Grammar to make a classroom comeback in national English curriculumhttp://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24508917-601,00.html
GRAMMAR will return to the classroom under the national English curriculum, along with punctuation, spelling, pronunciation and phonics, for all students from the first years of school.
The draft curriculum, to be released today by the National Curriculum Board, is unequivocal in including the explicit teaching of the basic structures of the English language.
But the draft retains the teaching of critical literacy, a sociological model analysing gender, race and class in literature to expose inherent prejudices and agendas.
The draft places literature as one of the three fundamental elements of an English course, along with language and literacy, and defines literary texts so as to include "multimodal texts".
The draft English curriculum was written by Sydney University education professor Peter Freebody, a literacy expert whose appointment was initially criticised for his lack of academic background in literature and championing of controversial views on literacy.
Professor Freebody said the curriculum stiffened the intellectual underpinning of the English curriculum by putting at its centre the three elements of learning about language, literature and literacy, or how to use language.
School English courses have been hotly debated in recent years, including the teaching of reading, the study of print literature, the use of critical literacy in analysing literature, and teaching the basic structures of the language such as grammar.
The draft addresses the debates, saying the "explicit teaching of decoding, spelling and other aspects of the basic codes of written English will be an important and routine aspect" of the curriculum. The draft says critical literacy is the analysis of texts in terms of "their potential philosophical, political or ideological assumptions and content".
"The (curriculum) will need to consider, at different stages of schooling, what emphasis is required to support young people to increase their sophisticated understandings of how to interpret texts, how they can be constructed and evaluated, and how their effects on us result from the features of the texts themselves and from the personal, social and cultural conditions in which they are used," it says.
Professor Freebody said critical literacy should not occupy a big part of the curriculum, but it had a role in enabling students to protect themselves against propaganda and being manipulated.
"Language isn't always innocent," he said.
"For the most part, what kids will learn when they encounter literary text is its aesthetic value and that it is cherished."
Professor Freebody said asking students to write Marxist, racist and feminist readings of a work such as Othello was "nonsensical". "It's a gratuitous notion that kids know enough about Marxism to do it, even if it was useful, which it isn't," he said.
"It's an example of bad practice by people trying to pursue this agenda of having kids analyse texts' underlying philosophical, moral, ideological and political issues, and this curriculum wouldn't endorse it."
The first key element of the curriculum is knowledge of English, covering strategies in learning to read and write.
"The explicit and systematic teaching of sound-script correspondences is important," it says. The draft says a quarter of school students learn English as an additional language, so the curriculum had to focus on the teaching of the basics.
"A focus on grammar, spelling strategies and conventions of punctuation will be necessary across all stages of schooling," it says. "This commitment includes traditional word- and sentence-level grammar, text-level grammar that teaches text types and patterns, and the functional relations between these levels."
Teaching grammar was deemed unnecessary, and was removed from curriculums in the 1970s, and while it has been creeping back in some schools and states, its teaching remains patchy. Some universities now offer first-year courses in writing, teaching the basics of grammar and sentence construction, to give students the skills they lack.
Perth teacher John Hancock has yearned for grammar to be a subject in its own right for the eight years he has been teaching high school. "We're dealing with grammar problems as they arise," Mr Hancock, from Helena College, said yesterday.
"It's assumed that because people converse in English, they have mastered the rudiments of communication. These rudiments can be easily forgotten."
An informed appreciation of literature is the second element of the draft curriculum, which is teaching students the aesthetic value of literary texts and that they are cherished.
The draft says Australian literary works should be a core element, with literature a fundamental part of the curriculum at every stage.
The third element focuses on learning to use language, from speaking English to writing it or using it in multimodal texts.
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