Breaking some of the myths - again.

In this article Paul Brock identifies what he perceives to be some of the major `myths' in literacy education. Through a meticulous analysis of a range of documentation he shows that many of the so-called `truths' about literacy standards and teaching are just furphies. This material was first presented as the Opening Address at the Literacy Conference, Refocus on Reading, held at the University of Wollongong on July 18-19, 1997. In this edited transcript, the editors have sought to retain the original tone and flavour of what Dr Brock had to say as a `speech', rather than change it to the style of a written `essay'.

I thought I might accept the invitation by the conference convenors to speak on the topic of `Breaking some of the myths' by painting an historical and theoretical backdrop which will focus more particularly on the reading dimensions of literacy.

Some of you may have read the superb article in last Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald, `The great escape', written by Deirdre Macken. One section deserves exact citation.

Australians are losing touch with reality. Traumatised by change, cynical of authority and pressurised by the pace of life, people are embracing myths and misconceptions: they increasingly rely on personal anecdote rather than on expert opinion to inform their view of the world and they are more likely to view statistics as an attempt to lobby rather than an indicator of reality.

This skewered (sic) view of the world is not just a curious aberration, one of the hiccups of society in transition. The flight from reality is gathering momentum. It is feeding on itself; myth, repeated enough, becomes part of the community's pool of knowledge; misconceptions, held with enough passion, set the agenda for society.

As the polls of perceptions divert further from the grounding of sense, logic, statistics, research, considered opinion, analysis and expertise, society is becoming more vulnerable to manipulation by political groups and vested interests.(1)

More importantly, myth is receiving the imprimatur of authority as the most powerful institution -- politics -- is forced to respond to perceptions of reality rather than actual causes of concerns. The list of legislation crafted to quell misplaced fears grows annually.

Ms Macken proceeded to provide a number of striking examples, such as the myth that most single-parent pensioners are teenage girls, whereas in fact only 2.9 per cent of sole-parent pensioners in Australia are under twenty years of age.

Of course, some `myths' are valid and can be substantiated. One myth which Ms Macken showed to be true is that large numbers of extremely wealthy Australians don't pay their fair share of tax. Ms Macken cites an Australian Taxation Office survey of 100 of the Business Review Weekly magazine's Rich List which found that eighty of them had declared an income of less than $25 000.

Ms Macken's article makes no reference to false myths associated with literacy -- but her observations are absolutely apposite to this continuously controversial area of policy, perception, and practice.

Some of you may have also recently read in the Sydney press the following attack on contemporary approaches to the teaching of reading and writing:

The wholesale substitution of `modern methods' has been found to be unwise. The defects apparent in school children at the present day are summarised thus: a) The children are not thoroughly grounded in essentials; b) They are not accurate in their work. Business people in Sydney ... find these and similar defects in the children they are at present taking into their employment and they attribute them largely to the new methods of education.(2)

I must confess: I cheated. This quote was taken from an editorial in The Catholic Press, a New South Wales publication, in 1909. This leads me into the first of the literacy myths I wish to explore.

Myth no. 1: Things were always better in the `good old days'

The most constantly recurring issue in our field, maybe since early Greco-Roman history, has been the lament of the aged and the conservative about the `decline in literacy standards' in the young. This decline they see as being perpetrated by dreadful, `soft, touchy, feely' contemporary teacher `revolutionaries' accused of lacking the intellectual rigour of their predecessors.

To say this is not to deny the absolute legitimacy, indeed the utter imperative, of the ever-recurring concerns for maintaining and increasing the literacy skills of young people within a world of rapidly changing and demanding contexts for textual, oral/aural, visual, and what might broadly be called technological, literacies.

Our students need to be able to write grammatically, to spell correctly, to read fluently, flexibly and critically, as well as being able to use language imaginatively, creatively and purposefully in a wide variety of contexts.

And one does not learn to read merely by osmosis. It demands the informed, skilled and explicit intervention of good teaching -- whether this be undertaken by parents, schoolteachers, or others such as volunteer aid workers in Africa, or even by those children in Nicaragua who taught their own illiterate parents how to read in Paulo Freire's famous literacy program.

But it does not matter where you dip into the history of education, you will find thunderous roars of utter conviction that standards are `now' palpably worse than they were a generation ago. The 1990s Jeremiahs hearken back to the 1950s. It is necessary, however, to apply an informed historical perspective to untrammelled cries of gloom and doom. For example, if you go back to the newspapers of the so-called `good old days' of the 1950s you will find identical lamentations for contemporary disasters, and calls for a return to the presumed halcyon days of the 1930s.

So, let us go back nearly fifty years to those `good old days' and listen to the comments of the Chief Examiner in English for the 1948 Leaving Certificate examination, Professor Waldock, as he thundered about the students sitting for the Leaving Certificate in 1946: `It is disappointing to find that students imagine they can pass a Leaving Certificate Examination without being able to write a sentence'.(3)

Reviewing what he had seen in the 1948 LC Examination, he lamented:

Examiners again stress the weakness is spelling. Here are some of the words that seem to confound large numbers of students (nearly eighty words followed including those such as `tragic', practical', `clever', `hungry', `persuade', `believe', `enemies' and `sensitive') ... It was felt too that errors in grammar and syntax are still too common. It seems that many pupils are conversant with the correct theory of good usage, but from lack of practice or attention continue to commit the old mistakes ... The examiners ... feel that candidates are still very weak in fundamentals -- that far too many, for example, do not know what a noun is, let alone an abstract noun.(4)

Professor Waldock's successor, Professor Alec Mitchell, declared in 1950 that he agreed with the withering criticisms made in the Norwood Report of 1941 on `the serious failure of the British secondary schools to produce literate students' and declared that, without a doubt, the same situation existed in NSW in 1950.(5)

Let us not forget that these Leaving Certificate students were the creme de la creme. In the 1940s and early 1950s, of every 100 students commencing sixth class only fewer than twenty or so completed their Leaving Certificate five years later. For example, of the 50 000 who enrolled in first year government high schools in 1948, only 16.1 per cent survived to commence their Leaving Certificate year in 1952.(6) The comparable figure today, of course, is around 70 per cent, and almost certainly about to climb following the Commonwealth's latest edict on abolishing dole payments for 16- to 18-year-olds.

Ah, but how the right-wing media pontificators and so many talkback radio disc jockeys love to hark back to the mythical `good old days' when, they assume, everything was wonderful.

This process of lamentation for the present and exhortation for a return to some mythical halcyon past era can be traced continuously back into the nineteenth century and beyond. George Elliott, President of prestigious Harvard College, lamented in 1871:

... that bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing, ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation and almost entire want of familiarity with English literature, are far from rare among young men of eighteen otherwise well prepared for college.(7)

American Andrew Sledd, a modern-day scholar, has observed that:

The discussion of this (declining standards myth) is not timely -- it is timeless; for although Newsweek certified our crisis a mere decade ago ... no fewer than five consecutive generations have been condemned for writing worse than their predecessors. By now our students should hardly put processor to paper; it's a wonder they can write at all.(8)

Another American historian of literacy practices, Harvey Daniels, traces this pattern back as far as George Puttenham's despair about the declining standards of literacy among the young of his day in 1586! Daniels sums up in this way:

To conclude: literacy has been declining since it was invented; one of the first ancient Sumerian tablets deciphered by modem scholars immortalised a teacher fretting over the recent drop in (standards of) students' writing. It is Sledd's cryptic conclusion that `there will always be a literacy crisis, if for no other reason than because the old never wholly like the young'.(9)

To further highlight this `myth' I want to discuss in more detail two (there are more but time forces me share just two) big `literacy crises', each of which enjoyed massive media coverage and assumptions of certitude -- and each of which turned out to be a furphy. Yet, in both cases, any exposure of the myths was relatively ineffectual in weakening the power of the mythology of crisis or the skewing of public perceptions of reality.

1992/93: The Literacy Challenge

Emblazoned across Australia in late 1992 were headlines thundering outrage that one in four students entering high school from primary school were illiterate. Throughout that year, and into 1993 and beyond, this myth flourished and was rarely contested. The background to this furphy is as follows.

At the end of 1992 the Keating Labor Government tabled a report on literacy in schools entitled The Literacy Challenge which had been produced by a House of Representatives committee chaired by Mary Crawford, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Employment, Education and Training. By and large its recommendations were sensible.

But none of the `good news' associated with The Literacy Challenge hit the press. The one sentence which was to generate the sensationalist headlines all around Australia in early 1993 was the unproved, blunt assertion that `ten to twenty percent of children are finishing primary school with literacy problems'.(10) Yet, the very next sentence seems to contradict the confidence of its predecessor: `The actual numbers of children with such problems are not known'.(11)

There is just no empirical evidence to prove that our primary schools in 1991 or 1992 were graduating such large numbers of sixth class students with serious literacy problems. What can be found is an implied assumption on page 2 of The Literacy Challenge, paragraphs 1.6 and 1.7, that because in its previous report on adult literacy the committee was presented with evidence that, `between ten and twenty percent of the adult population is functionally illiterate', then therefore it must be true that `ten to twenty percent of children are finishing primary school with literacy problems'.(12)

This was an unproved assertion based on flawed extrapolation from what was up till then the only comprehensive survey of adult literacy conducted in Australia, that of Rosie Wickert's No Single Measure, published in 1989.(13) Ms Wickert studiously avoided the term `functionally illiterate' to describe the proportion of her survey who manifested literacy difficulties. And, above all, she categorically did not make any assertions about the literacy standards of contemporary sixth class children.

The subjects in the Wickert survey, if they had been at school at all in Australia, would have been in sixth class in the years between about 1919 and 1979. In fact, her research showed clearly that there were two categories within her sample which consistently had literacy difficulties: those over sixty years of age (products of the so-called good old days) and those who had experienced fewer than six years of schooling -- it was absence from, not attendance at, schooling which is the issue here.

Evidence that a new piece of politically correct cant had entered the lexicon of literacy mythology soon appeared when a major EPAC report, Education and Training in the 1990s (Paper No. 31), ratcheted up The Literacy Challenge's statement that `ten to twenty per cent of children are finishing primary schools with literacy problems' to its own hyperbole of `around 25 per cent of children beginning secondary schooling are not able to read and write properly'!(14)

The data which the authors of The Literacy Challenge ignored or overlooked in having arrived at their position about students entering secondary school were quite breathtaking. The report admitted that the governments of Victoria, Tasmania, Western Australia and the Northern Territory had not provided `any estimates of the number of children considered to be at risk'; the same was true for Queensland.(15) Not a shred of evidence was presented from the ACT to support the report's assertion. Only South Australia provided any evidence that could remotely substantiate the claim. The South Australian submission noted that its WRAP program `found that one in five Year 6 students across the school population was having difficulty with the demands of school reading and writing'.(16) This is well short of asserting that one in four sixth class graduates could not read and write properly.

And the NSW data were fearfully distorted. The report claimed that the NSW Basic Skills Test (BST) `showed that twenty per cent of children required "some intervention"'. But `some intervention' is light years away from the catastrophic situation claimed by The Literacy Challenge and EPAC.

Later that year Dr Lesley Lynch, then DSE Director of Curriculum, tore apart these furphies. Commenting on the 1993 BST test for Year 6, which showed that fewer than 150 of the State's 58 000 sixth class students in government schools were found to be illiterate (Band 0), that more than 50 per cent of all boys and girls had to be grouped in the two highest bands, and that students in Band 1 could not be classified as illiterate, Dr Lynch declared:

... unsubstantiated reports had created the image that the nation's education system was in a woeful state. A Commonwealth parliamentary inquiry at the beginning of the year which revealed that 25% of young Australians were illiterate was shattered by these results.(17)

The 1992 BST results had been very similar. They should have been known to the authors of The Literacy Challenge. But the myth that one in four sixth class graduates cannot read or write persists -- and its perpetrators love to propagate it with embellishments.

The media had great fun. For example, the Brisbane Courier Mail headline proclaimed -- as fact -- that `one in four are poor readers and writers'.(18) The Hobart Mercury went one better, asserting that `a House of Representatives committee ... revealed up to 25 per cent of children were unable to read or write' (Feb. 5, p. 5).(19) Talk about illiteracy! Teacher bashing and the slamming of those of us who try to introduce enlightened balance into the perennial and simplistic rantings of some of our media pontificators as they peddle their `we'll all be roon'd' mythologies is an age-old sport.

Examples abound. Let me take the case of Glyn Davies, who, in 1985 was the chairperson of Queensland's English Syllabus Committee. Dr Davies took issue with a Brisbane reporter who had published a back-to-basics story full of wildly unsubstantiated allegations about, and misrepresentations of, the English syllabus in Queensland. After remonstrating with this journalist, Dr Davies was told by the reporter that `it was a standard ploy of the paper to run such a story once every few months. It keeps up our readership and it does nobody any harm.'(20)

The ACER/Kemp shock/horror story of October, 1996

Now let us proceed to 1996, and go to the other side of Federal politics. From last October onwards the nation has been assailed by assertions that one in three of all Year 9 students (14-year-olds) cannot read or write. Throughout that year and, often since, we have heard this assertion repeated as `gospel truth' by certain politicians, journalists, some talk-back radio jockeys, and assumed to be true in various current affairs programs. The day after Minister Kemp launched the story (five months before the ACER report was published), the presenter of the ABC's `AM' program prefaced Ross Solly's interview with the Minister on 22 October as follows:

A twenty-year survey has revealed that about a third of 14-year-olds don't have basic skills. The Federal Schools Minister, David Kemp, says the figures show that education policy and practice over the past twenty years has failed and in some cases there's actually been a decline in standards.(21)

Dr Kemp issued statements of outrage through media outlets throughout the country that the ACER's survey had proved that one in three Year 9 Australian students were virtually illiterate and that it had shown a serious decline in standards since the equivalent 1975 survey.

Of course, the survey had shown nothing of the sort. I and some of my academic colleagues, as well as two outstanding journalists -- Brian Toohey(22) in both the Australian Financial Review and the Sun-Herald, and Adele Horin(23) in the Sydney Morning Herald -- have exposed this as yet another myth. The comprehension `test' claimed to measure what the ACER defined as `mastery literacy' in students. Not `basic skills'. Not `functional literacy'. To be so classified, a student had to get 80 per cent of the answers correct: nothing less. About one-third of the students scored less than 80 per cent.

All of these things were made perfectly clear in a two-page `support' document produced at the time jointly by EPAC and ACER and distributed to people like myself keen to look at the data upon which Dr Kemp's claims had been made. But we found out that the report itself had not even been written -- and was not due to appear for several months!

The tests do not measure `functional literacy', nor are they as wide ranging as assessments such as the current National English Literacy Survey, which assesses progress against curriculum profiles in the domains of reading, writing, listening, speaking and viewing.

In the context of literacy tests, `mastery' means the capacity of a student to correctly answer (sic) items used to measure performance on a set of specific items ... Following reviews of existing research on this question, the prescribed level for mastery was set at `correct answers to 80% of the population of all particular items associated with a task or objective'. Thus in the 1995 test the 30% of students deemed not to have a mastery of literacy have failed to achieve an (sic) 80% correct mark on the literacy test.(24)

In a delightfully bizarre twist, Brian Toohey decided to ask Martin Flanagan, the Age journalist who was the author of the comprehension passage used in the test, to take the test himself. And what did the author score? Sixty per cent! There were two questions which asked students to state what the author meant. Flanagan got both `wrong': or, rather, his obviously correct answers were deemed to be `incorrect' by the ACER markers! Flanagan, the author, wrote what the author meant -- but the answers determined by the examiners were different. Whose `illiteracy' is on display here?

In its report, which was not released publicly until about five months after Dr Kemp had launched the latest literacy furphy rocket into the Australian atmosphere, the ACER explicitly confirmed that its instrument was not one to assess `functional literacy', or `basic skills', at all.

The published data on the 14-year-olds which the Commonwealth Minister and the media purveyors of gloom and doom argued showed one-third of Australian 14-year-olds to be lacking basic skills and revealed a dramatic decline in standards since 1975 demonstrated by a 2 per cent decline overall drop since 1975. Yet the data described in the media showed a rise of 2 per cent for the non-English-speaking-background girls in the age group; however, this same figure of 2 per cent was described in the media as `no noticeable rise' !(25) This is, of course, a patently ridiculous contradiction. The Australian wrote that `while the proportion of Year 9 girls who failed to attain basic literacy skills was 26 per cent in 1975 and 27 per cent in 1995, there was an alarming decline in boys' reading comprehension levels'.(26) A 4 per cent difference was thus interpreted as `alarming'!

But all this playing with statistics further exposes a remarkable ignorance of quantitative research analysis. These tiny percentages fall well beneath the standard percentage ceiling always allowed for error in research analysis of this kind.

And as for screams of declining standards, even allowing for all the inconsistencies and contradictions already alluded to, there was virtually no difference at all between the performance of the 1975 and 1996 cohorts.

The most statistically honest thing to say about published comparisons between the 1975 and 1995 figures is that the performance of the two groups is not significantly different.

And what would such a `non-change' result mean? Statistics being statistics, they are actually capable of being used to argue the very opposite to the position taken by Dr Kemp. Associate Professor Brian Cambourne, for example, has claimed that:

Rather than a decline in literacy standards the data strongly support a quite different interpretation; namely, that given the incredible increase in the complexity of literacy demands over the last 20 years, given the increasing number of students (especially boys) who are staying on at school ... and given the increase in the multicultural mix of students whose first language is not English, our schools and teachers have held the literacy line.(27)

But none of this prevents various talk-back disc-jockeys, or editorial writers, or teacher-bashers, from continuing to assert as `fact' the furphy that one in three of our Year 9 students cannot read or write.

Myth no. 2: Literacy in a vacuum

There is a popular notion among some sections of the wider community that skills can be developed in a vacuum devoid of the richness of linguistic contexts defined by critical variables such as the pursuit of meaning, the shaping influences of purpose, and the subtle yet profound influences determined by diversity of audiences. Skills just cannot be developed effectively in a vacuum. We become literate through the exercise of literary practices, i.e. by reading texts, and through the informed practices of intervention as exercised by parents, guardians and teachers.

Purveyors of this myth seem also to assume that literacy development occurs in lock-step, easily identified, hierarchical stages and that the various dimensions of literacy, which over-simplified can be described as:

* phonemic-phonetic syllable/sound/word recognition;

* the comprehension of meaning; and,

* the informed response to, or critiquing of, the meaning enunciated in the utterance, can be stratified into discrete layers of ages or stages performance indicators.

These are the crucial and essential components, of course. It has been the particular strength of the Anglo-Australian tradition that we have always recognised the interrelationships between these three dimensions within and across the four modes of reading, writing, listening and viewing.

This has not, however, been the dominant American tradition where these organic relationships have too often been separated into discrete components. And while in recent years, in particular, we have heard the strident cries of protagonists within certain camps that, for example, `phonics' is the only way to teach literacy, by and large the commonsense of teachers has prevented wholesale capture of pedagogy by any single camp.

Yet just in recent months in the United States we have witnessed the orchestrated attack in California and Texas upon any approaches to the teaching of reading in kindergarten other than direct, systematic decontextualised phonics as delivered through `basals' books. Textbooks have been banned which do not trumpet the phonics approach. I will quote from an email I received last week from an Australian colleague in the United States.

Very carefully worded Legislative Bills have been devised and sneaked through State government sittings which legislate that all kindergarten children shall be taught to read through direct, systematic decontextualised, phonics. The only readers they will be allowed to read will be decodeable books (Dan can fan the tan man) for the first 6 months of kindergarten. The teaching of the use of context clues is explicitly forbidden. In California a bill known as AB 1086 (Assembly Bill 1086) has just been passed on to the main Senate for approval...Professional development by people like Connie Weaver, Ken Goodman, Frank Smith, Stephen Krashen, Leanna Trail, programs like ELIC, Reading Recovery, and books and/or PD programs offered by publishers like Rigby, The Wright Group, Heinemann, Shortland Press (Wendy Pye's company) have all been blacklisted. Many of our University colleagues over here are talking about a New McCarthy-ism.(28)

Ironically, this represents a return to what Professor Alan Luke, in his doctoral thesis, demonstrated were the `bad old days' in North American education. In his highly detailed study of the 1946-60 history of literacy education in North America in general, and British Columbia in particular, Luke describes the enormous emphasis placed on the phonics-based basal readers like the `Dick and Jane' series and other methodologies dear to the hearts of back-to-basics advocates. He concludes that:

In the era examined (1946-1960) the quality of literacy learning and of learned literacy was constrained and delimited significantly by official norms for the acquisition of literacy (italics mine).(29)

As any teacher knows, the Californian decision to ban any approach other than phonics is nonsense. Of course teachers should be able to teach the phonemic-phonetic relationships. Of course teachers should be able to use whole language approaches to learning. Of course teachers should be able to use their knowledge of grammar and the multiple functions of language. Of course teachers should be able to use their knowledge about the psychology of the reading process. Of course teachers should be able to use their knowledge of literary and reader-response theory. Of course teachers should be able to draw upon their knowledge of a wide range of literary, factual, and media texts. But teachers will use these methodologies as appropriate to the needs, interests and capacities of their students and according to the contexts within which they are teaching.

Good literacy teachers go beyond the parameters of phonemic/ phonetic decoding and accurate comprehension of texts. While these are necessary skills, they are not sufficient to describe the fully literate person. Modern literacy curricula demand that students go further in order to be able, at a third level as it were, to respond critically, sensitively and with discrimination to what he or she reads, hears and views: to be `critically literate'. Teachers are required to educate critical readers and writers, not to produce mere sponges whose literacy skills stop merely at the accurate assimilation and reproduction of text. This is even more crucially important in the era of interactive information technology and the Internet.

The NSW Department of Education's splendid policy document, Literacy 97 Strategy: Focus on literacy, has adapted a framework developed by Peter Freebody and Alan Luke and expanded the three emphases I have been talking about into four, interrelated functions, as follows.

* break the code, including what sounds are represented by what letters or groups of letters (phonics); what punctuation markers signify; what the conventional graphic design and format of different texts signify; and what graphic symbols represent in different technological texts;

* participate in the meanings of text, including understanding and composing meaningful texts, using grammar conventionally to understand and build meaning, and knowing word meanings;

* using texts functionally, including understanding the different social functions of different kinds of texts and how these functions shape the ways texts are structured; their tone, degree of formality, and the sequence of components; and

* analyse texts critically, including asking the questions: `How is this text trying to influence me?'; `If I am reading it, how is it positioning me with respect to the writer?'; `If I am writing it, how am I positioning the reader with respect to me?' and most generally, `What does this do to me?'

(Adapted from Freebody and Luke, 1990)(30)

Myth no. 3: Graduates -- literate one year; illiterate the next

A particular literacy mythology has grown up around the breakpoints in the educational continuum. How often, for example, have the literate graduates of sixth class been condemned a few months later as `illiterates' by the Year 7 teacher; or the literate HSC graduates of Year 12 been condemned several months later as people `who can't read or write' by the academics teaching them in first year or by employers. And how often do we not hear the wails of complaints as the literate graduates of our universities hit the world of employment, to be condemned as lacking basic communication skills.

What perfidious alchemy blisters the no-man's-land between these staging points? Or, how much is it all to do with the initial difficulties experienced by the graduate of the previous stage as he or she attempts to come to grips with new genres of discourse peculiar to the new educational contexts?

And how much has it to do with low teacher expectations? Especially the hiatus between, say, the high expectations made of Mary -- the primary school `graduate' -- by her sixth class teacher, and the low expectations of the Year 7 `baby' Mary exercised by her `new' secondary school teacher. Or we could substitute this with the equivalent hiatus between Grade 2 and Grade 3; between Year 10 and Year 11 (especially with regard to senior colleges); between those teachers of graduating HSC students and their university counterparts as these mature young men and women become identified as naive, inexperienced `freshers'?

Now, I am not denying that there can be problems. Nor that there are problems. But I believe that too much of this is exaggerated because these criticisms often pay too little heed of the new linguistic contexts within which the educational graduate from the former `institution' is usually expected to operate immediately, nor the unfamiliarity of content with which the ex-student now has to deal. Transference of literacy skills from one set of contexts to another is not a simple process.

The Australian Language and Literacy Policy noted that:

Research in the United States indicates that people who perform literacy tasks adequately in a high school setting cannot necessarily perform literacy tasks of similar complexity in a workplace or community setting.(31)

Myth no. 4: The either/or myth

Invariably associated with the `literacy crisis' syndrome are the cries of those who pursue their own exclusivist nostrums for literacy remediation and who fiercely oppose the claims of any other theoretical and pedagogical positions within language and literacy education. A British colleague of mine describes as `intellectual terrorists' those who fiercely adhere to their own narrow remedies and who refuse to consider the claims of other theoretical and pedagogical approaches irrespective of the variegated nature of the learners and the diversity of learning contexts.

Education discourse in general, and literacy education discourse in particular, seems persistently soured by what the great philosopher Soren Kierkegaard called the either/or heresy. So often we have witnessed the erection and dismantling of straw person caricatures of points of view other than one's own or of the particular ideological cultural or political empire being built by acolytes of some guru of the moment -- often according to principles that would be anathema to the founding inspiration.

Donald Graves, for example, in a seminal essay, `The Enemy is Orthodoxy', has listed some of the more bizarre distortions of the writing theory and practices that he has heard proclaimed as being advocated by him.

1. Children ought to revise everything they compose.

2. Children should only write in personal narrative; imaginative writing ought to be discouraged.

3. Children should have several conferences for each piece of writing.

4. Children should publish each piece of writing.

5. Children should make each piece of writing last four days.

6. Children should share each piece with the entire class.

7. Children should own their own writing and never be directed to do anything with their writing.

8. Children should choose all their topics.

9. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation are unimportant.(32)

How many valuable insights into educational advancement have been repudiated and condemned not too many years later as having produced lowered standards, when in reality both the understanding and implementation of such insights have been honoured `more in the breach than the observance'? Too frequently the acolytes of a theory or movement proclaim the teachings of their masters with a degree of certainty and a black-and-whiteness exclusivity that sullies the more modest hesitancy and carefulness of their intellectual mentors or forbears.

A submission from the Tasmanian Council of State School Parents and Friends Association to a House of Representatives Inquiry into literacy education during the early years of schooling, and cited in The Literacy Challenge, deserves to be `up in lights' on noticeboards in every school and -- perhaps more importantly -- displayed in the office of every newspaper editor and in the studios of all talk-back radio pontificators.

If anything has been learned from the research on teaching literacy skill it should be that it would be arrogant to assume that all of the answers are known. It would also be misguided to assume that evidence points to a single model of learning or teaching, or that one model will be necessarily appropriate all developmental levels or for all children.(33)

The notion of informed, critical, eclecticism is central to my beliefs as a teacher, academic, and policy adviser. There is a wealth of splendid insights and scholarship to draw upon as a teacher/ researcher/academic. While some are either/or mutually exclusive positions, many are not. We have so much to learn about reading from philology, psychology, literary theory, semantics, grammar -- or rather -- grammars, phonics, whole language theory, systemic linguistics, reader-response theory, semiotics, history of pedagogical practices, and so on.

The splendid teacher draws upon these insights and applies relevant theory to relevant practice as she or he faces the daily task of identifying and responding to the needs, interests and capacities of each of her or his students. Good teachers have always been both idealistic and pragmatic.

We need to know and value the history of the teaching of literacy. This will not only help the profession to retain what is of value and let go what is not, but -- perhaps even more importantly -- will safeguard that history against any later attempts by any later whiz fad geniuses, gurus or whatever to ignore or distort it.

As teachers, policy advisers, academics, or whatever, we need to deal intelligently and constructively with diversity and not succumb to the `us versus them' bitterness of ideological bigotry. The field of literacy education has already been hurt by this kind of immaturity.

We need to resist, as far as possible, empire building and destructive infighting within and between opposing `camps'. We need to identify and resist those false either/or dichotomies and ideological entrenchments often predicated upon straw-person arguments and sometimes even `the cult of personality'. We should be on our critical guard to identify and contest theory that becomes dogma; critical enquiry which becomes worship; leaders who become gurus; bridges that become barricades; concepts that become articles of faith; followers who become acolytes; approaches which become religions; and dissent which becomes heresy, irrespective of the various intellectual or professional cultures from which they may come.

Whether we are teachers, researchers, policymakers, bureaucrats or a mixture of any of these, we must always be, to quote from W H Auden's fine poem September 1, 1939, `ironic points of light' -- idealists but armed with a healthy and informed scepticism of all preachers of orthodoxies.

What the teacher of reading/literacy should `know, understand and can do'

Well, what can we say with confidence about the nature of language and literacy?

It is well worth repeating, three-and-a-half decades later, those wise words of Michael Halliday that `what is common to every use of language is that it is meaningful, contextualised, and in the broadest sense "social"'.(34)

As part of the small team which wrote the 1990 Commonwealth Government's White Paper, Australia's Language: The Australian language and literacy policy, a colleague and I came up with the following `definition' which, I am delighted to say, has since been adopted in the DSE's recent excellent document Literacy 97 Strategy: Focus on literacy.

Literacy is the ability to read and use written information and to write appropriately, in a range of contexts. it is used to develop knowledge and understanding, to achieve personal growth and to function effectively in our society. Literacy also includes the recognition of numbers and basic mathematical signs and symbols within text.

Literacy involves the integration of speaking, listening and critical thinking with reading and writing. Effective literacy is intrinsically purposeful, flexible and dynamic and continues to develop throughout an individual's lifetime.(35)

Now let us come forward to 1997.

If you want to find a superb exposition of the richness and complexity -- yet, in another sense, commonsense simplicity -- of literacy education you need still go no further than this publication. It provides a splendid overview of literacy teaching and learning.

I. Since 1991, the very nature of what constitutes literacy has been expanded by the emerging multimedia and information technologies, the appearance of the Internet and further developments in computing and word processing.

II. Literacy is learned in social contexts as people use literacy pract-ices to interact with each other to achieve particular purposes. It occurs in a variety of situational contexts -- in the home, in the community, at school, on the job, in recreational and other informal learning contexts. In the contemporary world, we employ literacy practices to argue, to explain, to debate, to demonstrate how something can be done, to provide information, to explore issues, to entertain, and to communicate creatively.

III. The literacy needs of individuals change throughout their lifetimes. As they move into different situations or specialised areas of learning and experience new technologies, they are continually required to adapt and extend their knowledge and literacy skills so that they can understand and use language appropriately.

IV. Practices of literacy evolve over time in accordance with changing demands made on individuals and changing expectations within the social and cultural context.

V. Good literacy teaching recognises the variety of ways in which literacy is relevant to the daily lives of student within diverse social and cultural contexts. Students must know what to do with text in particular contexts, both within and outside the classroom. To be literate in the contemporary world requires an understanding of, and the ability to apply, the wide range of written and spoken forms or types of text which are essential to effective communication.

VI. Development of literacy competence is necessary if an individual is to develop fully as a person, able to participate in the work force, to engage in the democratic process and contribute to society in an educated manner.(36)

All I would want to add are the following personal observations and reflections.

1. A teacher of literacy needs to have a thorough grasp of the subject matter of the specific curriculum area or areas he or she is teaching that is well beyond the specific parameters that he or she might be expected to work within in the classroom.

2. Modern teachers of literacy must have a grounding in scholarly theories of reading, writing, communication and language use in general.

3. Teachers need to be able to draw upon a wide repertoire of strategies appropriate to the needs, interests and capacities of their students.

4. We educators must practise what we preach. All teachers need to be exemplary users of the language: to read widely and critically; to write with flair, imagination, accuracy, and lucidity; to speak with clarity, verve and wit; to listen with acumen, accuracy and sensibility. We need to be fine models for our students. One of my favourite maxims comes from Chaucer's description of the `poure persoun' -- the humble and dutiful country priest whom we meet in Canterbury Tales: `first he wroghte, and afterward he taughte'. To teach effective literacy we must be `practitioners' of effective literacy.

5. Effective teachers of literacy have a commitment to sharing their enthusiasm and expertise with their students. They are be able to lead their students well beyond those starting points of learning, i.e. students' needs and interests, way out towards those unmapped horizons limited only by students' capacities. They need to be able to inspire, drive, motivate, correct, and demand the highest standards of their youngsters. We all know that teaching is an art and a science -- and it's mostly hard, slogging, work. We teachers have also to be actors, head coaches, naggers, humdrummers, stirrers, listeners, susser-outers, intuiters, creators, pacifiers, and masters of repetition. Above all, we have to be people who keep hanging in there.

Conclusion

In responding to the request to discuss some of the myths about literacy, I would be alarmed if I left you with the impression that I assume that everything is rosy. I do not.

We must be eternally vigilant to ensure that our students are literate in the fullest sense of the word. There is no place for sloppiness or carelessness or ignorance or error within our teaching profession, especially in the field of literacy education. For a student to leave school illiterate is an indictment on our society.

I am most optimistic about the policy directions being taken in NSW as, for example, enshrined in the policy Literacy `97 Strategy: Focus on literacy, the forthcoming NSW policy on reading which the Minister will release in August, and the final draft of the revised Board of Studies' K-6 English Syllabus.

To finish on a personal note. I am sure that when I accompany my daughter Amelia on her first day at kindergarten at Narellan Vale Public School in the year 2001, I will be as confident about the quality of the literacy education that she will experience as I was last Tuesday when Sophie returned there to commence her second term in kindergarten. And irrespective of whether I am speaking as a teacher, or an academic, or a policy adviser, but above all as a parent, that makes me feel pretty happy about the future of literacy education in NSW.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Acknowledgement is gratefully made to Dr Terry Burke, NSW Deputy Director General of Education, and to the NSW Department of School Education for their continued support of the biannual conferences of the Centre for Language in Education at the University of Wollongong (CLEUW).

FOOTNOTES

(1) Macken, D. The great escape. The Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum section, 12 July, 1977. p. 1.

(2) Cited by Dr S. Smith in the article `School and the educated parrot' which was subsequently cited by M. McDonnell in a letter to the editor, the Australian, 11 May, 1987. p. 8.

(3) Waldock, A. (1947). Leaving Certificate Examination, Examiner's Report, English -- Pass Paper 1946. The Education Gazette, 1 April. p. 129.

(4) Waldock, A. Leaving Certificate Examination, Examiner's Report, English -- Pass Paper, 1948, unpaginated. Private papers of D. Bowra stored in the library of the then Sydney Teachers' College, later known as Sydney College of Advanced Education -- Institute of Education, and now incorporated within the Faculty of Education, University of Sydney.

(5) Board of Secondary School Studies, minutes of meeting, 28 June, 1951. p. 295.

(6) Wyndham, H. (Chairman). (1957). Report of the Committee Appointed to Survey Secondary Education in New South Wales. Sydney: Government Printer. p. 88.

(7) Cited in Daniels, H. (1983). Famous Last Words: The American language crisis reconsidered. Southern Illinois UP: Carbonale. p. 51.

(8) Sledd, A. (1988). Essay readin' not riotin': The politics of literacy. College English, 50, 5. p. 496.

(9) loc. cit.

(10) House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training. (1992). The Literacy Challenge. Canberra: AGPS. p. v.

(11) loc. cit.

(12) ibid. p. 2.

(13) Wickert, R. (1989). No Single Measure: A survey of Australian adult literacy. Canberra: DEET.

(14) EPAC (1993). Education and Training in the 1990s. Canberra: AGPS. pp. 3 and 42.

Much of the remainder of this section on the 1992/3 `crisis' is based on -- and much of it is a verbatim citing from -- earlier published work by the author, notably `Joint Response of the Australian Language and Literacy Council and the Schools Council to The Literacy Challenge', and the Appendix to that document, in Teacher Education in English Language and Literacy. Canberra: AGPS, 1995. pp. 123-37.

(15) House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training, op. cit. p. 3.

(16) ibid. p.2.

(17) The Sydney Telegraph Mirror, 7 August, 1993. p. 7.

(18) Headline in the Courier Mail, 3 February, 1993. p. 3.

(19) The Hobart Mercury, 5 February, 1993. p. 5.

(20) Davies, G. (1986). Ozlit and the Basics Bunyip. The Australian Author, 18, 3. p. 5.

(21) Rehame Australia Monitoring Services, transcript of interview of Dr Kemp conducted by Ross Solly on the ABC's Radio National `AM' program, 22 October, 1996. p. 1.

(22) Toohey, B. Reading and righting literacy test wrongs. The Sun-Herald, 3 November, 1996. p. 39.

(23) Horin, A. Home truths about literacy. The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 November, 1996. p. 25.

(24) Unpublished paper jointly produced by EPAD and ACER. Literacy and the longitudinal surveys of Australian youth program. p. 1.

(25) The Australian, 23 October, 1996. p.1.

(26) loc. cit.

(27) Brian Cambourne, personal correspondence to author.

(28) loc. cit.

(29) Luke, A. Literacy Textbooks and Ideology: Post-war literacy instructions and the mythology of Dick and Jane. London: Falmer Press.

(30) NSW Department of School Education. (1997). Literacy 97 Strategy: Focus on literacy. Sydney: NSW Department of School Education. pp. 13-14.

(31) Dawkins, J. (1991). Australia's Language: The Australian language and literacy policy, companion volume. Canberra: AGPS. p. 38.

(32) Graves, D. The enemy is orthodoxy. In A Researcher Learns to Write: Selected articles and monographs. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann. p. 185.

(33) House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training, op. cit. p. 24.

(34) Halliday, M. (1969). Relevant models of language. The State of Language Educational Review, 22, 1. p.26.

(35) Dawkins, J., ibid. p.9.

(36) NSW Department of School Education, op. cit. Literacy 97 Strategy: Focus on literacy. Sydney: NSW Department of School Education. p. 8.