, an institution she helped found.
Anne Burns is a British-born Australian educational linguist, internationally known for her work on genre-based pedagogy in TESOL and EAP/ESP. She is a Professor Emerita in Language Education at Aston University (UK) and Professor of TESOL at the University of New South Wales (Australia). The TESOL International Association named her one of the '50 at 50', leaders who had made a significant contribution to TESOL in its first 50 years.
Louise Jane Ravelli is an Australian linguist. She is a professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research expertise includes multimodal communication, museum communication, discourse analysis, and systemic functional grammar, using the frameworks of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Social Semiotics, and Multimodal Discourse Analysis.
Frances Helen Christie, is Emeritus professor of language and literacy education at the University of Melbourne, and honorary professor of education at the University of Sydney. She specialises in the field of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and has completed research in language and literacy education, writing development, pedagogic grammar, genre theory, and teaching English as a mother tongue and as a second language.
Suzanne Eggins is an Australian linguist who is an Honorary Fellow at Australian National University (ANU), associated with the ANU Institute for Communication in Health Care. Eggins is the author of a best selling introduction to systemic functional linguistics and she is known for her extensive work on critical linguistic analysis of spontaneous interactions in informal and institutional healthcare settings.
Jenny Hammond is an Australian linguist. She is known for her research on literacy development, classroom interaction, and socio-cultural and systemic functional theories of language and learning in English as an Additional Language or dialect (EAL/D) education. Over the course of her career, Hammond's research has had a significant impact on the literacy development of first and second language learners, on the role of classroom talk in constructing curriculum knowledge and on policy developments for EAL education in Australia. She is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Education, University of Technology Sydney.
Mary Macken-Horarik is an Australian linguist. She is an adjunct Associate Professor in the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education (ILSTE) at the Australian Catholic University. This title was awarded "in recognition of her international reputation and scholarly expertise in the field of Senior Secondary English Curriculum." Macken-Horarik is known for her contributions to systemic functional linguistics and its application to literacy, language and English education.
Elizabeth A. Thomson is an Australian linguist. She is an adjunct professor in the Division of Learning and Teaching at Charles Sturt University, and Principal Honorary Fellow of the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong. She is known for her research in linguistics, language education and training, language other than English and curriculum & assessment design, and has made contributions to the field of English and Japanese linguistics from the Systemic Functional perspective. She is a foundation member of the Japan Association of Systemic Functional Linguistics (JASFL), a member of the International Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (ISFLA) and the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (ASFLA), and also an associate member of The Council of Australasian University Leaders in Learning and Teaching and The Australasian Council on Open, Distance and e-Learning (ACODE).
Jane Torr is an Australian academic in the fields of early childhood language and literacy development in home and early childhood education and care settings. She is an honorary associate in the department of educational studies at Macquarie University, where she has been teaching and researching for over 30 years. Torr's research draws on systemic functional linguistic theory to explore the relationship between context and meaning in adult-child interactions, and the implications for children's learning. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as well as publications in professional journals.
Mary J. Schleppegrell is an applied linguist and Professor of Education at the University of Michigan. Her research and praxis are based on the principles of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a theory derived from the work of social semiotic linguist Michael Halliday. Schleppegrell is known for the SFL-based literacy practices she has continuously helped to develop for multilingual and English language learners throughout her decades long career, which she began as an educational specialist before transitioning to the field of applied linguistics. As a result, her publications demonstrate a deep understanding of both the theories and practices related to teaching and learning.
