The Literacy Wars

The Literacy Wars

Why teaching children to read and write
is a battleground in Australia

Ilana Snyder

First published in 2008

Copyright © Ilana Snyder 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Snyder, Ilana, 1949– .
    The literacy wars: why teaching children to read and write is a
     battleground
    in Australia.

ISBN 978 1 741754 24 7 (pbk.).
Includes index.
Bibliography.

Literacy – Government policy – Australia.
Literacy – Australia.
Culture conflict – Australia.
Educational change – Australia.
Education – Australia.

302.22440994

Set in 11.5/14pt Bembo by Midland Typesetters, Australia
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Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Literacy under attack

2 Grammar

3 Reading

4 Culture

5 Gender

6 Testing

7 Technology

8 Curriculum

9 Literacy fights back

References

Acknowledgments

There are many people to thank for their contribution to the writing of this book. Colleagues, friends and family gave me ideas, critical feedback and encouragement.

Thanks to Simon Marginson, Allan Luke, Peter Freebody, Jane Kenway, Eva Gold and Alan Gold for reading the proposal, and to Simon Marginson, Allan Luke, Viv Ellis, Mastin Prinsloo and Dimitris Koutsogiannis for reading the first draft. Their insights and suggestions were invaluable.

Thanks also to: Marion Meiers and Christine Ludwig for information and materials; Bill Green, Julian Sefton-Green and Scott Bulfin for ideas and resources; the Literacy Inquiry List, run by Brian Cambourne, for print-media materials on the debates; Nick Burbules for a discussion about binaries; Urszula Clark for a conversation about the National Literacy Strategy in England; Tony Mackay for our exchanges about curriculum; and Colin Lankshear and Bill Green for the explanation of literacy in the introduction, which is how we explained it in Teachers and Technoliteracy.

My gratitude goes to Ben Snyder for being the very first reader of a draft chapter; Ray Snyder for his continuous engagement; Gabe Snyder and Sally Greenberg for looking after Ruby when we went to Vancouver; and Dulcie Kanatopsky for her sustained interest.

The book would not have been written without research leave provided by Monash University. The time at Oxford University and the University of British Columbia gave me the opportunity to talk about my ideas with academics and research students before I began to write the book in Melbourne.

As always, Elizabeth Weiss, publisher at Allen & Unwin, was enthusiastic and offered excellent advice. Rebecca Kaiser managed the editorial phase with consummate skill and good humour. I also thank Susan Jarvis for her careful checking of the manuscript.

1 Literacy under attack

‘The Literacy Debate’ was the lead story in the Weekend Australian of 23–24 September 2006. The front-page puff piece for the coverage within affirmed the paper’s support for the ‘neutral, apolitical teaching of English’ (Ferrari 2006a). It was accompanied by a cartoon that encapsulated many parents’ anxiety about their children’s literacy. Said a young boy in response to his father’s concern about the quality of his homework: ‘Don’t worry. I can google my way through life.’ There were also two more articles, five images and an editorial—all dedicated to the failings of literacy education. There was only one piece that defended current practice. This was a major offensive in the literacy wars as they are fought in the print media.

Central to the assault on literacy education were extracts from an article by David Freesmith (2006a), an English teacher at Adelaide’s Prince Alfred College, which had been published several months earlier in the teachers’ journal English in Australia. Freesmith (2006b) had accused the Australian of mounting a political and ideological attack on critical literacy but of failing to understand it. The goal of critical literacy, he explained, is to create a questioning, critical, ethical citizenry; critical literacy is integral to a healthy democracy. Abridged to the point of incoherence, his defence of critical literacy was set up to compare badly with the other contributions. Literacy Wars 1 31/1/08 10:06:08 AM

Freesmith pointed out that the latest round in the debate about critical literacy had been sparked by academic Wayne Sawyer’s editorial in English in Australia. Disappointed at Howard’s re-election in 2004, Sawyer (2004, p. 8) had asked whether a critical literacy needed to become ‘more direct and deliberate in its ethics and its critical stance’ against a government that had lied about refugees throwing their children overboard, set up detention centres and gone to war with Iraq, despite evidence that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Sawyer’s musings have been used over and over by the Australian to caricature the enemy.

There was a lengthy response to Freesmith by Kenneth Wiltshire (2006), J.D. Story Professor of Public Administration at the University of Queensland’s business school, and chairman of the review of Queensland’s curriculum under the Goss government. The focus of the literacy debate, wrote Wiltshire, is the core curriculum and who decides its content. Endorsing the Australian’s stance against teaching school students critical literacy in English, he said that school was for ‘basics and knowledge, certainly accompanied by critical thinking, but not in a milieu where all is relative and there are no absolutes’.

Wiltshire dismissed critical literacy as ‘at best negative and at worst nihilistic’, holding it responsible for ‘dumbing down’ the curriculum. He concluded with a tribute to the Australian, which he said had ‘played a vital role as a national presence for the fourth estate in our robust democracy’, providing ‘a forum for intellectuals of both the Left and Right’. He commended the way the paper had handled the literacy debate in exposing the ‘reality of our education systems’. There was not a hint of irony in Wiltshire’s judgment of the Murdoch newspaper.

With captions that drew on his words, four pictures illustrated Wiltshire’s article. Under a photo of a statue, representing a man deep in thought, the caption read: ‘Our culture: Aristotle is still valid today.’ There were also photos with captions of the Howard government’s three education ministers: ‘Reform views: Brendan Nelson’, ‘Idealistic: David Kemp’ and ‘Explicit values: Julie Bishop’. Not all readers would have agreed with Wiltshire’s portrayal of the ministers responsible for educational leadership and policy in Australia since 1996.

The second response to Freesmith was written by Kevin Donnelly (2006f ), former chief of staff to Liberal minister Kevin Andrews and an education consultant who writes often for the Australian on literacy matters. Describing himself as a ‘conservative education warrior’, Donnelly declared that he was proud to be part of the Australian’s two-year campaign that began in 2004 ‘against political correctness in education and the destructive influence of critical literacy and postmodern theory’ on the school curriculum. Instead of valuing ‘the moral and aesthetic quality of literary greats’, claimed Donnelly, students are taught to ‘deconstruct’ the words of Wordsworth and Shakespeare. The result? Students leave school with a ‘fragmented and disjointed understanding’, the victims of ‘postmodern claptrap’.

Illustrating Donnelly’s article was a picture of a male teacher with a sheet of paper in his hand, standing in the middle of a class of what looked like Year 8 or 9 students. The teacher was talking and some of the students were looking at him. Aimed at ridiculing postmodern approaches to the study of literature, the caption read: ‘Deconstructing the Bard: Macbeth is examined in terms of “patriarchal concerns with order and gender”’. Macbeth, a staple of the English curriculum across the states of Australia, is usually studied with older students. There were no books to suggest the reading of a play, nor the kind of engagement that might be expected in a drama lesson. Without an obvious connection between the stock photo of a classroom and Donnelly’s accusations, the header, ‘Subject for Complaint’, printed in a very large font, was required to deliver the message.

Although in this instance the effect of misusing an image was benign, there were traces of the media manipulation employed by the Coalition government in the ‘Children Overboard’ affair, referred to by Wayne Sawyer in his editorial. Just prior to the election in 2001, when the polls were not predicting a Howard victory, government ministers told the Australian people that blurred images of a boat and people in the water depicted illegal immigrants throwing their children overboard. The prime minister used the photos as ‘evidence’ of the ‘kind of people’ who were trying to get into Australia without going through the ‘proper’ processes. Many commentators have attributed the re-election of the Coalition for a third term to this cynical misrepresentation of images for political gain.

Without anything new to add to the debate, the editorial (Editorial, 2006b) recycled opinions that the paper has paraded regularly since 2004: ‘[y]oung Australians must be taught how to think and write, not what to think and write,’ it pronounced. Opposed to the dissection of the Western canon according to ‘Marxist, feminist or racial analysis rather than according to the universal truths such as love, hate, pride, ambition and jealousy’, the editorial rejected Freesmith’s views as part of the ‘lunatic fringe’. It presented the writers at the Australian as a united team with a shared view on literacy education: ‘We are unabashed fans of the modern Western liberal democracy, the literary canon and Judeo-Christian values.’

The editorial referred to academic Wayne Martino (1994), whose words, plucked from the journal English in Australia, have been used repeatedly in the Australian to exemplify the arcane language of the promoters of critical literacy. Wrote Martino: ‘the English classroom is conceptualised as a socio-political site where alternative reading positions can be made available to students outside of an oppressive male–female dualistic hierarchy—outside of an oppressive phallogocentric signifying system for making meaning.’ (1994, p. 39) The sentence may be theoretically dense and overly complex but, like Freesmith and Sawyer, Martino was writing for a professional audience, not the readers of a newspaper. The editorial concluded by anticipating the ‘inevitable passing of critical literacy into the large well of dumped educational fads’.

The following week, the Australian published a number of letters on the Literacy Debate. Except for Freesmith’s self-defence, most supported the views expressed by Wiltshire, Donnelly and the editorial. On Wednesday, 27 September, the newspaper’s agenda was given further weight when senior political writer Paul Kelly (2006) entered the fray. He urged the federal government to intervene in determining the content of the school curriculum ‘on behalf of the interests of parents and children’.

Kelly repeated some of Wiltshire’s accusations—the reign of deconstruction as an approach to the study of texts, knowledge-free curricula and the absence of standards and accountability. He called for ‘a transparent review of what is being taught, its effect and its rationale’. Kelly also ridiculed Wayne Sawyer’s editorial as indicative of the ideological base of English teaching in Australian schools and criticised the website of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English for supporting Sawyer’s views. Kelly’s only concession to teachers was his suggestion that reform would get nowhere unless ‘it carries the teachers, improves their status and values their professionalism’.

What were readers to make of the Australian’s treatment of the literacy debates? Those who are not experts in literacy education, but who have entrusted their children to schools, must have been alarmed at the wildly different views about what constitutes a good literacy education. How were they to interpret the polarised positions? For readers who believe that literacy education is simply about teaching children and young people an unchanging, fixed set of basic skills, the Australian’s coverage spoke directly to them. Even readers who suspect that there might be more nuanced and balanced ways of thinking about literacy could not have helped but be concerned.

As mentioned, the national newspaper has run a succession of articles promoting a similar political line since 2004. More than half of them have been written by Kevin Donnelly. Dissenting views have been published from time to time as op-ed pieces, but most often as letters to the editor. For people interested in learning about the challenges facing literacy education at the beginning of the twenty-first century, reading the Australian would suggest that the debates are fierce but that only one side has the answers—those with different views are dismissed as part of the ‘loony left’. Rather than facilitating public discourse about literacy issues, the Australian has actually suppressed such discussion.

The articles published that weekend in September 2006 highlighted some of the questions central to the media debates about literacy education. Should there be a core literacy curriculum? How much attention should be given to basic literacy skills? Which books should be included in a literature course? Does popular culture have a place in the English classroom? Has the English curriculum been dumbed down? What does postmodern theory have to offer literacy education? Should critical literacy be an integral component of the curriculum? To what extent are the battles over literacy about other things?

Literacy education is of great interest to everyone, young and old, because understanding written words—whether in print or on a screen—is something that most people do every day, often many times over. Also, everyone is an expert and has an opinion about how reading and writing should be taught, as everyone has been to school. These reasons help explain why the literacy debates command so much attention in the media. However, they are only part of the answer. The debates command so much attention because they are rarely just about literacy, as illustrated in the articles and images published in the Australian in September 2006. They are also related to broader ‘social and cultural issues, and to political and economic forces’ (Green et al. 1997, p. 22). These broader issues and forces affect, even determine, the form and content of the debates about literacy in the media.

Debates or wars?

Characterising contemporary media coverage of literacy education as the literacy wars captures the intensity and force of the controversies. Competing views—from which method to use for teaching reading to the choice of texts for a Year 12 English course—have become battlegrounds. However, it is the defenders of traditional approaches to literacy, not the advocates of contemporary practice, who have enjoyed consistent media attention. Before the Coalition gained office, the conservative forces were sometimes given a run in the press but not with the relentless regularity of the Howard years.

In their attacks, the conservative literacy warriors often employ abusive language directed against their adversaries. Literacy teachers are accused of lowering standards by using child-centred approaches that do not provide children with a strong foundation in literacy learning. The attacks extend to what literacy teachers and educators say about literacy and how they say it, dismissing anything more complex than a simple sentence as edu-babble.The aim of the concerted attacks has been to raise public anxiety and undermine confidence in literacy education. Under the Howard government, public concern has reached new heights, with many people now believing that there is a literacy crisis.

However, the notion of a literacy crisis is not a new phenomenon. Literacy crises have been declared at other points in Australian history and have usually arisen in relation to socioeconomic change of some kind. Each time, there are reports in the print media, letters to the editor and discussion on talk back radio as teachers, unions, professional organisations, academics and parents respond.The effect is always powerful, with the public assuming that there is a literacy problem and that educational systems and teachers are to blame. Although the word ‘crisis’ has not been used as often as in the 1990s, the pattern remains the same.

The literacy wars are not restricted to Australia. In the United States in the early 1990s, the reading wars raged and, more recently, George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, with its narrow focus on maths and reading test scores, has provoked deep division in the education community. In England, when Tony Blair first took office, he proclaimed that his government was concerned with education, education, education. But his reforming zeal will be remembered more for imposing the prescriptive National Literacy Strategy, with its controversial Literacy Hour, and for the failure to reach national targets for primary and secondary students’ literacy as measured in standardised tests.

In some respects, the Australian literacy wars are a version of the American culture wars that began in the 1980s, especially as they related to schools. The battles were over the kind of knowledge young people need to participate in life as informed citizens. The school was seen as the site to build cultural literacy and a national cultural identity. Conservative critics of the school curriculum complained that there was too much attention to cultural diversity and not enough to the unifying function a common national culture should assume. By contrast, the supporters of progressive approaches regarded such views as dangerously narrow, a threat to cultural diversity and freedom of belief and expression.

Two decades later, the Australian progeny of the American cultural critics have sought to discredit a literacy curriculum they believe is afflicted by relativism, fragmentation and a fix-ation on contemporary social issues. They have poured scorn on the teaching profession and institutions of teacher education, accusing them of damaging traditional educational values. Their mission is greater emphasis in schools on cultural literacy, the literature of the Western canon and traditional values.

In response, literacy teachers and educators argue that we can’t turn the clock back, nor should we want to. There have been enormous changes in the world of ideas—due to science but also due to feminism, multiculturalism and social justice. These ideas cannot be ignored, and giving attention to them in the literacy classroom does not mean that there is no place for the enduring values and traditions of the classics and Australia’s cultural heritage.

Although no one has died in these wars and those charged in this book with waging them are accused of no more than expressing their conservative views, there have been casualties. The persistent denigration of literacy teachers by the conservative critics in the media has damaged the morale of those charged with the responsibility of educating the next generation of citizens. Hard-working and underpaid, with out the social regard they deserve, literacy teachers have been bewildered, but also angered, by their characterisation as postmodern radicals. Moreover, the collateral damage for the students in the classrooms of these battle-weary teachers and their confused parents cannot be under-estimated.

The conservative critics, who have a straightforward message for the public about the literacy wastelands of Australian schools, have been able to promote their views, not just in the tabloids and on talkback radio, but also in the more respected newspapers. Their repeated attacks in the media have armed members of the Coalition government with the vocabulary to malign literacy teachers and educators—which they do, often, in their speeches and in their press releases. What is more, the attacks have had repercussions for policy decisions and funding. This is the political context in which The Literacy Wars was written.

The literacy wars

This book provides a critical account of the literacy wars. Its purpose is to examine and evaluate the substance and viability of the arguments, claims and beliefs intrinsic to the conflicts. The book considers the main arenas of contestation: grammar, reading, culture, gender, testing, technology and curriculum. Each chapter covers a different battlefield by providing some historical background and explaining the vocabulary of the particular conflict and the positions of the adversaries.

No assumptions are made about readers’ knowledge of key concepts and, wherever possible, reference is made to research findings as a source of evidence to assess the various claims by the warring factions. Organising the battlefields into separate chapters is, of course, somewhat artificial as they are all linked to each other and overlap in complex ways. However, this structure has provided me with a systematic and generative way to think about the literacy wars and my hope is that readers will also find it useful.

Considerable attention is given to the role the press has played in shaping the public agenda and informing the debates. Although the literacy wars have also featured on radio, television and the internet, certain elements of the print media have been responsible for their escalation since 2004. The role of a serious press is to provide the public with information and commentary from a range of different perspectives. To a large extent, this has not been the case in the coverage of the literacy debates in Australia during the Howard years.

Despite any early impression, it is not only the Australian that is subjected to scrutiny. However, it was the Murdoch paper’s crusade against contemporary approaches to literacy education that motivated me to write the book. In recent years, the Australian’s in-house opinion shapers have been accorded astonishing privilege and power. Their goal has been to dictate a reactionary model for the secondary school English curriculum. It is time to hold them to account.

This chapter ends with an explanation of the meaning of literacy and why it provokes such strong feelings. Literacy is not easy to explain. In the first place, while the word is common in everyday usage, it is understood differently by different people, sometimes in radically divergent ways. In the second place, although literacy is often thought about as an independent con cept, such concepts are never self-contained but are always defined in relation to other concepts.

In the third place, literacy is a highly contested word. It is not a notion like ‘car’ or ‘holiday’ which command a reasonable level of agreement about their meaning. Even though such words presuppose a certain cultural perspective, this is nothing compared to what is at stake with literacy. Literacy is intensely value-laden—influenced by what people variously aspire to and hold important. That is why the battles over literacy are so potent politically and why they evoke visceral reactions.

Traditionally, literacy has been thought of as a cognitive ability. Being literate has been seen as a matter of cracking the alphabetic code, word-formation skills, phonics, grammar and comprehension skills. According to this psychological view of literacy, encoding and decoding skills serve as building blocks for doing other things. Once literate, people can then get on with the business of learning.

By contrast, more recent understandings see literacy as a social practice. According to this view, reading and writing can be understood and acquired only within the context of the social, cultural, political, economic and historical practices to which they are integral. From a socio-cultural perspective, literacy—or, rather, literacies—are best understood as the social practices of reading and writing which take place in different settings—not only the classroom, but also in the workplace and the other locations of everyday life. Reading or writing always involve reading or writing something with understanding.

My personal view is that both psychological and social understandings of literacy are useful and both should inform the literacy curriculum. But that is not the point here. The fact is that there is no single, correct view of literacy that would be universally accepted. There are a number of competing definitions and these definitions are continually changing and evolving. Competing definitions of literacy are at the heart of the battles.

The lack of agreement about what literacy is helps explain the conflict between the conservatives who want to preserve valued traditions and the literacy teachers who are caught somewhere between the legacy of the past and the imperative to prepare children for the demands of the future. The high social, cultural and economic premium placed on literacy learning also helps explain the intensity of the conflict and why literacy continues to stir people’s passions.

Literacy Wars 12 31/1/08 10:06:09 AM

2 Grammar

Like literacy, grammar also arouses people’s passions. When the writer Frank Moorhouse was in France, visiting an Australian war memorial, he was so incensed by a misplaced apostrophe on a new plaque that he rang the prime minister, Paul Keating, to complain (Keenan 2004). Also concerned about apostrophes—but in this case a missing rather than a misplaced one—Lynne Truss, author of the popular book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, picketed cinemas showing Two Weeks Notice carrying a placard emblazoned with the apostrophe that belonged after the ‘s’ (Keenan 2004).

But Clive James (2006) is bothered by more than the misuse of apostrophes. He fears that the English language is falling apart. In an essay in The Monthly, James grumbles that grammatical mistakes in the media go unnoticed by editors. His worst suspicions were confirmed when he read a letter in a British higher educational journal, written as recently as 2001 and signed by more than 500 university professors, lecturers and teachers of English, who all agreed that teaching grammar was not that important. Declared James: ‘You can write charmlessly without insulting the reader. But to write ungrammatically, and not realise it, is to insult the English language.’ (2006, p. 53)

Grammar’s capacity to arouse passions is not a new phenomenon. In her book, Grammar Wars, Linda Mitchell (2001) observes that in seventeenth and eighteenth century England, a time of significant language change, grammar became a hotly contested issue. She describes grammar as a natural battlefield for the mind as it represents one of the few intellectual competencies that each of us attains. Even though it is generally regarded as a dry and boring subject, what kind of grammar, how it should be taught and for what purposes are disputed. Teachers, parents, academics, politicians, talkback radio jocks, writers to the editors of newspapers and custodians of standards all have views on grammar.

Yet, despite the widespread interest in grammar, it remains difficult to define. Historically, grammar was an elastic and ambiguous term: it could mean the study of the vernacular of a foreign language, parts of speech, language use, language itself, or even translation (Mitchell 2001). But a standard, commonsense definition has endured the centuries: grammar is the art of speaking and writing correctly and the art of speaking and writing well. For Clive James and his generation, to be literate means knowing the rules of grammar.

Until the late 1960s, the study of grammar in schools meant teaching Latinate grammar, which included students learning the names of individual parts of speech and the rules of punctuation as well as how to analyse complete sentences. Most often taught through repetitive textbook exercises, Latinate grammar was a core part of the literacy curriculum in schools across the English-speaking world. However, as the result of a change in thinking, teaching grammar in this way was abandoned and for a while nothing was put in its place. I was a newly trained secondary English teacher in 1971 and, although I had been drilled in traditional grammar in my own schooling, I adopted the position of the times and did not teach grammar as I had been taught it.

Grammar was not taught prescriptively in many Australian schools for more than a generation and, as Clive James observed, those who missed out may be aware of structural and syntactical problems in their writing but they lack the language to describe them. This is what I found as a pre-service teacher educator at Monash University in the 1990s. The students in my classes complained that they had not been taught grammar at school. These future English teachers recognised that they did not have the language to talk about structure, syntax and meaning-making in reading and writing with the young people they encountered in schools on teaching practice rounds, and for some this was a worry.

A look at changes in thinking about grammar and its teaching from an historical perspective helps us understand why things altered so dramatically in Australian schools in the late 1960s and what has happened since. It also reveals ‘how current debates are rooted in the past in ways that have a bearing on contemporary issues’ (Clark 2001, p. 2). Although brief and necessarily selective, the historical perspective which follows provides a context for making sense of the debates about grammar, these days often captured by the term ‘basic literacy skills’. It also provides some background to the other debates in the literacy wars.

As approaches to grammar education in Australia continue to reflect patterns and trends that originated in England, this account begins with England. The offshore influence on our literacy wars of England and other English-speaking countries is a theme to which I return, but at this point I will make just a few observations. Australia’s colonial background and long-term associations, culturally and economically, with England are a legacy of the British Empire. Even after Australians became Australian citizens in the 1940s, there were lingering commitments to being English and, until the 1950s, English syllabi in the states and territories were permeated with references to Britain and the Commonwealth.

Today the influence of England is apparent in the Australian debates about a national curriculum. In England, the National Curriculum was introduced in 1989 by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and entrenched by Tony Blair’s New Labour. Although the National Curriculum in England has been subjected to increasing criticism, with a retreat from its most prescriptive elements now evident, in 2006 the Howard government launched a renewed push for a national curriculum. The debates over a national curriculum, including comparisons with the English experience, provide the focus of a later chapter.

Australia’s relationship with the United States has a different history, with stronger connections forged after World War II. In addition to the impact of progressive education, particularly in the late 1960s, the influence of the United States is unmistakable in the battles over how to teach reading and in our nascent policy about the use of phonics in the early years of schooling. The influence of the United States is also conspicuous in the stoush over the place of the canon and popular culture in the curriculum, mainly due to the efforts of certain writers who have tried to provoke a local version of the American culture wars. As their news reports and opinion pieces are often quoted by those who determine educational curriculum, policy and funding in Australia, their claims demand careful scrutiny. The debates over reading and culture are covered in the next two chapters.

A single unified grammar

Although it may seem to make sense that there is just one way to think about grammar and grammar teaching, various ideas about the nature of language and grammar have been popular at different times. By the twentieth century, there was growing recognition that living languages change and trying to establish a single unified grammar of the English language is like trying to find the grand theory of everything. Languages expand to accommodate new words and shifts occur in grammar, spelling and pronunciation. Even dying languages such as Hebrew can be revitalised. In the nineteenth century, Hebrew was languishing as a spoken language but today it is the national language of Israel. Overall, the move in the twentieth century was away from traditional notions of language as an independent, rule-governed system to one which recognises the interdependence of language with communities of users (Clark 2001).

However, prior to the twentieth century, over many hundreds of years, grammarians and lexicographers wanted to establish language and grammatical standards and for the usual reasons: nationalism, control of education and either maintaining or removing social class demarcations, often simultaneously. As a result of their work, grammars were written which prescribed how the language should be used and which attempted to make English fit the rules of an already existing grammar: Latin grammar (Clark 2001).This prescriptivism involved claims about the correctness of particular linguistic constructions (ensure that subjects and verbs agree, don’t use double negatives) and was the mechanism through which efforts at standardising the English language were realised (Baron 2000).

The process of standardisation was a slow one, with different components of the language standardised at different times. The core of a written standard was established in the mid-fifteenth century, adoption of the modern set of punctuation marks was in place by the early seventeenth century, while consistency in spelling took many more decades. The notion of standardised pronunciation was even longer in coming. For the next two centuries, an increasingly normative approach to grammar resulted in volumes of usage dos and don’ts, some of which reflected prevailing usage among the upper classes and some of which were simply made up (Baron 2000).

Over a period of more than four centuries, grammarians continued to have difficulty resolving the relationship between English and Latin. In the sixteenth century, English was seen as a useful medium for teaching Latin and Latin as a good medium for learning English—inasmuch as English grammar was the same as Latin grammar. However, by the middle of the seventeenth century, general knowledge of Latin was so poor that it became necessary to teach Latin grammar through English. The assumption of analogous structures in English and Latin grammar was part of a more general belief that all languages have the same grammatical origin, namely Latin, an assumption put to rest by anthropologists such as Franz Boas in the twentieth century (Baron 2000).

It should not be surprising that the first English grammar was actually a grammar of Latin, William Lily’s A Shorte Introduction of Grammar, which appeared in 1542. The book provided terminology and grammatical analysis in English that served as models not only for Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson but also for schoolboys and writers through the eighteenth century. By the late seventeenth century, Latin had become the normative model against which English was measured.

The second half of the eighteenth century saw a groundswell of grammatical prescriptivism—more than 200 grammars appeared (Baron 2000). The effects of Latin-based prescriptive grammars on the English language and users cannot be overestimated and, although not all grammarians welcomed making Latin the grammatical standard against which English should be measured, the influence of prescriptivism is still with us today. We saw it in Clive James’ irritation at the errors made by writers in newspapers and magazines that go unnoticed by editors who are ignorant of the rules of Latinate grammar.

The notion of a single unified grammar of the English language, so intimately connected to the issue of language standards, has been particularly important in England because of the role language has played in defining the political, religious and social character of the state. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755, which attempted to fix spelling and word definitions, was seen as a national triumph. Language has also played a central role in religious affairs—King James lent his name to a new translation of the Bible that became a linguistic benchmark. And in the social arena, language standards have been both a means of social mobility and a mechanism for keeping the poor in their place. Social aspirants were encouraged to improve their speech but, at the same time, the emergence of Received Pronunciation, in which the notion of a standard came to be associated with the way the language was spoken, erected a wall between the social classes (Baron 2000).

In Australia, the place of language and grammar standards has been a little different. Politically there has never been a national language as such, or even a universally acknowledged dialect standard. However, under Howard there has been a growing number of references to Australian English, culminating in his call for a citizenship test in 2006 that would include knowledge of Australian values and proficiency in English.The government’s mistrust of new immigrants, signified by their incapacity to speak English, has been aggravated since the attacks of 9/11, but is not a new phenomenon in Australia. It can be traced through the various patterns of immigration, from the Chinese in the nineteenth century to the refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in recent times.

Since the mid-1980s,there have been references in educational policy documents to Australian English, and the Macquarie Dictionary is dedicated to its maintenance and development. In the religious realm, given the Australian separation of church and state, there has never been a real attempt to invoke language in the name of religion, and socially Australians have taken a laid-back attitude towards diversity in languages and dialects, absorbing words and phrases from other languages, never assuming that language should be frozen. In a profound sense, formal standards in language, dialect and written lexical and grammatical choice have mattered less historically in Australia than in England (Baron 2000).

Different English grammars

By the twentieth century, the notion of a single, rule-governed system that was universally applicable to all languages had been discredited and grammarians were trying to write grammars based on rules derived from usage rather than prescription.

Noam Chomsky (1957) showed how grammar could be studied in a scientific way: he built formal models of grammar generated by language and then tested them against ‘the facts’. Rather than making language conform to rules, his grammar was based on the formulation of rules. To account for the structures his transformative grammar identified, Chomsky proposed the idea of an innate language acquisition device with which all children are born, emphasising the biological rather than the social nature of language learning. Although such a theory of language is useful for the scientific study of language, when applied to how a particular language is used it falls short in describing all the structures possible within it (Clark 2001).

Other linguists, such as Michael Halliday (1973), have stressed the social and functional nature of language rather than its innateness. The central thesis of Halliday’s functional grammar is that all aspects of language have a role to play and the task of grammar is to offer a description based on its different functions. Unlike Chomsky, Halliday was interested in how children acquire grammatical concepts, which made his theories applicable to the teaching of grammar. Halliday’s functional grammar of English provided evidence for the belief that language is as much a social product as an innate ability. Whereas traditional grammar is concerned with classification of words and their ordering within a sentence, functional grammar emphasises how language is structured in a given text and how particular meanings are realised. Consequently, it is concerned with the language of texts rather than the analysis of sentences.

Possibly because he ended his career as a professor at the University of Sydney, Halliday’s ideas have had considerable impact on some literacy educators in Australia, and for a short time on an entire state school system. In 1994, the teaching of syst emic functional linguistics was mandated in New South Wales schools and, even though the policy was overturned by an incoming Labor government a year later, the reinstatement of explicit grammar teaching, however short-lived, was seen by many as signifying a restoration of linguistic standards and thereby of social order. Teaching the rules of grammar has always held the promise that the hierarchy of the social order would be maintained because of a symbolic link between the structure of language and the structure of society (Green and Hodgens 1996).

In addition to links between language and society, con nections between language and thought were also made. Based on research into Native American languages, the American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir (1921) argued that our thinking is determined by language and that people who speak different languages perceive and think about the world differently. What came to be known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis emerged from Sapir’s work and that of his student and colleague, Benjamin Whorf. The hypothesis proposed that, rather than reflecting reality, language constructs it. While few linguists today would endorse the theory in its strong deterministic form, many now accept a more moderate version—that the way we see the world is influenced by the kind of language we use. Sapir and Whorf’s research also made it clear that, as well as linguistic considerations, social, cultural and environmental factors all have an important part to play in our view of the world.

As the twentieth century progressed, the emphasis moved away from the study of language as an abstract system to how language is used in society. The word ‘grammar’, a singular noun, became ‘grammars’, a plural concept (Clark 2001). As mentioned in Chapter 1, in a similar way ‘literacy’ has become ‘literacies’. Language as ‘discourse’, defined as all forms of meaningful ways of thinking and speaking about some part or aspect of the world, was seen as constituting and organising reality rather than reflecting it. Theories of discourse, particularly those associated with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin, have all highlighted the relationship between language, thought and power. These theorists were concerned with the outcomes of power—what power does to people, groups and societies, and how this power comes about through language in action. Their ideas influenced curriculum documents in the 1990s across most of the states and territories of Australia, but in the current more politically conservative climate have come under increasing attack, dismissed by some critics in the print media as ‘postmodern gibberish’.

The latest outpourings about postmodern thinking have come from Shelley Gare (2006), a former editor at the Australian. In The Triumph of the Airheads and the Retreat from Commonsense, she argues that some time during the 1980s, educationalists began urging teachers to stop putting red ink through mis-spelled words and misplaced apostrophes and to encourage students to regard learning not as work but as a journey towards fulfilment. Although there is some truth to these complaints, her commonsense solution—to reinstate the teaching of prescriptive grammar to reverse declining standards—is problematic.

The belief that traditional Latinate grammar is grammar elides the fact that it is just one of a number of grammars available. Moreover, there is little evidence to verify the common perception that students’ writing in the past had fewer grammatical errors than the writing of their contemporaries (see Chapter 6 on testing). Yet the commonsense view that there is just one grammar—traditional Latinate grammar—and that it should be taught again in Australian schools as it was up until the 1960s because it ensures grammatically correct expression and writing quality retains a hold on the hearts and minds of many.

Teaching grammar in schools

Just as there have been ongoing debates about the nature of language and grammar through the centuries, so have there been different views about the teaching of grammar. At the beginning of the twenty-first century in Australia, how to teach grammar, let alone which grammar, has become emblematic of the political and ideological debates around the effectiveness of literacy education. Some regard the formal teaching of grammar as useless and constraining, while others see it as the only reliable means of systematically teaching the form and structure of language (Knapp 1998).

Conflicting views of the role of grammar in literacy education are not unique to the present period. More than two hundred years ago, educational reformers, inspired by Emil Rousseau’s Emile, were claiming that there was no point in teaching grammar directly as young people learned it through practice. At around the same time, William Cobbett (1983), whose Grammar of the English Language ended with a fortieth edition in 1923, argued that it was not necessary to learn grammar before learning to write, but that knowledge of grammar enabled students to write more clearly and have a greater understanding of what was written by others. However, his approach to the role of grammar in literacy education and his popular grammar book were not used in schools (Clark 2001).

Hard Times