Australian Literacies: Informing National Policy on Literacy Education

Abstract

The second edition of this work gives a broad overview of the various policies, both at state and national level, that have been introduced in Australia to promote literacy. It begins by examining the social and economic context that has led to an increased awareness of the importance of literacy and discusses the need for a literacy policy that focuses national attention on Australia’s school literacy achievements and raises literacy levels by directing resources towards areas of under-performance. The importance of literacy is discussed in terms of education, citizenship, economics and culture, and an individual’s participation in the knowledge society. A background of the literacy debate in Australia is given, as well as an examination of categories of learners, such as Indigenous Australians and ESL learners, and an overview of both school literacy education and adult literacy, numeracy and ESL education. The author’s conclusion is that there is not a generalised literacy crisis in Australia but that there are serious literacy performance problems among some groups and individuals.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 94 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.