Literacy Works is the leading provider of secondary school literacy resources around Australia.
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. Then I thought, ‘Maybe other teachers might be interested in this’ … and Literacy Works was born.
Fast forward to two decades later…
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 secondary school teachers. I am involved in literacy research and I regularly publish and present academic papers, as well as presentations to teachers.
I am still passionate about improving literacy in secondary schools and I work with schools on the Literacy in Subject Areas program for secondary school subjects. Literacy in Subject Areas shows teachers how to teach literacy and their subject content together. It builds teacher confidence and understanding of the literacies of their subject AND how to teach it effectively.
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!
Latest publications:
Weekes, T. (2027). ‘Disciplinary writing in secondary school geography: Evaluating like a geographer’, in H. Chen, P, Jones & H. Georgiou (Eds.), Improving disciplinary writing in the secondary school. Writing for learning in English, History, Geography, and Science. Routledge.
Dreyfus, S. & Weekes, P. (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.
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.
Weekes, T. (2019). ‘Writing, talking and drawing about music: Transformations of musical knowledge in the multimodal music classroom’ in H. de Silva Joyce & S. Feez (eds.) Multimodality across classrooms. Learning about and through different modalities. New York & London: Routledge.
Trish Weekes PhD
trish@literacyworks.com.au
