About

Literacy Works started way back in 2000. I was teaching Music in an inner city high school. My students were from many cultural and linguistic backgrounds and they were really struggling with literacy in my subject, especially writing. I attended a PD session on literacy in the school hall, and I realised I didn’t know enough to help my students, so I decided to learn more. I developed my own literacy worksheets for my subject and they worked a treat to help students in my classes. Then I thought, ‘Maybe other teachers might be interested in this’ … and Literacy Works was born.

Fast forward to two decades later…

Literacy Works is the leading provider of secondary school literacy resources around Australia. And they have been updated in 2023 for the Australian Curriculum V9.

I became so interested in literacy that I left the classroom to study and learn more. I gained a PhD in secondary school literacy.  I am passionate about sharing the latest evidence based literacy research in high quality resources and in professional development for teachers. I am involved in literacy research and I regularly publish academic articles. Here are my latest publications:

Weekes, T. (2021). ‘A review of the literature around literacy transition’, in P.T. Jones, E. Matruglio & C. Edwards-Groves (Eds.), Transition and Continuity in School Literacy Development. London: Bloomsbury.

Weekes, T. & Jones, P. (2021). The challenges of mapping literacy development across the years of schooling. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. Special Issue: Literacy Transition. 44(2), 11-25.

Dreyfus, S. & Weekes, T. (2022). ‘Putting Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) & Sydney School Genre Pedagogy (SSGP) to work in a compulsory first year Arts subject’, in Caldwell, D., Knox, J.S., Martin, J.R. (eds.), Appliable Linguistics and Social Semiotics: Developing Theory from Practice. Bloomsbury: London.

I am still passionate about improving literacy in secondary schools and I work with schools on subject-based literacy programs.

If you’re interested in whole-school literacy change, I have created a new, FREE resource for schools using everything I have learned about literacy in the past 20 years:

How to improve literacy in secondary schools.

I hope you find Literacy Works makes literacy easy in your subject. Please get in touch if you have any questions and good luck with your literacy initiatives this year!

Trish Weekes PhD