HOT TOPIC // IMPROVING A GENERATIONAL DECLINE IN WRITING SKILLS
CIS Researcher Fiona Mullers says an English proficiency test is the way forward.
Improving a generational decline in writing skills AUSTRALIAN STUDENTS’ DECLINING ACHIEVEMENT IN NATIONAL ASSESSMENT PROGRAM — LITERACY AND NUMERACY (NAPLAN), AS WELL AS IN INTERNATIONAL TESTING, HAS REVEALED THAT WRITING SKILLS ARE BELOW THE 2011 AVERAGE WITH ONE IN FIVE FAILING TO MEET THE NATIONAL MINIMUM STANDARD.
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The NSW Centre for Statistics and Evaluations (CESE) has indicated that high school students struggle with writing more than with reading and numeracy. The CESE report, based on 10 years of NAPLAN literacy data, revealed that one in every six Year 9 students in New South Wales fails to achieve the minimum standard required to succeed in their final years of school. As a result, students who lack sound writing skills are disadvantaged in almost every academic endeavour, unable to achieve maximum benefit from the wider school curriculum and likely to be disadvantaged in post-school life and work.
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Fiona Mueller and Deidre Clary from the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) have investigated what has led to this generational decline. In their report - Writing matters: reversing a legacy of policy failure in Australian education, the pair found that Australia has seen at least 60 years of the adoption, variable implementation and occasional jettisoning of a parade of methodologies including: learning styles, multiple intelligences, critical literacy, constructivism, whole language, process writing, genre theory and text types, balanced literacy and learning progressions. Fiona Muller says that a major consequence
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has been the near abandonment of consistent, explicit instruction about how the English language works as a system, juxtaposed with an ideological preoccupation with the socio-cultural experience of students in the classroom. “Many of us have been concerned about what some might call the basics for a long time. At a number of conferences and forums, colleagues of mine and I have been approached by practicing teachers with those concerns of the decline as one aspect which is clearly evident in NAPLAN results,” she says. “My personal concern has been for a very long time that we have adopted a whole
