Writing as linguistic mastery: the development of genre- based literacy pedagogy

There have been three major phases in the pedagogy’s development: the initial design of the writing pedagogy in the 1980s, with a handful of genres in the primary school; the extension of the writing pedagogy in the 1990s, to genres across the secondary school curriculum and beyond; and the development of the reading pedagogy from the late 1990s, integrating reading and writing with teaching practice across the curriculum at primary, secondary and tertiary education levels. The strategies developed in the initial stage are now standard literacy teaching practice in primary schools across Australia and increasingly internationally, as well as in ESL and academic literacy programs. The latest reading and writing strategies have been consistently shown to accelerate literacy development at twice to over four times expected rates, at the same time as they close the gap in any class between the most and least successful students (McRae et al, 2000; Culican, 2006; Rose, Rose, Farrington & Page, 2008). After reviewing developments in each of these three stages, the chapter concludes by positioning genre-based pedagogy in relation to other approaches in the literacy field. The genre writing pedagogy The two key dimensions of the genre writing pedagogy developed in the 1980s were an analysis of the kinds of texts that students are expected to write in the primary school, and a consistent method for supporting all students to write successfully. The pedagogy was developed in an ongoing partnership between teachers and discourse linguists, in the context of a school system that had largely abandoned the explicit teaching of writing in favour a progressivist ideology of personal development. The whole language movement, which came to dominate Australian education faculties and school syllabi from the late 1970s, proscribed the teaching of grammar and composition in both the classroom and teacher training. Teachers were told not to impose direct instruction in writing on children, but to encourage them to write from