Helen de Silva Joyce
Helen de Silva Joyce is an Australian applied linguist and TESOL researcher who spent the bulk of her career translating Sydney School genre theory into practical curriculum for adult migrant English. Much of that work happened through the National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research (NCELTR) at Macquarie University and the AMEP Research Centre, with a parallel decade as Director of Community and Migrant Education at the NSW Department of Education and Training. She now holds an adjunct post at the University of New England.
Her signature contribution is the long collaboration with Anne Burns on spoken discourse and workplace language, which pulled the SFL tradition out of schools-literacy contexts and reshaped it for adult ESL classrooms. In earlier publications she is cited as Helen Joyce; the fuller Helen de Silva Joyce is the form she uses now.
Career
- Curriculum and teacher-education work in the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) from the late 1980s
- Researcher at NCELTR, Macquarie University, on national AMEP-funded projects on speaking and genre
- Director of Community and Migrant Education, NSW Department of Education and Training, for over ten years
- Independent consultant and Adjunct Lecturer, School of Education, University of New England
Published Work
- English for Social Purposes: A Handbook for Teachers of Adult Literacy (Hammond, Burns, Joyce, Brosnan & Gerot, NCELTR 1992)
- Focus on Speaking (Burns & Joyce, NCELTR 1997)
- Focus on Grammar (Burns, Joyce & Gollin, NCELTR 1996)
- Teachers' Voices 8: Explicitly Supporting Reading and Writing in the Classroom (eds. Burns & de Silva Joyce, 2007)
- Planning and Teaching Creatively Within a Required Curriculum for Adult Learners (Burns, de Silva Joyce & Graves, TESOL International 2011)
- Text-based Language and Literacy Education: Programming and Methodology (de Silva Joyce & Feez, 2012)
Influence
- Helped adapt the Callaghan & Rothery three-part Teaching-Learning Cycle into the four-part cycle used across adult TESOL
- Made speaking a legitimate object of genre-based pedagogy, not just writing
- Central in extending Sydney School methods to workplace and community-language contexts
- Left a durable footprint on AMEP teacher training and the Certificates in Spoken and Written English