What AERO’s report of writing development in Australia doesn’t want to talk about

The recent report by the Australian Educational Research Organisation (AERO), Writing development: What does a decade of NAPLAN data reveal? , has caused quite a stir in Australian news and social media spaces.

Headlines have trumpeted the “shocking report” of the “dramatic decline” in students’ writing ability in Australian schools. Journalists have seized on the report’s claim that most Year 9 students are now “using punctuation like children in Year 3”.

This is what the report reveals. And, of course, it’s disturbing. Yet, as the authors of the AERO report acknowledge, and as anyone who’s a regular consumer of news media knows, the steady decline in Australian students’ writing has been reported for several years.

And the minimal improvements evident in some areas of writing in the most recent NAPLAN results are no cause for optimism. They’re likely to be due to larger numbers of struggling students not sitting the NAPLAN test in 2022.

The major report from a national research organisation (generously funded by taxpayers) merely confirms what research has already shown – that there’s a continuing decline in Australian students’ writing achievement.

The report is silent on factors that may contribute to this result, and is also silent on some of the key issues facing literacy teachers.

The report’s failure to draw on significant, existing research reflects a lack of respect for English teachers

The report fails to consider significant research underwritten by the nation’s peak professional body of English teachers in Australia, the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE).

Susanne Gannon’s (2020) study, Teaching writing in secondary English in the NAPLAN era, reveals similar concerns about the decline in writing in Australia. It does so by drawing on a combination of NAPLAN data and professional experiences of English teachers in schools. It provides the critical lens on this issue that the AERO report lacks.

One has to wonder why a peak research organisation would investigate writing development in this country without consulting or even acknowledging relevant research published by English teachers and the professional body that speaks for them.

No wonder teachers in Australia don’t feel respected or appreciated by the general public or the media, as reported in the recent Australian Teachers' Perceptions of their Work Report 2022.

The lead author of that report, Monash University’s Dr Fiona Longmuir, observes: “Teachers are the backbone of our community. We need to prioritise respect for this highly valuable workforce, and respect takes many forms. We must appreciate our teachers, advocate on their behalf, and enable their voices to be heard at the policymaking table.”

By failing to consult or acknowledge English teachers, the AERO report reflects an all-too-familiar lack of respect for professional expertise. There’s also a missed opportunity here to engage with the profession best-placed to provide insights into writing pedagogy and issues confronting teachers.

NAPLAN is a limited test that has a toxic influence on the culture of writing in Australian schools

NAPLAN is changing the way writing is taught in schools, and it’s fostering a toxic culture (see Comber et al., 2012; Gannon and Dove, 2020; McGaw et al., 2020; Perelman, 2018; Turbill et al., 2015).

Put simply, it forces teachers to adopt teaching methods that are not effective, it hasn’t improved outcomes, and it’s not a holistic approach to education.

English teachers have spoken publicly about the pressure that NAPLAN brings to homogenise their approach and dedicate more class time to teach to the test. This takes time away from helping students understand themselves better, and their place in the world.

It also takes time away from approaches to teaching writing that encourage students to see themselves as writers, rather than writing as merely something done for a test.

Echoing English teachers’ concerns, a multi-state review of the impact of NAPLAN testing on students’ learning warned of the “unintended effects” of NAPLAN-focused teaching. One major consequence is that students, even the best students, are producing “formulaic” writing in the NAPLAN writing task.

Silent on English as an alternative language or dialect (EAL/D)

A quarter of primary and secondary school students learn English as an additional language or dialect, according to the Australian Curriculum. In some schools that figure can be as high as 90%.

Yet the AERO report says nothing about the complex understandings and knowledge required by schools and teachers to meet the writing needs of this large cohort of diverse EAL learners.

Part of the problem lies with the limitations of the NAPLAN data. For example, NAPLAN collects data on students with a “Language Background Other than English” (LBOTE), but there’s no disaggregation of the data to account for the diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds within the broad category of LBOTE.

The LBOTE category lumps together Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders; immigrants to Australia; students with a refugee background; children born in Australia of migrant heritage where English isn’t spoken at home; and international students from non-English-speaking countries.

Read more: Learning from disruption: Why we should rethink the place of NAPLAN in our schools

Like the NAPLAN data it’s based on, the report assumes the cultural and linguistic differences in this group don’t matter in the teaching of writing. The recently released National Roadmap For English as an Additional Language or Dialect or Dialect in Schools reveals the flaws in this assumption. It states:

“NAPLAN testing is an inappropriate and invalid measure for Indigenous EAL/D students learning Standard Australian English as their additional language ... It assesses students’ literacy in a language they can’t speak about culturally alien content that reflects an urban, English-speaking life-world.”

The silences of the AERO report regarding cultural diversity are all the more concerning when they encourage a romanticised public conversation about the teaching of writing that seeks a “silver bullet”, one-size-fits-all writing approach to teaching writing.

Promoting explicit teaching despite evidence it limits more able learners

There are repeated references throughout the AERO report calling for greater “explicit teaching” of writing. This is despite an acknowledgement in the report that this approach to writing pedagogy – broadly identified with the “genre” approach to the teaching of writing, and mainstream practice since the 1980s – can pose limitations to more able student writers.

The AERO report acknowledges, in passing, concerns expressed by researchers about the explicit teaching of the mechanics of writing in formulaic ways. It says: “Skilled writers are scaffolded ‘into’ writing rather than challenged to write beyond the scaffold.”

Given the emphasis in NAPLAN on scoring the mechanics of writing, rather than ideas development and elaboration, the test has sent a clear signal to teachers – they need to focus on what Paris (2005) calls the “constrained” skills of literacy, at the expense of the “unconstrained” skills of vocabulary, ideas, expressiveness, and creativity.

Read more: A year without NAPLAN has given us a chance to re-evaluate how we gauge school quality

Research by and with English teachers shows teachers and students are best-served by having a rich repertoire of writing practices and teaching styles.

Schools can foster a “culture of writing” across all subject areas. These writing cultures are fostered by teachers who are supported to collaborate and use a variety of approaches.

Professional learning resources provided by subject associations are regarded as the most helpful and relevant for supporting effective practice. This is a long way from the narrow, one-size-fits-all approach this report seems to endorse.

Supporting teachers to promote a positive writing culture in their classrooms

Further research underwritten by another professional association in Australia, the Primary English Teachers’ Association (PETA), shows that supporting teachers to see themselves as writers and to develop a “writing identity” promotes a positive culture of writing in classrooms, and nuanced repertoires of teaching approaches.

Against the background of this extensive research on the teaching of writing, one wonders why the AERO report would promote the idea that there’s a single “best practice” that will guarantee a rich writing culture in Australian schools.

All this suggests the AERO report was written with a particular agenda in mind – endorsing an ideological narrative that NAPLAN is of central importance to the teaching of writing in Australia.

“We must appreciate our teachers, advocate on their behalf, and enable their voices to be heard at the policymaking table.”

NAPLAN is characterised as an invaluable but benign “canary in the coal mine”, revealing the danger we’re in, and helping us avert some impending calamity in writing development.

But there’s a compelling body of evidence showing what this report tries to conceal – that NAPLAN is not merely a benign canary in the coal mine.

Indeed, much of the problem lies in the nature of the canary itself. The landscape of teaching writing in Australia would be improved by removing NAPLAN altogether, as happened for a year amid COVID-19.

And we trust that AERO’s future reporting of writing development in Australian schools listens to and learns from the English teaching professionals across the country who surely deserve more respect and understanding than the current report offers.