BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES

TESOL Quarterly invites readers to submit short reports and updates on their work.
These summaries may address any areas of interest to Quarterly readers.
Edited by ANNE BURNS
Aston University
University of New South Wales
CELIA ROBERTS
Kings College London

Teacher Agency and Policy Response in the Adult

ESL Literacy Classroom
SUE OLLERHEAD
Macquarie University
Sydney, Australia
doi: 10.5054/tq.2010.230742_1

& This article reports on a small-scale study that examines how Paula

and Lucy,1 both teachers of very low-literate adult English as a second

language (ESL) learners, interpret and respond to Australias
Language, Literacy, and Numeracy Program (LLNP) policy in
different ways. The study investigates their diverging backgrounds
and pedagogical and personal attitudes and beliefs, focusing
particularly on the extent to which they feel empowered to exercise
agency in their teaching.2 In doing so, it explores a potential link
between teachers ability to act agentively and the ways in which they
respond to policy conditions. In examining these issues, the study
focuses on specific policy-driven constraints and enablements
(Toohey, 2007) experienced by each teacher in the course of her
teaching work.

1
2

606

Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identity of the teachers.

The empirical data underpinning this study were collected as part of a wider, multisite case
study into low-level adult ESL literacy instruction, which included over 10 hours of
semistructured interviews conducted with head teachers and teachers, as well as over
45 hours of classroom-based observation.

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 44, No. 3, September 2010

BACKGROUND TO AUSTRALIAN ADULT LITERACY

POLICY
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a shift in Australias language and
literacy policy saw literacy education transformed from what Searle
describes as a small-scale, community-orientated, marginalised field
based on humanistic principles (2002, p. 5) to a core foundation of the
countrys economy, when it became organised under the vocational
education and training sector. According to Searle, this resulted in what
were once humanistic goals, such as identifying and responding to an
individuals social and personal needs, being quickly subsumed by
industry goals such as productivity and cost-effectiveness (p. 7).
Australian literacy policy has always been characterised by a distinct
separation of funding amongst various government sectors. The
Department of Immigration and Citizenship funds adult ESL teaching
through the Adult Migrant English Program, whereas funding for adult
literacy and numeracy teaching is administered through the Department
of Employment, Education, and Workplace Relations (2009) through
labour-oriented programs such as the LLNP and the Workplace English
Language and Literacy program (Burns & de Silva Joyce, 2007). This has
led some stakeholders in the field (Hammond & Derewianka, 1999; Lo
Bianco & Wickert, 2001; Searle, 2002) to comment that adult literacy
policy environment tends to be mass-directed and generalised, rather
than aimed at meeting the myriad needs of a widely divergent client
base.
It is within this policy context that the Australian LLNP, instituted in
1992, claimed to provide high quality, flexible training to its clients, to
meet a growing need for vocationally oriented literacy and numeracy
training. Its clients, who are mostly referred by the governments social
security agency Centrelink, attend training for a maximum of 19 hours a
week, in blocks of up to 160 hours, after which they are assessed using
the National Reporting System (NRS; 2009).3

PERCEIVED TEACHER CONSTRAINTS UNDER LLNP

POLICY
The numerous policy-related challenges experienced by teachers
working in the LLNP are well documented (Australian Council for
Adult Literacy, 2009; McKenna & Fitzpatrick, 2005; McGuirk, 2001).
Prevalent amongst these are the programs considerable demands on
accountability that result in increased administration and reporting loads,
3

The National Reporting System is Australias nationally recognised instrument for

reporting outcomes of adult English language, literacy, and numeracy programs.

BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES

607

as well as highly prescribed time frames, within which teachers are obliged
to measure student gains in language proficiency. Students are expected
to attain two NRS improvements within each 160-hour block of tuition,
which assumes that they are able to acquire literacy skills in a linear
manner. Searle (2002) described this imperative as the LLNPs
decontextualised, building-block approach to literacy teaching, which
fits neatly into what Street (1984) termed an autonomous or deficit model of
literacy.
Added to this requirement is the doubling of the assessment burden for
teachers, who have to report student progress against both the NRS and the
outcomes of the various curricula used by their institutions. The sacrificing
of valuable classroom time in favour of assessment and reporting duties,
which are mostly driven by funding and tender conditions, is generally felt
by teachers to be counterproductive to their efforts to meet learners
individual needs (Australian Council for Adult Literacy, 2009).
Teacher comments cited in this study also reflect concern about their
capacity to deal with the emergence of a new student population in adult
literacy classes, comprising learners with very little literacy in their first
languages (L1s) and very little experience of formal learning. According
to Murray (2003), this learner population poses significant challenges
which need to be addressed in terms of specialised teacher training and
program planning. Gunn (2003) related that classes that combine both
L1-literate and nonliterate students often result in nonliterate students
being disadvantaged. In reality, however, policy-driven funding constraints dictate that very little, if any, explicit training is given to teachers
of low-literate learners, and the combination of L1-literate and
nonliterate learners is a common occurrence in adult literacy classrooms. In this way, policy conditions would seem to act against teachers
ability to act agentively in the best interests of their students.
Teachers difficulties with elements of language and literacy policy are
by no means unique to Australias LLNP. In Haque and Crays (2007)
report on constraints experienced by Canadian language teachers
working under the Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada
(LINC) program, they concluded that the starting point for dealing with
adverse teaching conditions lies not in offering makeshift assistance in
the form of improved resources and reduced class sizes, but rather in
addressing the core issues of the LINC policy itself and the way in which
it is implemented (p. 641).

AGENCY AND PRACTICE

Sociolinguists such as Hornberger (Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester,
2000), who are concerned with the power relations inherent in literacy
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teaching practices, argued that teachers have the potential to occupy

transformative roles, even within highly constraining policy environments. Hornberger saw the power relations present in literacy teaching
environments as being flexible and open to transformation through
what teachers do in everyday practices. She put forward a pedagogy of
multiliteracies that includes critical framing and cultural practice
models as examples of instructional practices where the traditional
power relations governing literacy tuition are contested at a microlevel
in the classroom.
Hornberger viewed teachers potentially transformative power as being
largely dependent on the extent to which they possess or display agency, an
attribute described in broad terms by Pickering (1995) as the ability of
individuals to exercise choice and discretion in their everyday practices.
Taking this concept further, Giddens (1984) placed emphasis on the
transformative potential of agency, which he described as the capability of
the individual to make a difference to a pre-existing state of affairs or course
of events (p. 14). In the context of this study, the pre-existing state of
affairs is viewed as the constraining conditions of LLNP policy, and the
capability of the individual to make a difference is conceptualised as
conscious efforts by the teacher to resist feelings of powerlessness and
negativity experienced as a by-product of these conditions.
The view of agency adopted in this article emphasises the importance
of the social settings in which adult literacy instruction takes place.
Toohey (2007) stressed that teachers are not simply agentive in their
own right, but rather that societal factors, such as the institutional
culture in which teaching takes place, impose constraints on, and
enable, their agency (p. 232).
In Stritikus (2003) explication of what he termed the policy-topractice connection (p. 30), he drew on elements of sociocultural
theory to illustrate how the way teachers implement policy in the
classroom is not influenced only by policy itself, or by curricula and their
supporting materials, but also by the context in which their teaching
takes place, their beliefs and attitudes towards pedagogy, as well as their
political and personal ideologies (p. 33).
It is through the lenses of these theoretical frameworks that the agentive
behaviour of Paula and Lucy in response to LLNP policy is observed.

THE TEACHING CONTEXT

Both Paula and Lucy work at a large vocational training college, which
is accredited to run the LLNP. The college is located in an ethnically and
socially diverse commercial hub, on the outskirts of a major Australian
city. A local government area comprising 280,000 residents, it is home to
BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES

609

a large migrant population, with 31% of residents having been born

overseas, and 23% of residents coming from non-English-speaking
backgrounds (data retrieved June 8, 2009, from http://council.gov.au;
anonymity of city name is preserved).
The colleges languages program caters for over eight levels of
English language proficiency, ranging from preliterate beginner to
advanced, vocationally oriented classes. Both Paula and Lucy teach at
what they term marginally post-beginner levels, where their classrooms
comprise roughly 25 students each. Most of their students attend class
for 5 hours a day, 3 days a week.
Paula and Lucy describe their students as having mostly refugee
backgrounds, coming from strife-torn regions of Africa and Asia, where
their schooling was severely disrupted as a result of violent conflict and
displacement. Most students had very little or no literacy skills in their first
languages (L1s) and also very little experience of formal learning situations.

THE INSTITUTIONAL CULTURE

An interview with the colleges head teacher Rose provided an insight
into the pervading culture surrounding the LLNP, including teacher
attitudes towards instructing very low-literate students. Rose identified
the high administrative load dictated by the NRS as a major disincentive
for teachers. She described a situation in which a once energetic,
creative teaching environment had been affected by an air of
despondency emanating from the plethora of daily, bureaucratic tasks
that teachers had to complete.
I think some of the teachers feel that were so assessment and reportingdriven, that quality teaching is disappearing because all their time is taken up
with paperwork instead of being creative and saying these students are having
difficulty, how can I present the matter in a way that they would understand
it. And, they havent got the energy and the time now, because its just being
drowned in paperwork.

In Roses opinion, the adult literacy teaching sector as a whole was

largely unprepared for responding to the complex needs of students
with very little or no formal learning. She described an almost ambushlike situation, where teachers were not sufficiently warned or equipped
for the multiple, intense, and complex challenges they would face in
teaching students with markedly low levels of literacy and often highly
specific and complex social and settlement needs.
We were caught, the Sudanese crept up on us. Maybe four years ago, none of
us had taught that kind of learner. Then suddenly, the Sudanese were upon
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us, and the Afghan women were upon us, and so we were kind of, we were
existing teachers [of ABE students] and even if you had expertise at teaching
lower levels at other providers, they were educated, they had literacy, so its
completely different.

Roses comments add weight to concerns about the lack of theoretical

professional development given to teachers of very low-literate students
and the absence of self-evaluation and reflection by such teachers on
their teaching practices (see McCormack, 1994; McGuirk, 2001). Both of
these factors were considered by Gunn (2003) as being essential to
developing a deeper insight into the needs and backgrounds of
preliterate and low-literate students.
Both Paula and Lucy volunteered individual responses to the
institutional culture in which they were working. Although Paula had
taught at other levels of English language proficiency, she found
teaching more advanced students less interesting and satisfying and
enjoyed the fundamental challenges posed by teaching very low-literate
classes. Paula saw teaching as a dual process of analysing and presenting
language according to specific student needs and admitted that her
teaching experiences provided a constant source of learning and selfquestioning.
I actually love the challenge of getting right down to the basics of a language
and working out how to present it in its simplest form for people at beginner
level. Its rewarding breaking the language down and thinking about how you
can present it so that its meaningful to them. I find it very challenging, very
difficult actually.

Lucy described how the immense effort she put into developing
appropriate classroom materials for her students often resulted in
frustration, when she realised that they were not responding to her
prompts or progressing in terms of proficiency. She used adjectives such
as exhausting and depressing to characterise her work, admitting
that her teaching was as much a learning experience for her as it was for
her students.
Ive been trying hard to do things, maybe I try to work out some impossible
things. I try very hard to do things in different ways. Always you are learning.
You say, okay this must be the best way for them to learn, but its only from
your point of view. You are educated, you think that people know, that they
can understand. You cant anticipate how theyre going to use that.

Lucy relates how the first job she was given at the college was teaching a
class of beginner literacy learners. She admits to feeling completely
BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES

611

unprepared for the task, as the majority of her teaching experience was
gained in a high school environment, where students were taught in
their L1s. Significantly, however, she viewed her lack of experience as a
substantiating reason for being allocated a low-proficiency class,
explaining, Not everybody likes to teach level 1. Its very hard to find
level 1 teachers.
Both teachers acknowledged that the difficulties posed by teaching
multilevel classrooms, compounded by the LLNPs policy of continuous
enrolment,4 often necessitated the preparation of materials for a
number of levels within one class. For Paula, this situation presented
an opportunity to promote both student autonomy and classroom
collaboration.
There are some students who you just have to sit down alongside and work
individually with [them]. The other students have to learn that they have to
wait for that. And they do learn, they learn patience . . . its good for them to
learn that there are different students with different skills.

Despite the vast amount of time that both teachers spent preparing
materials for their students, they admitted that there was very little
sharing or cross-referencing of materials between the colleges teachers
generally. This meant that the institution had no documentation of
successfully implemented practices and materials, and thus no coherent
knowledge base from which to assess their effectiveness. In this way, the
institutional culture appeared to act against Freeman and Johnsons
(1998) proposed framework for analysing the knowledge base of literacy
teaching practices, which entails examining the relationship between
three closely related elements: the teacher-learner, pedagogical practice,
and the social context in which the instruction takes place. In other
words, who teaches what to whom, where? (p. 405).

TEACHER BACKGROUNDS
The first teacher featured in the study, Paula, had been teaching adult
ESL literacy students for 5 years. She had entered the ESL profession in
her 50s, and held a Masters degree in linguistics. She had begun her
ESL teaching with an international charity organisation, where her
students were predominantly refugees and asylum seekers, a job she
found very stimulating and rewarding. As part of her training, she had
completed a workshop on the treatment and rehabilitation of torture
and trauma survivors.
4

612

Continuous enrolment is a core tenet of LLNP policy, meaning that new students are able
to enter LLNP classrooms at any stage during a semester, regardless of course timetables.

TESOL QUARTERLY

The second teacher, Lucy, was a qualified high school teacher, who
had worked in the education system of her home country for 10 years
before migrating to Australia. After leaving the profession for 16 years to
raise her family, she enrolled in a TESOL certificate in Australia and
eventually completed a Masters degree in language teaching. She
taught for 2 years in the Australian high school system but found the
culture very different to what she was used to as a teacher previously.
Lucy explained how, in her home countrys education system, both
teaching content and pedagogical practices were strictly dictated by
policy, which was closely adhered to by teachers. Also, she described
marked differences in the behaviour and attitude of her Australian
students compared to those in her home country.
Because high school [in Australia] is very different you know, with the way things
are in X. Yes the children are different and I think the culture. When I was
teaching [in X], the student is very disciplined. They sit there and they listen.

INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICES
For Lucy, classroom teaching and support materials were deployed to
present language in a methodical and structured way. A series of four,
hour-long observations of her lessons revealed that she consistently
favoured a form-focused approach, described by Ellis (2001) as any
planned or incidental instructional activity that is intended to induce
language learners to pay attention to linguistic form (p. 2). In Lucys
classroom, this was evident in her practice of asking students to focus on
the structure of short versus long words, and her breaking down of words
into their composite syllables and phonemes by presenting them on
different-coloured bits of paper. However, Lucy admits that this
systematic approach often failed:
When I prepare I think itll be perfect, then I put the words on the board with
different colour for different syllables. Then a word like holiday which has
three syllables, they copy as 3 different words, ho, li day. Its not one, 3!
So I think okay, Ill have to find another way.

Sustained observation of Lucys lessons also revealed markedly low levels

of student participation and engagement, with Lucy providing most of
the input in the form of protracted, rhetorical teacher talk (see Gass,
1997; Lightbown & Spada, 2006; Ritchie & Bhatia, 1996). This can be
witnessed in the following transcript from a portion of a lesson in which
Lucy aimed to introduce her students to vocabulary associated with
leisure activities:
BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES

613

Classroom Transcript 3.1

1 T: Today were going to be talking about Going to the
beach because thats what Australians like to do.
2 T: How many of you have been to the beach?[10 s pause]
3 T: How many of you have been to the beach huh?[7 s pause]
4 S1: I go with school but windy, rainy.
5 T: We all take children to the beach. Why? Because they like
to play in the sand and water.
6 T: Even adults like the beach father, mother, children like the
beach.
7 T: What else do people do if they dont go to the beach on a
Sunday, huh?
8 S2: I go to church in the morning.
9 T: They have a barbeque!
In the above-mentioned lesson, Lucys earnest attempts at contextualising the vocabulary aims of her lesson resulted in prolonged
descriptions, explanations and anecdotes on her part that met with
little or no response from her students. Through sustained observation,
it thus became apparent that Lucy was exerting substantial effort in the
preparation and delivery of her lessons, yet was growing increasingly
frustrated at what she perceived as a lack of progress by her students,
whom she characterised as passive learners.
Paulas approach was to use a whole-text method of teaching, which
she said she had struggled along with for years in the absence of any
material assistance or training available for teachers of low-literate
adults.
She explained how she started by developing and reading her
students very simple stories related to their life situations, for example,
that of a young woman who came to Australia and wanted to work in
childcare. Each story had pictures that matched with the simple texts,
which were all written in the present or past simple tense.
Wed read the stories again and again, around the class, until the Sudanese5
almost did know it by heart, because they have such a good ear. So then Id
collect all the stories from them, and then wed work backwards, wed
generate them on the board.

Paula would elicit key vocabulary and spelling from the stories from her
students, who would then write them up on the board as a class.

614

According to Paula, most low-level literacy classes at the college comprised high numbers
of students from Sudan.

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Id say, How do you spell it? and wed sound it out, ad nauseum, until they
gradually took wild guesses at the spelling and they learned some simple
rules. Wed generate the key words in random order, all over the whiteboard,
and then learn to read those words out of context, so they were no longer just
memorising the story.

Paula would then present students with the pictures and the text, cut up
separately, and ask them to match the simple texts with the pictures. By
this stage, her students had learned to recognise some of the words from
the story as sight words. She would repeat this exercise every week, using
a different story.
For Paula, the key aspect of her self-devised teaching method was the
promotion of active learning. In her experience of having taught
students who had never been to school, one of her key observations was
that many of them were very passive learners. She found this to be
particularly the case with female students, many of whom she perceived
as occupying traditionally subservient positions to men in their households. She felt that this passivity often transferred to their classroom
learning.
But if you get the class to work collaboratively, eliciting words, spelling, and
recreating texts, they forget their reservations and become active, rather than
passive in their learning.

Observed over a series of four, hour-long observations, Paulas lessons

were characterised by an energetic, lively atmosphere. Interaction
amongst students was generally very high, with Paula often playing a
peripheral, facilitative role, while students proceeded with communicative tasks such as group surveys and small group discussions. This
dynamic learning environment was acknowledged and appreciated by
her students, one of whom remarked:
I love here at [college] the way the teacher teaches. She lets us laugh and
enjoy to learn English. To know more, to try, Im happy with that. But before
that I was at [college] and the teacher talk and talk and I just want to finish.
Now Im so happy I like the way I learn everything.

DISCUSSION
Jennings (1996) asserted that it is teachers experiences, ideas, and
beliefs that determine how they interpret educational policy, how they
integrate both old and new knowledge, and how they translate policy
into instructional practices.
BRIEF REPORTS AND SUMMARIES

615

In this study, Paula communicated a strong commitment to the

humanistic and social concerns of her students, as well as their specific
literacy learning needs. For her, the very absence of specific training and
materials for teachers of low-literate students in the LLNP provided her
with the pedagogical freedom to develop her own evidence-based
classroom teaching techniques and materials to meet the complex needs
of her students. In this way, she was able to overcome the air of defeat
pervading the institution in the face of constraining policy conditions
and to offer classroom lessons that were vibrant, active, and clearly
engaging to her students. In doing so, she was able to exercise her
agency as a teacher, and, as Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester (2000)
would suggest, contest the traditionally powerful policy conditions at a
microlevel, through her own creative and intuitive classroom teaching
practices.
Lucys teaching background was located within a more authoritarian
context, where policy was strictly adhered to and observed. She found
the vast amount of classroom preparation she carried out in the face of
very slow progress by her students, added to what she perceived as the
rigorous and unreasonable demands of the LLNP reporting system,
frequently overwhelming. These factors, heightened by the low levels of
classroom participation by her students, impacted negatively on the
personal and professional satisfaction that she got from her job. In this
context, therefore, it could be said that policy conditions acted to
constrain Lucys ability to act agentively as a teacher.
Examining Lucy and Paulas experiences draws attention to the
potential for the powerful and transformative effects of teacher agency.
Although the benefits and drawbacks of the LLNP policy have been
debated at length at a macrolevel (see Australian Council for Adult
Literacy, 2009; McGuirk, 2001; McKenna & Fitzpatrick, 2005), this smallscale case study would suggest that documenting and sharing successful
microlevel contestations of policy, in the form of transformed teaching
practices, may serve to result in material change for teachers and
students alike. Exploring possible linkages between teacher agency and
policy response allows for reconceptualisation of a view of teachers as
passive recipients of policy. It enables a focus on the highly variable
capacity of teachers to utilise their agency to both resist constraints and
capitalise on enablements in their individual classrooms and teaching
environments.
THE AUTHOR
Sue Ollerhead is a doctoral student in applied linguistics at Macquarie University,
Sydney, Australia. She has taught English as an additional language in Africa,
Europe, and Australia, and has worked as an English language materials developer
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for schools in sub-Saharan Africa. Her main interests are second language
acquisition and language in education, with a specific focus on the instruction of
very low-literate adults.

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Freeman, D., & Johnson, K. E. (1998). Reconceptualizing the knowledge-base of
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Aligning Instructional Practices to Meet the Academic

Needs of Adult ESL Students
KIMBERLY A. JOHNSON
Hamline University
Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States
BETSY PARRISH
Hamline University
Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States
doi: 10.5054/tq.2010.230742_2

& In many English-speaking countries, two fundamental changes are

converging on the world of work: (a) shifting demographics, including
the decline in the labor force of native-born, native-English-speaking
residents (McMurry, 2007; RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) Financial
Group, 2005) and (b) the need for education beyond the high school
diploma to compete in difficult economic times and to fill the fastest
growing and most in-demand occupations (Bailey & Mingle, 2003;
Hecker, 2001; Holzer & Lerman, 2009; National Center on Education
and the Economy, 2009). With the current economic downturn, the
numbers of adult learners seeking services in adult basic education
(ABE) within the United States, including English as a second language
(ESL), is expected to grow significantly (Kirsch, Braun, & Yamamoto,
2007; Shaffer, 2009), so it is critical that we address the education and
training needs of the adult ESL population, including the need for
postsecondary education (Bailey & Mingle, 2003).
Acknowledging the need for education beyond a high school diploma
or general educational development certificate (Prince & Jenkins, 2005;
Strawn, 2007), our state is in the midst of a 3-year ABE Transition to
Postsecondary initiative to better prepare students currently enrolled in
the ABE system (45% of whom are ESL students) to succeed at
postsecondary education. Although many of the teachers in that system
have some ESL training, including about 25% with masters degrees in
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