As was signalled in the introduction, this study is specifically concerned with what I have termed “School English Literacy”; that is, the literacy that children will need to enable them to succeed at school. In theory, academic success equates to gainful employment, which leads to financial security and control over one’s life and destiny. While both Indigenous and non‐Indigenous children bring to school with them a range of literate practices, dialects and languages that serve them well in their homes and communities and are crucial to the development and maintenance of their cultural identities, it is also crucial to their academic success and their ability to participate in the broader Australian and global context that they become literate in the Standard Australian English literacy and literacy practices which are used in schools, government and bureaucracy. Yunupingu (1999, p. 1) referred to the ability to operate in two cultures, or discourses, as “double power”.
The concept of literacy has been described as “slippery” (Gallego & Hollingsworth, 1992; McGarry, cited by Hollindale, 1995). A term that was once unproblematically used to describe the interpretation of the alphabetic code has evolved to have a much wider meaning. The term “literacy” has moved beyond the written text to include the negotiation of meaning through a variety of media in a variety of contexts. This shift in meaning has given rise to notions of “plural literacies” (Hollindale, 1995) “multiple literacies” (Gallego & Hollingsworth, 1992) and “multiliteracies” (New London Group, 1996).
These terms acknowledge the growing diversity of ways and purposes of communication in different social contexts in a rapidly changing world. It is recognised that
very young children are exposed to greater or lesser degrees to a variety of literacies before they enter school (Heath, 1983; Taylor 1983), and that their competence with these different literacies contributes to a greater or lesser degree to the ways in which young children are able to take up the kinds of literacies which are offered to them through formal schooling (Hill, Comber, Louden, Rivalland & Reid, 1998b).
Notwithstanding this view, official policies tend to take a more functional view of literacy. The Australian Language and Literacy Policy (DEET, 1991, p.5) defines literacy as follows: “Effective literacy is intrinsically purposeful, flexible and dynamic and involves the integration of speaking, listening and critical thinking with reading and writing.” This definition of (school) literacy is reflected in the reading, writing, speaking, listening and viewing strands that make up the English curriculum profile for Australian schools (Australian Education Council, 1994).
The Statement on English for Australian Schools (Australian Education Council, 1994, p. 4) states that:
while respecting students’ home languages,...teachers have a responsibility to teach the forms and usages generally accepted in Australian English, [which]... should be treated as an extension of, and an addition to, a student’s home language. The goal should be to ensure that students develop an ever‐widening language repertoire for personal and public use.
The stated aims of the Australian Curriculum: English (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], ) are to ensure that students:
learn to listen to, read, view, speak, write, create and reflect on increasingly complex and sophisticated spoken, written and multimodal texts across a growing range of contexts with accuracy, fluency and purpose
appreciate, enjoy and use the English language in all its variations and develop a sense of its richness and power to evoke feelings, convey information, form ideas, facilitate interaction with others, entertain, persuade and argue
understand how Standard Australian English works in its spoken and written forms and in combination with non‐linguistic forms of communication to create meaning
develop interest and skills in inquiring into the aesthetic aspects of texts, and develop an informed appreciation of literature
While there is acknowledgement of the range and variety of text forms and ways of being literate, the main aim of the literacy curriculum in the education system is to provide children with the literacy skills they will need to be able to operate fully in the wider
Australian society, and this involves a major focus on print‐based literacy in Standard Australian English.
Multiliteracies
The term “multiliteracies” was originally proposed by a group of eminent literacy educators who came to be known as the “New London Group” (Anstey & Bull, 2006). They met in New London, New Hampshire, in 1994 to consider how changes in technology were impacting on literacy practices and how literacy pedagogy should respond to these changes. “Multiliteracies” draws strongly on the notion of literacy as a social practice (Luke, 1994; Maybin,1994) and the idea that we draw on a range of practices for communicating with different groups of people in a variety of contexts, and that when we communicate, we make choices about which practices will be most effective in each particular context and with that particular group of people. In this paradigm, the term “text” is meant to refer to any piece of communication, whether it is spoken, written, presented through images and whether it is presented using paper, oral, gestural or electronic modes of communication. The New London Group (Cope and Kalantzis, cited in Martello, 2002) identified six overarching “design elements”, or modes of conveying meaning: linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, spatial and the sixth mode, multimodal, being a combination of any or all of the first five modes.
The multiliteracies, or as they have been more recently termed, “new literacies” (see, for example, Lankshear & Knobel, 2011) are ways of including and validating more diverse and less formal communication practices, such as texting on mobile phones, non‐ traditional spelling conventions, or of embedding multi‐modal texts into a communication.
This view of literacy does not necessarily involve being able to decode print in the traditional sense, as messages can be conveyed effectively through the use of non‐ alphabetic symbols such as emoticons, through visual images or even through music or recorded speech. It could be argued, therefore, that in order to be fully literate, one must be able to use a full repertoire of literate practices, including decoding print, successfully operating new communication technologies, constructing and making meaning from a range of text media and the capacity to critically interrogate a text and to use texts for our own social and political purposes.