Modelling and mentoring : teaching and learning from home through school

Adopting a longitudinal perspective on teaching and learning language from home through school to working life, this paper bring out the inherent complementarity of teaching and learning processes, showing how parents and teachers serve as mentors for learners by modelling meaning for them in dialogic interaction. The paper begins with a focus on language development in the home, looking at the kind of interactions taking place. It then moves on to consider how this kind of teaching and learning can be recontextualised in school, focusing in particular on the curriculum and pedagogy of the genre-based literacy practices of what has come to be known as the ‘Sydney School’. The focus of this primary and secondary school initiative is then extended to the tertiary academic sector.