Literacy: Developments and Requirements

BASIC SKILLS

INTRODUCTION

We have taken it for granted that basic literacy is the capacity to read and write at a level which allows people to communicate easily and fluently on an ordinary, daily basis. ⁽¹⁾

It has troubled us that more and more employers, academics, and business people have been saying that typical Australian high school graduates cannot read or write at this level -- and therefore cannot do many of the standard.jobs required of them. ⁽²⁾  In our first years, disturbed by the prevalence of this criticism and by what we perceived to be some of its more obvious sources -- for example, the effects of mechanistic views about 'process on the teaching of language, and the influence of narrowly prescriptive notions of "relevance" on school literature programmes -- we concentrated in speeches and in writing on broad curricular and pedagogical reform in the field of English. ⁽³⁾

Noting in our early publications that studies in Western Australia, South Australia, New South Wales, and the ACT had revealed the problems of trainee teachers in punctuating simple sentences, using standard English diction correctly, and writing coherent paragraphs, we examined the English curriculum throughout Australia.  Over a four-year period, with some dismay, we reported on a decline in the quality of school literature programmes across Australia, the widespread disappearance of the formal study of grammar, the inadequacy of writing correction in school programmes (especially, in the "drafting" stage of process writing), and the low priority of reading as a leisure pursuit in the lives of many of our graduates. ⁽⁴⁾

More recently, in the face of an increasing concentration in the media, Parliament, and parent organisations upon fundamental reading and writing difficulties in children and young people, and upon the skills and competencies associated with basic literacy, we have turned our attention to the very beginning of schooling, and to current theory and practice in the field of childhood and adult literacy.  Over a three-year period we have published research on basic literacy;  sponsored workshops for teachers who have wanted more help with pupils who are behind;  involved ourselves in hands-on literacy work in schools;  produced a Study Paper (which sold out and had to be re-printed) after attending a major international course on the language arts (Spalding) in Sydney;  and updated material on literacy for the media after attending a second Spalding course.

At the same time, we have followed closely -- but in a less detailed and concentrated fashion -- key curricular and pedagogical developments in literature and language teaching.  As well, we have noted important language arts developments in the community such as changing patterns of selection for prestigious national book awards, an increasing reliance upon the electronic media, and a corresponding tendency to underestimate the extent to which language development (for example, the growth of an enriched vocabulary) depends upon the habitual reading of books rather than frequent exposure to multi-media texts strong on image. ⁽⁵⁾

PRACTICAL EFFORTS

In an effort to implement in very practical ways our knowledge of the requirements of early literacy, particularly in relation to reading and spelling, we began in 1993 to test the reading of pupils attending Pared and local schools, to advise schools and State policy makers in the field of Early Literacy, and to recommend computerised and other materials designed to aid children who are behind. ⁽⁶⁾  Also in 1993, with a number of parents and STLDs (Support Teachers working with Language Difficulties), we attended a two-day reading workshop in Sydney conducted by Tasmanian optometrist and researcher Byron Harrison and remedial specialist Jean Zollner;  and, as a follow-up, we organised in April of 1994 an EPU-sponsored repeat of their basic workshop format, making use of additional reading materials, videos, and computer software.

Our targeted professional group in April 1994 was teachers working with primary and secondary children with learning difficulties and remedial language needs;  but we also attracted ordinary classroom primary and secondary teachers with a desire to learn more about the diagnosis and remediation of reading/spelling difficulties in the usual school population.  One very worried parent from Picton brought to the workshop a boy whom nobody in her local area had been able to help.  Byron Harrison tested this child's reading in front of our workshop audience and immediately knew what needed to be done to improve his situation.  Many of the teachers who witnessed this demonstration and others on the two days commented on the extensive knowledge of Harrison and Zollner in much-needed areas of early literacy education. ⁽⁷⁾  They also spoke informally about the difficulty of effecting essential reform on the scale at which it is needed.

Acting on the expressed concerns of these teachers, we began to look more closely at the relationship between literacy and cognition in Australia and other English-speaking countries.  We established links with scholars in New Zealand doing research in the field, Australian groups doing remedial work with children and adults (for example, the Language Foundation of Australia in Queensland and the Speech, Language and Literacy Centre in Sydney), and overseas researchers in the US and the UK with years of relevant practical experience. ⁽⁸⁾  The more we read and spoke with literacy experts, the more troubled we became about the roots of the problems we were meeting in ordinary classrooms.  So a word about our discoveries, and their connection with recent history in the field of early literacy, is in order.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

For well over a decade in Australia and other English-speaking countries, scholarly protests about widely relied-upon methods of teaching reading, writing, and spelling fell largely on deaf ears.  In the early '90s, however, increasing public awareness of deficiencies in the linguistic knowledge and competency of young people, and a corresponding concern about these deficiencies expressed by many public figures, resulted in the establishment of a review of infant/primary programmes in the language arts by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training.

In February 1993, following the examination of dozens of submissions from teachers and principals, this parliamentary Committee released The Literacy Challenge, a report on the success of the nation in imparting the fundamental language skills which are responsible for accuracy and fluency in reading, writing, and spelling.  Among the msore widely publicised facts acknowledged in this report were:

• the absence of nationwide standardised tests in reading and therefore of hard data on standards of student achievement;
• a decline in the quality of candidates admitted to infant-primary teacher training programmes;
• the likelihood, based on considerable anecdotal evidence in submissions from educators throughout Australia, that as many as 25 per cent of children leave primary school with a literacy problem.

In the same year Education Monitor published an article by Harrison and Zollner (Vol. 4, No. 1) explaining why so many children have literacy problems and recommending instructional changes designed to nip these problems in the bud. ⁽⁹⁾  Based on 20 years of research with over 2,000 children, Harrison and Zollner's large contention was that the whole-language approach to literacy which has been in vogue for 20 years in Australia and other English-speaking countries has fostered inadequate methods of teaching reading and spelling by relying on:

• whole-word recognition as the basic tool of reading;
• guessing what words are, from syntactic and semantic cues;
• an aversion to direct, thorough teaching of structured, sequenced phonics to beginning readers;
• a distaste for graduated reading schemes;  and
• extreme reluctance to test the phonic skills of young children.

The immediate results of reliance on this approach, they said, were:

• undetected reading failure in countless beginning readers;
• the indefinite continuation of this undetected failure -- so that children who "guess" rather than "read" fail to develop essential reading strategies, fall hopelessly behind their peers, and often fail to catch up;  and
• a widespread need for remedial programmes (for example, Reading Recovery) ⁽¹⁰⁾ which are costly, time-consuming, and difficult to implement on a wholly successful basis.

An underlying cause of inadequacy in the whole-word approach, their argument continued, was its failure to take adequately into account visual development in young children.  Fundamental to successful whole-word guessing is the ability to perceive and process sufficient letters in key words.  If the number of letters processed in these words is insufficient, accuracy will decline along with semantic and syntactic cue reliability.

Since Visual Attention Span -- the number of letters processed at a glance -- normally ranges in young children from one to three and develops at the rate of 0.6 a year, infant children whose VAS is below three have major difficulty with whole-word guessing.  They develop visual habits, particularly the habit of glancing quickly at only the high visibility letters in a word -- in other words, the beginning and end letters or the letters with tails -- which encourage inaccurate guessing and are very hard to eradicate.  By the age of eight, confronted by increasing numbers of visually similar words (for example, house/horse/hearse), low VAS children -- approximately one in three infant pupils -- begin to show early signs of loss of self-confidence in both print and themselves.

Typical problems in a child with a low VAS who has been taught to read by whole-word guessing are:

• Confusion between letter names and letter sounds (for example, mispronounces "y" as "w", "u" as "y", "g" as "j");
• Mid-word name/sound confusions, particularly on vowels (for example, misreads "mat" as "mate", "got" as "goat");
• Mid-word inaccuracies (for example, misreads "back" as "beak", "magnet" as "maggot");
• Poor left-to-right processing skills (for example, misreads "net" as "ten");
• Inaccuracy in multi-syllabic word-guessing (for example, misreads "picnic" as "picture");
• Overdependence on end letters, leading to poor proof-reading skills (for example, doesn't know which word "looks right" among diad/doad/dead/duad/deid/daad/deud);
• Overdependence on semantic and syntactic cues (for example, misreads "The teacher held up a bank in Tocumwal" as "The teacher held up a book in technicolour").

In the usual teacher education programme, infant/primary teachers are not taught that although some children -- those with a high VAS -- may read quite well and even pick up word-attack skills incidentally as they process whole words, almost all infant school children require early and well-consolidated phonics to attain their full reading and spelling potential.  Even though school personnel regularly say, "Oh, we do give our pupils phonics instruction", unless this instruction is systematic, reading and spelling failure is extremely common in both boys and girls.  Such failure, needless to say, discourages children from developing the habit of reading for pleasure;  and it also significantly damages that much-valued contemporary commodity, self-esteem.

Although hard data are not available on the literacy of our jail population, anecdotal evidence has long suggested that a very high percentage of young men in prison have fundamental reading and spelling problems.  Widely disseminated media reports on university students and adults likewise point to the existence of major reading/spelling difficulties in significant numbers of mature-aged people. ⁽¹¹⁾  In a series of articles in The Australian written in 1993 by columnist Frank Devine, who attended a Harrison-Zollner Literacy Workshop in Sydney in that year, the point is made in grisly detail that "screens and concealments must be swept aside" about the actual state of literacy in Australia, and in particular the skills of young readers. ⁽¹²⁾

When I discussed the sources of reading failure in 1994 at a literacy debate at Darling Harbour covered by The Australian to celebrate Book Week, and in follow-up articles published by Education Monitor, The Australian, The Telegraph-Mirror and The Sydney Morning Herald, audience response from around Australia was so strong that extra office staff were required to handle it. ⁽¹³⁾  From the hundreds of 'phone calls taken at the time by journalists and staff, it was obvious to me that despite warnings about the dangers of the whole-word guessing approach to reading provided by Harrison and Zollner seven years ago, this approach was still the dominant one throughout Australia.  Even now, widespread grass roots recognition of the need for major changes in the teaching of reading and spelling has not effected necessary reform. ⁽¹⁴⁾

Although, for the first time in many years, the Primary English syllabus in New South Wales (newly designed in 1994) recommends suitably systematic instruction in phonics in infant school reading programmes, and although senior members of staff in the Department of School Education in Parramatta recognise the need for this, many teachers of reading in the State continue to rely primarily, and too soon, on whole-word guessing.  A similar situation in other States has been criticised by such nationally known reformers as MP Bob Charles, who has campaigned for years for more enlightened approaches to early literacy throughout Australia, ⁽¹⁵⁾ and who was responsible for the dissenting Appendix in The Literacy Challenge.

The main reason too little has been done for beginning readers, despite increased public awareness of the importance of reform, is the influence of the whole-language lobby (WL) in every English-speaking country in the world.  Fuelled in America by the writing of Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman (who initially recommended whole-word guessing for deaf children whose hearing prevented them from profiting from phonics work in letter name/ sound correlation), and in Australia by Brian Cambourne and others at the University of Wollongong, this lobby sensibly promotes the reading of "real" books, imaginative role play, drama, and other creative language activity.  The difficulty is that it also promotes whole-word guessing;  it calls outmoded and counter-productive the systematic teaching of phonics;  and -- against a weight of international research -- it claims that children learn to read and write as they learn to speak. ⁽¹⁶⁾

In its approach to the teaching of reading, WL regularly claims that phonics can only be taught through dated, boring, counter-productive drill.  This is untrue.  The successful worldwide use, for twenty years, of the British product "Letterland", which makes daily use of drama, music, poetry, and story to teach children how to sound out letters (b as in bib), blend them (c - a - t), and chunk them (pic - nic), demonstrates the falsity of this claim.  So does a diverse range of instructional materials made publicly available over roughly the same period by the Language Foundation of Australia in Queensland and its head, Mrs Barbara Dykes, by other Australian bodies involved in early childhood literacy, and -- most significantly -- by the Spalding Foundation in Arizona, which has encouraged Australians to open new literacy centres in Sydney and other States (detail to follow).

Unfortunately, however, because WL proponents control what is taught in most of the English-speaking world's pre-service and in-service teacher education programmes, monopolise senior positions in influential international reading associations responsible for widely read journals and heavily-attended conferences, and dominate the world of educational publishing, it is extremely difficult for research antithetical to their position to effect essential, broadly based, school change.  For years this lobby has effectively opposed basic literacy testing on the grounds that it is too stressful for young children.  The observable fact that inadequate reading habits create much more long-term stress is met by the lobby with silence or derision.

As a result, lack of teacher awareness of what needs to be done step by step with beginning readers, so that they bring to print habits that will not require laborious, costly dislodging at a later date, is still all too prevalent in Australia, New Zealand, North America, and the UK.  Also widespread is a systematic refusal to have anything to do with, or report on, work by researchers who are likely to be severely critical of whole-word guessing at in-service workshops for teachers and international gatherings of early literacy experts.  A Harrison-Zollner research update reported on by Education Monitor last year ⁽¹⁷⁾ testifies to the continuing power of WL in places where that power counts.  So does a recent edition of the Sunday programme on Channel 9 (on 25 February 1996), which made explicit the fact that many teachers who give pupils the "decoding" skills basic to accurate reading are still forced to do so secretly because of the attitudes of WL proponents.

Despite the increasing willingness of most Australian States to undertake basic skills testing of literacy and numeracy, the routine screening of word-attack skills in beginning readers is not being done.  Byron Harrison's much-publicised diagnostic computerised screening test, referred to earlier, which takes on average only a half-hour or less to conduct, and which costs far less to administer than Reading Recovery, is at present in use in about 1,000 Australian schools.  The Macquarie University Special Education Centre's similarly helpful screening tests also are used by increasing numbers of school personnel.  But, unfortunately, hundreds of schools are as unfamiliar with Harrison-Zollner and MUSEC screening tests as they are with comparably well-designed tests -- for example, the Iowa Basic Skills test -- long available in overseas countries like the US and the UK.

As a result, the latest Harrison-Zollner-Magill figures on 600 children (a new member has been added to the team) confirm dire predictions made by Byron Harrison in 1988 in The Australian Journal of Remedial Education (Volume 20, Number 1) about

• learned and habitual reading inaccuracy associated with letter name/sound confusions and too-early reliance upon whole-word guessing;
• difficulty in reading three-syllable and four-syllable words;  and
• difficulty in visually detecting (proof reading) spelling errors in the middle of simple one-syllable words (for example, "deid" or "diad" rather than "dead").

The extent to which infant school children are still being taught to guess words, rather than to attack them phonemically as they should, is demonstrated by the team's finding that, at the end of infant school, guessing error patterns were found in 75 per cent of females and 90 per cent of males.  Such patterns are significantly linked with poor reading and spelling.  Although fluent adult readers normally use both whole-word and phonic methods of attack, children who are learning to read need solid phonics consolidation before they can effectually utilise whole-word guessing skills.

Particularly disturbing is the Harrison-Zollner-Magill conclusion that inaccurate guessing habits, once learned, persist.  On entry into high school, 65 per cent of the males and 58 per cent of the females were still making the same kinds of errors.  This research finding flatly contradicts WL assurances to teachers, parents, and the wider community that reading inaccuracy is unimportant in the early years of school since children will "grow out of it".

At the end of infant school, almost 50 per cent of the 600 children tested by Harrison-Zollner-Magill still experienced significant levels of letter name /sound confusion.  High levels of identical confusion were found in high school pupils.  Deficiencies in blending letters and chunking syllables -- the processes responsible for accurate reading and spelling -- were also common.  On entry into high school, 85 per cent of males and 75 per cent of females were unable to read phonetically regular three-syllable and four-syllable words and Aboriginal place names.

As Education Monitor has pointed out (Vol. 6, No. l), if the data gathered by Harrison et al. had been obtained through the study of children recognised by themselves and by their teachers as struggling, their findings would be troubling enough.  But the 600 pupils whose literacy was tested were consecutive, unselected children seeking eye-examinations, not reading-skill diagnosis.  Many, who considered themselves average or better-than-average readers and spellers, found when tested that they were making significant errors.

PRESENT NEEDS

It is now almost three years since the federal inquiry responsible for The Literacy Challenge found that no Education Department in Australia had data on the kinds of basic reading and spelling skills tested by Harrison, Zollner, and Magill.  At the very least, tests as precise as those given by this internationally praised team should be required in every Australian State. ⁽¹⁸⁾  The huge national expenditure on Reading Recovery currently being incurred throughout the country would be unnecessary if the knowledge underlying their warnings were finally heeded by every State Education Ministry.

What makes our situation even more disturbing is that the most recent findings of Harrison-Zollner-Magill are entirely consistent with the most significant overseas research on early literacy currently available -- research which takes into account the developmental needs of children with respect to hearing, speech, and movement as well as sight.  A July 1995 visit to Sydney by the internationally known literacy expert Dr Mary North, sponsored by Westpac, made it abundantly clear that although expert researchers have long understood the devastating limitations of the WL approach to the language arts, ordinary teachers (of the kind who studied with Dr North during two intensive weeks of their July holidays) lack essential knowledge of workable alternatives.  Without solid in-service work on cognition, required for everyone who teaches the language arts, this tragic situation is unlikely soon to be reversed in Australia or other English-speaking countries.

Despite extraordinary technological advance, which has made it possible for cognitive scientists to confirm discoveries about language processing made in the early part of this century by such pioneering researchers as neurologist Samuel Orton and teacher Romalda Spalding, rank-and-file people working in schools are, in effect, living in the linguistic Stone Age.  Typically, infant/primary teachers and ordinary secondary school teachers with large numbers of semi-literate pupils have no idea how to alter habits responsible for poor reading (that is, poor decoding and comprehension skills), writing, spelling, and note-taking.  Until very recently, even at some of our finest independent schools, senior staff have been as helpless in the face of severe learning disability and major literacy problems as the typical graduates of teacher training programmes. ⁽¹⁹⁾

In the US, as early as 1985, the highly-publicised Report of the Commission on Reading, Becoming a Nation of Readers, made the point that the issue is not "whether" all children should be taught phonics, but "how it should be done."  Yet Australia has been unable to capitalise on known facts about successful language arts programmes like Spalding, which take it for granted that a thorough understanding of letter name-sound correlations is one -- though only one -- fundamental precursor of solid academic achievement.  Although our most capable speech pathologists, psychologists, and STLD teachers work on a daily basis with scores of children with major literacy problems, their knowledge -- acquired largely overseas --  has not yet reached all the grass-roots staff in schools who are most in need of it.

The chief practical issue for Australians right now is how to by-pass the bureaucrats, the anti-testing lobbies, and the policy makers determined to do what they have always done with the language arts, simply because they have spent so much time doing it, whether or not it actually works.  To a frightening degree, our senior educationists do not want to hear about ways of teaching spelling, writing, decoding, reading comprehension, note-taking, and "researching" better than the methods already known to them.  With mind-boggling complacency, they insist that their own smorgasbord approaches to early literacy -- diverse methods for diverse needs -- are acceptable, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, published across a broad political spectrum, that they are not. ⁽²⁰⁾

Typically, policy-makers at the State level and teacher educators group "phonic" approaches together, failing to distinguish them properly from one another, treating them in effect as equally worthwhile, and ignoring current research in cognition which carefully distinguishes different approaches to decoding, reading comprehension, and other activities basic to reading and the language arts. ⁽²¹⁾  When they are interviewed by journalists working for newspapers or radio and television stations, these same educationists also claim that teacher trainees and school pupils are being given instructional tools in language acquisition which they are not, in fact, being given.  With painful consistency, they confuse telling prospective teachers about methods of acquiring language skills and demonstrably giving them the full range of requisite skills. ⁽²²⁾

SPALDING IN PRACTICE

In how many kindergarten classes in Australia with a high proportion of minority group children are five-year-olds able not just to spell and to read accurately, but to write "related" sentences (that is, the beginnings of sound paragraphs) after only two to three months of instruction?  That is what is currently happening in the Peoria School District in Arizona where Dr Mary North acts as a senior consultant. ⁽²³⁾  Ordinary children there, including many from low socio-economic or minority group backgrounds, are being taught reading through writing in ways which produce basic skills test results significantly above the national average.  And not only that:  these very same children, when they reach third-class, read aloud, produce their own plays and puppet shows, write, spell and analyse the main ideas in ordinary prose at imaginative levels which are ordinarily associated with much older pupils.

If we had the will, we could emulate the Peoria District's efforts and well-documented successes. ⁽²⁴⁾  Already, some of our more enterprising school heads, classroom and resource teachers, and speech pathologists have travelled overseas more than once to see the work of Districts like this first-hand, or have taken advantage of more local efforts made by psychologist Dr Carol Margeson and speech pathologist and consultant Mary-Ruth Reed to help them update their own professional knowledge.  All we would have to do, to spread understanding like theirs more widely, is bring qualified Spalding trainers to this country to instruct teachers (the American cost is approximately $70 a head) and then, with the Spalding Foundation's approval, set up a Literacy Foundation in this country with accredited Australian teacher trainers.  As we go to press, committed Australian professionals are trying to do just this.

Although the Spalding Method has worked in the US for close to 60 years, many of our Ministries and State Education Departments are unfamiliar with its history.  Yet the bald facts are straightforward and relatively easy to understand..  With the help of Samuel Orton and other research scientists with a thorough understanding of the way the human brain works, Romalda Spalding successfully incorporated aspects of both the "whole-language" and the "phonics" approach to literacy in a multi-sensory, holistic programme of instruction in the language arts.  Because her own teacher training hadn't given her the knowledge and skills that she needed to help the struggling pupils in her primary classes, she was determined to acquire essential medical and cognitive awareness in other ways.

Using the most up-to-date cognitive models, Mrs Spalding's followers -- teachers like Mary North and her colleague, Kay Younker-Sullivan -- now make use of seven interactive, organically related processes to produce skilled reading and writing:  feature and letter recognition, spatial placement, and orthographic, lexical, syntactic, and semantic responses to print.  Because all four sensory channels to the brain -- sight, sound, speech, touch -- are involved in these processes, children who are weak in a particular sensory area are normally catered for in the other areas.  In classes in which the Spalding Method is suitably taught, without short cuts or unapproved changes, dyslexia vanishes.  No child fails to spell, read, write, take notes, and undertake simple research at acceptable levels of competence.  This is why one of the most respected cognitive psychologists in the world, Professor Sylvia Farnham-Diggory, has called Spalding the only approach to the language arts, to date, that fully works. ⁽²⁵⁾

Unlike WL lobbyists, who argue that reading is primarily a semantic process, or sight-word advocates, who think that it is primarily lexical, or phonics fanatics who say that it is chiefly orthographic, the proponents of Spalding recognise that all these sub-routines are involved in basic language arts instruction. ⁽²⁶⁾  To be able to respond to print effectively, children and adults must have extensive training in analysing the black marks on the page, the sound stream of spoken language, and the writing process itself.  Thus, like Mrs Spalding herself, students who are trained via The Writing Road to Reading, and also the instructional manual for Spalding Course 2, with the help of Spalding-certified instructors master all these forms of analysis.  Through scaffolding techniques which create a unified support structure for print, they almost effortlessly grasp the bedrock principles underlying sound language use.

After learning how to hold a pencil, sound letters out, and form letters in a writing notebook, Spalding-taught children construct sentences, build larger reading and writing vocabularies, and master fundamental features of sound reading comprehension.  Within a very short time they are able to gather information, summarise the main ideas of a piece of writing, and name the distinguishing characteristics of different writing styles (generically, to begin with, narrative and informative prose).  Higher-level thinking is a basic component of the approach.  So is attention to the history of language, including regional variation and changes in pronunciation, diction, and grammar.  There is constant, positive feedback.  Automatically, through forms of repetition which they like, students learn how to transfer knowledge and make it their own, just as thei;  Spalding-trained teachers have done.

Because they learn spelling and handwriting from the word Go, children instructed in the Spalding Method are free to be creative very quickly.  They don't have to go through imaginatively constricting basal readers:  by the time they know the 45 basic sounds of English (using 70 "phonogram" cards), they are ready for quality literature.  With the help of the Ayres list, which contains the 1,000 most commonly used words in our language, primary pupils can decode passages that many unseasoned adults would probably consider too difficult.  For they soon have at their command the basic vocabulary which enables them to plunge, with their teachers, into what Keats called "realms of gold".  On average, the entire programme costs only $2.25 per student -- a startling contrast to Reading Recovery, which costs $2,000-$3,000. ⁽²⁷⁾

It is highly likely that, in future, other approaches to the language arts, anchored in a research base on cognition as strong as Spalding's, will be implemented in classrooms.  But at present, no other method is as comprehensive, holistic, and successful.  That is why some of the most dedicated speech pathologists, teachers, and primary principals in this country have learned how to implement it despite the expense and effort involved in two 2-week intensive Spalding courses available overseas or through the Speech, Language and Literacy Centre in Sydney.

OTHER LANGUAGE ARTS ISSUES

Although most of our time over the past three years has been devoted to the study of basic literacy, we have also examined related issues affecting the linguistic achievement of Australian students:  the study of grammar, the development of school writing programmes, and the quality of the literature recommended for children and young people.  A brief word about all three is therefore in order.

FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR

In the 1950s and 1960s traditional grammar was taught in most Australian primary and secondary schools.  Students worked their way through exercises in grammar texts dealing with rules and exceptions to rules.  Although many people who use language effectively in today's workplace continue to draw on the knowledge that they acquired in this way, there were significant numbers of students who did not understand the concepts involved, or who could not transfer into ordinary speech and writing the skills they relied on to complete artificially constructed exercises (not least, because they had never met the Spalding Method).  Because the English-teaching profession was acutely conscious of this problem of transference, the teaching of grammar slowly vanished from ordinary classrooms.

For over a decade, one catch-cry of English teachers teaching writing was "Meet students at the point of need":  that is, help individual pupils in writing areas needing obvious attention.  Another was "Encourage pupils to be creative, and to immerse themselves in writing experiences."  Unfortunately, the complexity of language itself, the increasing prevalence of pupils whose first language was not English, and widespread gaps in student knowledge of such basic matters as punctuation, diction, parts of speech, and paragraph construction prevented this dictum from working.  Eager to do better, teachers and teacher educators with a strong classroom base began to explore new ways of giving students explicit whole-class instruction in language.

In New South Wales, a group of linguists who had spent considerable time working with pupils whose cultural and linguistic understanding, acquired in their countries of origin, made it hard for them to cope with some of the standard conventions of English began concentrating on models that could foster a better understanding of how everyday language is used in speech and writing.  With the help of Michael Halliday, an internationally known specialist in functional grammar who was for a time at the University of Sydney, these educators focussed on the role played by context, audience, and text in the creation of meaning. ⁽²⁸⁾

Drawing on an interest in genre widely shared by professionals of an earlier day -- that is, on such diverse modes of address as poems, stories, plays, formal essays, myths and legends, newspaper and magazine articles, letters, biography, reminiscences, historical narrative, advertisements, and job applications -- they concentrated on helping students to take account of the cultural and situational contexts in which texts of every kind are structured.  Their basic tenet is that we all need to know about a broad range of spoken and written conventions in order to understand the plentiful resources of language and the appropriateness of specific usages.  In practice, students need to be taught how language varies according to structure, purpose, or regional or social group.

Because knowledge of grammar has grown enormously in the last forty years, and because one large area of growth has been within the field of "functional grammar", the Primary English syllabus which was set in place in New South Wales in 1993 re-introduced the teaching of grammar in schools -- but in the very new way called for by modern linguistic research on the conventions suited to different language use.  Although the syllabus is not a back-to-basics document anchored in dated rote methods of teaching grammar, it does take for granted the importance of a systematic approach to language conventions.  Despite a certain contemporary suspicion of "systems" and the widespread recognition that no syllabus, however enlightened in design, can solve all the problems related to literacy development, other States and overseas experts have shown considerable interest in it. ⁽²⁹⁾

Since there is still widespread misunderstanding about what "functional grammar" is and does, it is important to recognise that it does not replace traditional grammar, but builds on it -- using, for example, a traditional understanding of parts of speech in order to make perfectly clear to pupils how nouns, verbs, and objects function in ordinary English sentences.  Naturally, teachers unprepared by their pre-service training to teach any grammar at all have had a lot of catching up to do in order to master the full range of grammatical understanding now possessed by functional grammarians and other language experts.  To help them, some of the more difficult terminology in use in New South Wales has been officially discarded, in line with recommendations made in the 1995 Eltis Report;  but the up-to-date conceptual base fundamental to an understanding of how language "functions" has been retained. ⁽³⁰⁾

What language experts, teacher educators with a strong background in linguistics or writing, and ordinary classroom teachers are currently building on is the belief that students can use a knowledge of how texts start and finish, and what the priorities are which determine how they proceed, to improve their own organisation of ideas in speech and writing and to trace patterns and meaning in the speech and writing of others.  An understanding of the way grammar works is fundamental to an understanding of how language conventions more broadly work, and why people structure their means of communication differently.  Since contemporary definitions of the nature and functions of grammar are broader than they used to be, our understanding of grammar's place in schooling is consequently broader and more flexible. ⁽³¹⁾

Right now, English teachers, teacher educators, and policy makers across Australia are debating the priorities which will be given to different kinds of texts in school classrooms.  Among the questions being asked privately and publicly (for example, on national radio programmes like Jenny Brockey's) are these:  How much attention should be paid to the media, and how should it be provided?  What is the role of literature, and what should it be, in the lives of children who are not headed for university?  How can material on diverse "texts" which is basic to the successful HSC Contemporary English course be taught earlier, at suitable levels, to many more pupils? ⁽³²⁾  How, precisely, can the neglect of non-fictional prose in primary school English teaching be remedied in ways that foster significant language development?  How can ordinary classroom teachers keep up-to-date on computer software, film, and other media products which require careful scrutiny, and which are developing at exponentially rapid rates?

TEACHING WRITING

An increased understanding of language and a broader view of the nature and uses of grammar naturally affect, and will continue to affect, the content of school writing programmes.  So far, however, difficulties which have plagued the implementation of "process" writing precepts -- for example, the idea that pupils should draft and re-draft material until it is "publishable" -- have not been resolved.  Among the issues currently being discussed is how much parents, teachers, fellow pupils, or outside tutors should be allowed to influence the content of multiple "drafts".  Another is whether, or to what extent, continuous assessment involving portfolio work should be encouraged in senior pupils applying for university admission, since Victorian pupils and teachers (and others elsewhere) have acknowledged widespread cheating in the production of non-examinable work. ⁽³³⁾

A large literacy issue which follows from inadequacies in school writing programmes, whether the emphasis has been on "process" writing or not, is basic coherence in the use of language.  Widely publicised debate at such major Australian tertiary institutions as the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney and the University of New South Wales has focused national attention on whether university entrance requirements should include a compulsory English unit.  The immediate reason for such debate has been widely-reported deficiencies in speech and writing among students entering prestigious fields like medicine.  To date, however, academic Boards at these institutions have had difficulty deciding which Year 12 English courses, if any, provide the kind of training in speech and writing which will correlate appropriately with a student's Tertiary Entrance Ranking (TER).

Since students in many States can receive a high TER if their level of understanding significantly exceeds that of their written expression, university Boards are considering the prospect of setting their own examinations in composition before admitting candidates to specific programmes, or requiring prospective students to complete existing aptitude tests in Writing of the kind already in use in Queensland.  For several decades overseas, national examinations in composition designed by the Educational Testing Service in Princeton have been used to differentiate among candidates for university entrance.  But ordinary teachers in ordinary schools, here and overseas, continue to feel overwhelmed by the numbers of pupils who cannot manage these tests because their command of written English does not begin to match their command of the spoken word. ⁽³⁴⁾

Of the reported programmes in writing which have been most successful at improving the composition skills of weak students and encouraging more advanced pupils to take leaps forward, one that has attracted significant international interest was introduced in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1989 by two writers, Ellen Kolba and Sheila Crowell, who for many years prior to that were conducting in-service writing workshops for teachers and addressing national conferences run by the MLA, the National Association of English Teachers, and other professional groups with large memberships. ⁽³⁵⁾  In 1989, when I travelled to America to witness major school reform efforts first-hand, Montclair was one of the first places I visited because of its highly publicised, racially integrated "magnet" schools.  At Montclair High School I attended one of the best English classes of my entire trip, a discussion led by English Department head Dr Bernadette Anand.  She has since become very involved in the Writing Project -- called The Writers' Room -- organised by Kolba and Crowell.

A common theme in the writing of educational reformers whose focus is structural school reform is the need for programmes that can be replicated with relative ease.  Although a necessary, difficult-to-replicate feature of the Kolba/Crowell Writing Project is the linguistic knowledge of Kolba and Crowell themselves, there are other aspects of their project which can be imitated effectually, provided that the people running it have language and writing expertise comparable to theirs.  Among them are the following:

• availability of a Writers' Room where young writers and their coaches can work during free time;
• regular teacher involvement in Writers' Room activity;
• coaching by community members trained for at least six weeks by the Writing Project's leaders;
• peer tutoring, monitored by expert staff;
• regular discussion and writing conferences involving small groups of students of all ages and staff;
• a willingness to reflect on other writers' efforts, and to refrain from putting pen to paper until suitable reflection has occurred;
• an awareness of the importance of conversation, and an analytical interest in ideas, to the writing process.

LITERATURE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

At the moment, educational policy makers in a number of Australian States are discussing projected changes in senior English programmes which would diversify textual offerings and allow students who do not intend to go to university to study a wider range of "texts".  In New South Wales, for example -- as in Victoria earlier -- plans are afoot to allow young people in secondary English classrooms to receive their Tertiary Entrance Rankings (TERs) by studying multi-media offerings as well as ordinary literature.  Since retention rates in the senior years of school are increasing, the argument runs, the authentic needs of a more diverse student population must be met in ways that represent an up-to-date understanding of modernity.

What concerns us, as it concerns many teachers responsible for improving the content of school literature programmes, is not the fact that community lobbies want to encourage young people to look more critically at popular culture -- films, videos, television programmes, magazines, newspapers, computer software -- and to receive respectable Year 12 credentials for doing so.  There is a case to be made -- as it has been made by many members of State syllabus committees -- for a properly critical scrutiny of diverse forms of contemporary writing.  Our worry, rather, is that in the senior years, particularly with students remaining in school because they are unable to secure decent jobs, the temptation to concentrate on contemporary writing and to neglect the study of more demanding, less "relevant", early literature will be very great.

This is no idle worry.  In view of the recent inroads made by Political Correctness into Humanities programmes at every educational level, the need for pupils who stay at school during the post-compulsory years to experience a solid body of first-rate pre-20th-century literature is all the more pressing.  For over a decade, as we remarked in Educating Australians, the predominant trend in both primary and junior secondary classrooms has been to bombard the young with modern writing -- and, in particular, writing that revels in life's bleaker prospects.  The sounder perspective derived from a solid experience of literature published in other times and other places is not simply desirable:  it is imperative -- not least, because young people themselves often complain about the dispiriting material that they are forced to digest against their own better judgment in order to improve their vocational opportunities. ⁽³⁶⁾

Earlier this year, in an article in Education Monitor based on her reading of some 75 highly commended contemporary Australian novels for young people, ⁽³⁷⁾ Jill Ireland characterised the literature in this category which has been given the most prestigious awards in this country over the past decade as inferior to that of the two decades preceding it.  What disturbed her was not so much the cardboard portraiture, the creaky plots, or the limited benefits of re-reading afforded by these books -- though these weaknesses would necessarily concern all persons of strong sensibility.  Her major worry was the typical worldview purveyed by them, which can be summarised as follows:

• The essentially malevolent universe must be fought by the individual with secrecy and cunning;
• If there is any force controlling humankind -- for example, the State, a computer program, or Dreamtime magic -- it is sinister;
• No institution -- family, government, church, health care body -- is even remotely helpful:  indeed, institutions barely exist except in a depraved form;
• The human race is largely corrupt, with the exception of a few brave adolescents who through vigour, violence, bravado, keen persistence, intellectual acumen, magic or psychic powers win out against the evil forces;
• Relationships have only temporary value;
• People are fundamentally solitary:  it is hardly possible to know real connectedness, only parallel solitude;
• The best stance to adopt about life, and about the loss of innocence, is wry acceptance.

An observation made by numerous Australian educators who have read Mrs Ireland's article is that her generalisations apply equally to books regularly assigned in school classrooms, and to those that are awarded prizes in adult literature competitions. ⁽³⁸⁾  20th-century literature as a whole, they point out, is cynical or downright nihilistic about human possibility.  Living writers who portray human society in its richness, neglecting neither the virtues nor the vices of ordinary men and women -- for example, Primo Levi, A.S. Byatt, R.K. Narayan, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Saul Bellow, or Shirley Hazzard -- enjoy minority status.  To a menacing degree, their merited place in the classroom goes to authors whose philosophies are crass and destabilising. ⁽³⁹⁾

There is thus every reason for syllabus designers and the reading public more generally to express concern about moves to alter the English curriculum by giving older students an even larger dose of contemporary print than they normally receive during their free time.  Unless an older literature, anchored in a more balanced sense of human potential, is required of all students, not simply those with strong academic ambitions, the claim that we are educating, not indulging, our young people will be increasingly hard to sustain.  If some of the plans now being considered for senior English programmes are adopted, it will be relatively easy for almost everybody to avoid meeting the major figures in the history of English Literature.

In the light of demands placed upon every core discipline in the '90s, it is highly likely that even our most responsible teachers will be pressed into a compromising selection of texts to cater for pupils overwhelmed by the volume of work required of them in "hard" options.  For some years, understandably, the reputation of English has been in decline.  To do reasonably well in the subject, students do not have to do anything like the work required in "real" disciplines like Maths or Chemistry. ⁽⁴⁰⁾  Indeed, it is well known that cribs often get better marks than genuine attempts to come to terms with real books.  What is needed to restore a measure of respectability to English (at the very least) is a feeling for history, and for the spirit of continuity that is fundamental to it.  Not for nothing did the Marxist historian Eric Hobshawm remark that most young men and women in the 1990s "grow up in a sort of permanent present."

What could be more patronising, or more misguided, than the assumption that traditional stories, verse, and drama are the rightful property only of an academic elite headed for university?  Surely every serious English teacher who has ever read major, suitably chosen, works of prose or poetry aloud in the classroom, or assigned them to students of ordinary academic ability, knows their inherent appeal.  Yes, of course, works of popular culture, including those churned out by the mass media, have an immediate attraction for the young.  But so, well taught from kindergarten to Year 12 (K-12), does traditional literature.  The importance of resisting moves to supplant it, in the name of greater egalitarianism and realism, cannot be overstated.

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ENDNOTES

1.  A recent article by Gavin Swallows in SCORE, "What is Literacy?" (Vol. 3, No. 3, Autumn 1995), also uses this basic definition.

2.  Recent evidence of the view that students are not meeting acceptable literacy standards can be found in an article entitled "Leaving Students Lack Skills:  Survey", The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 December 1995.  Stephanie Raethel and Luis M. Garcia report that a new national survey of two-thirds of "Australia's key educators, including school principals, university vice-chancellors and TAFE directors, believe too many school graduates are not mastering the basic skills".

3.  See, especially, Susan Moore's Study Paper 9, "HSC Literature Texts in Australia" (February 1989);  Susan Moore, "The Revolution in Children's Literature", Quadrant (July 1989);  Susan Moore, "Our children aren't reading the right stuff", Sydney Morning Herald, 22 August 1989;  Susan Moore, "Contemporary English:  The Set Texts", Education Monitor, Vol. 1, No. 4;  Susan Moore, "The Clean Sea Breeze of the Centuries", Review (Spring, 1990);  Susan Moore, "Long Ago and Far Away:  Adventures in Reading," an oration given at, and published by, the University of Southern Queensland, 27 September 1991, and reprinted in slightly different form in SCORE, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1992;  Wood, Educating Australians (1992), pages 29-58;  Susan Moore, What Should My Child Read? (1992);  and "Some Criteria for Selecting Children's Books", Christian Librarians' Network Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 1 (November 1994).

4.  Many of our more important findings, initially published in articles in Education Monitor, Review, and Study Papers, were summarised in Wood's Educating Australians.

5.  On the importance of books, and some of the implicit dangers of reliance on television and the electronic media, Dame Leonie Kramer's comments on the new HSC design for English currently circulating for comment and criticism in New South Wales is pertinent.  See her article, "Why English Has a Special Role", The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 June 1995.

6.  The diagnostic reading/spelling test which I used was developed by Byron Harrison and can be purchased through W.H.A.T., Quality Educational Software, c/o Byron Harrison, Shop 18, Upper level, Cat & Fiddle Arcade, Hobart, Tasmania 7000.  Phone, toll free, 008 030 030.  In the course of my investigations, I also met fine pen-and-pencil diagnostic reading tests developed by the Macquarie University Special Education Centre.

7.  In an effort to disseminate Harrison-Zollner research more widely, I included in the Australian edition of Kappa Delta Pi Record, an article on Teaching Reading by this outstanding team, whose research had earlier been hailed at the Dyslexic Institute in London as a major contribution to knowledge in the field of early literacy.

8.  Major researchers who have worked with us include Michael Irwin of the New Zealand Round Table, editor of The Education Digest;  Professor Tom Nicholson of the University of Auckland, a well-known expert in the field of early literacy;  and Dr Mary North of the Spalding Foundation, who is linked with the Sydney Speech, Language and Literacy Centre.  Indirectly, we also have links with Martin Turner of London's Dyslexic Institute.

9.  This article was reprinted in a special Australian edition of the US journal Kappa Delta Pi Record in the Spring of 1993.

10.  A number of research studies on limitations in the design of Reading Recovery have now appeared.  A recent one is Elfrieda H. Hiebert's "Reading Recovery in the United States:  What Difference Does it Make to an Age Cohort", Network News & Views (February 1995).

11.  The most widely cited publication on adult literacy, still, is Rosie Wickert's No Single Measure:  A Survey of Australian Adult Literacy, DEET, Canberra, 1989.  Among some of the more startling statistics in her study of a sample of 1,500 are these:  18 per cent could not circle the expiry date on a learner's permit or sign their name on a Bankcard form;  21 per cent could not locate a phone number in a directory;  given paint charts, 38 per cent could not give the right paint for a galvanised-iron shed;  and 22 per cent could not say what a marathon swimmer had eaten after reading a newspaper article on the swimmer.

12.  "Reading and Rights", The Australian Magazine, 25-26 September 1993, page 60.  See also, for example, Frank Devine's "Children's literacy problems are a crying shame", The Australian, 26 August 1993;  "Under the spell of teaching methods", The Australian, 9 September 1993;  and "The facts on illiteracy, spelled out loud and clear", The Australian, 23 September 1993.

13.  See Susan Moore's "Literacy and Teacher Training", Education Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 3;  Susan Moore, "Why pupils need to follow instructions to the letter", The Australian, 3 February 1994;  Susan Moore, "Churning out poor readers", The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 June 1994;  and Susan Moore, "It's learning to read by guess and by gad", The Telegraph-Mirror, 25 June 1994.

14.  On the influence of the whole-word guessing lobby, and the resulting illiteracy of untold numbers of English-speaking children, some more recent articles from the Pacific region alone are Warwick Roger, "Slipshod Reading Teaching Method", The Evening Post, 27 February 1995, reprinted in The Education Forum (NZ), August 1995;  Noel O'Hare, "What's Wrong with Reading?", Listener, 15 July 1995;  and Warwick Roger, "Adventures in the Reading Trade", Metro, August 1995.

15.  See Bob Charles, "Madness in the Method:  The Causes of Illiteracy", Education Monitor, Vol. 2, No. 4;  and Bob Charles, "A Testing Time for Literacy", Education Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 3.

16.  Among the more recent research studies which reveal the falsity of these claims by the Whole-Language lobby are article upon article in The Journal of Research and Reading, Vol. 18, No, 2, 1995.

17.  The following section of this Report repeats information contained in this issue of Education Monitor, Vol. 6, No. 1.

18.  David Kemp's recent initiatives in literacy testing are therefore particularly important.

19.  Understandably, school executives are reluctant to speak publicly about errors they have made in handling learning-disabled pupils.  But recently, the junior head of Ascham, Helen Grant, made it known that Ascham is revamping its entire Early Literacy programme, K-6, in line with Spalding's research, so that staff are properly up-to-date on international research into cognition and language acquisition.

20.  In the Summer 1995 issue of American Educator, the journal put out by the American Federation of Teachers, one of the most highly-publicised researchers into cognition and the language arts, Marilyn J. Adams (with Maggie Bruck, Associate Professor of Psychology and Pediatrics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada), exposes some of the bedrock fallacies in this approach -- and, in particular, the fallacy that chldren learn to read and write in the same way that they learn to speak.  Her article, which contains an allusion to Jeanne Chall's influential study of Reading in the late '60s, is called "Resolving the 'Great Debate' ".

21.  One common error, repeated in radio talk shows by so-called experts, is that Lindamood Bell and Spalding are virtually interchangeable.  They are not.  Lindamood Bell offers instruction in auditory discrimination and spelling.  Spalding covers a much broader cognitive area.

22.  From 1974 to 1988, trainees were told about many methods of teachmg reading, but they were not systematically shown how to impart essential skills, nor were they expected to master these skills before being accredited.  To my knowledge, there is not a single teacher training programme in Australia that actually teaches all the components of Spalding.  Only teachers who have learned the Spalding Method in the US, or been instructed in it by Mary North and the Sydney Speech, Language, and Literacy Centre, can properly be said to have been "taught" Spalding.

23.  A more detailed description of the Spalding language arts approach can be found in the Study Paper, The Writing Road to Reading, which contains Mary North's discussion of the subject, originally published in slightly different form in Annals of Dyslexia, a publication of the Orton Dyslexia Society.  A paper of mine, "Producing a Nation of Readers", which led Carolyn Jones of The Australian to publish a lead article on one aspect of Spalding, "A Sound Approach to Reading (11 March 1996).  In Carolyn Jones' article, an allegation by a lecturer at Sydney University is made to the effect that students there are "taught" Spalding.  This assertion is very misleading, as the previous footnote explains.

24.  A few pertinent statistics are worth re-quoting from the paper on Spalding published in September 1995.  In 1990, first-graders in Peoria District's 17 primary schools (including four schools with low socioeconomic populations) had an average percentile rank reading score of 67 (national average of 49) and average language score of 85 (national average 53) on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.  Second-graders averaged 67 percentile rank in reading (national average 46) and 86 in language (national average 52).

25.  See Farnham-Diggory's widely used university text, Cognitive Processes in Education (Harper Collins, Second Edition, 1992), particularly Chapter 9.  See, too, another work recommended by her and by the Spalding Foundation, Robert Aukerman's Approaches to Beginning Reading (1984).

26.  On the sub-routines involved in rigorous language arts instruction, University of Delaware professor Farnham-Diggory is perhaps the most helpful source.  See her "From theory to practice in reading", a paper read at the Annual Conference of the Reading Reform Foundation, July 1987, San Francisco, and Schooling (1990), Cambridge, Massachusetts:  Harvard University Press.

27.  On how Spalding works, see Susan Moore, "Holistic Approach to Language Training", The Canberra Times, 1 May 1996, and "Literacy:  The Need for Radical Educational Change", Quadrant (June 1996).

28.  A detailed discussion of the history of this group, and their views about sound language composition, can be found in an essay given to us without details about the journal in which it was published.  Compiled by Lorraine Murphy, it is called "Bibliographical Essay:  Developing the Theory and Practice of Genre-based Literacy".  Its authors are Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, Gunterh Kress and Jim Martin.

29.  See Wendy Michaels, cited in "Good News About School Renewal", Education Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 2.

30.  Support for the general principles of functional grammar has been strong in New South Wales and other States.  The Eltis Report, entitled "Focussing on Learning:  Report of the Review of Outcomes and Profiles in New South Wales Schooling", was based on hundreds of teacher/parent submissions on educational practice in the State.  It supported the functional grammarians, while recommending that some of their more abstruse terminology be replaced by conventional Plain English.

31.  For a fuller discussion of changes in our understanding of grammar, and the role of functional grammar in schooling, see Donna Gibbs, "Teaching Grammar in the 90s", Education Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 1.

32.  In March 1996, following widely reported public anxiety about the prospect that HSC electives like Contemporary English may be dropped in favour of a more exclusively "academic" or "literary" Year 11-12 English programme, I myself spoke on the Jenny Brockey Show in support of this particular course.  It implements important understanding of genre recommended by such diverse educators as the functional grammarians and the designers of Spalding Course 2.

33.  See "Fairness in School Assessment", an Observation on Tim Brown and Sam Ball's A Report on the VCE Verification Process, Education Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 1.

34.  On typical writing problems found in the work of senior school pupils and first-year university students, see Barry Spurr, "The Crisis in English", Education Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 2, and Charlotte Clutterbuck, "Grammar, the Ground of All", Education Monitor, Vol. 3, No. 2;  reprinted in SCORE, Vol. 2, No. 6.

35.  For a more detailed discussion of this programme, see Ellen D. Kolba, "The Writers' Room:  A Window on School Restructuring", Education Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 3.

36.  See, further, Peter Hunt, "More Reflections on Literature", Education Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 3.  In the same issue of Monitor, John Bell discusses the relevance of live Shakespeare productions to young Australians (in "Shakespeare Today").

37.  See "The Australian Book Awards for Older Readers", Vol. 5, No. 3.

38.  Since its initial publication, many schools and dozens of adults, both teachers and parents, have contacted Jill Ireland to express agreement with, and concern about, the large ideas she discusses in this article.  The article itself has been re-printed in several places:  for example, Annals Australia, (No. 5, 1995).

39.  See further "Teaching English Today:  A Conversation with Ann Parker", Education Monitor, Vol. 6, No. 2.

40.  See, further, Susan Moore, "Home Truths:  A Reflection on the Demidenko Affair", Quadrant (October 1995).