Language as Personal Resource and as Social Construct: competing views of literacy pedagogy in Australia

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Abstract
During the 1980s in Australia considerable attention and effort was directed to literacy education, particularly writing pedagogy. In the late 1970s and early 1980s process writing was promoted into schools by a group of teachers, teacher educators and academics. Teachers were encouraged to take a renewed interest in the teaching of writing and something of a ‘revolution’ was taking place in primary schools by the early 1980s. By the mid‐to‐late 1980s process models of literacy education were rejuvenated by the development of whole language. As process writing spread into the schools and became a new orthodoxy in many places, another group of academics, linguisticians and teachers began to offer critiques of process pedagogy. Throughout the 1980s this group has attempted to identify and linguistically describe the various genres children are asked to write in schools and to propose a curriculum model for the teaching of this genre‐based view of writing. The two groups have often locked horns in defence of their positions which, at the theoretical level, appear to be irreconcilable. At the present time, the genre‐based group has been successful in drawing the attention of politicians and in securing funding for the development of the genre‐based pedagogy. The debate will continue well into the new decade as each State Department or Ministry of Education develops literacy curricula in response to the policies of the respective State governments.

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