Interrogating Policy Contradictions in Literacy Reforms About Persuasive Texts

• In Event: 31.091 - Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: 31.091-24 - Reading and Writing Instruction in K–12 Contexts

Abstract

Founded on an appreciation of literacy as a social justice issue, we examine two forms of knowledge about persuasive texts. The first form of knowledge, immortalised as a writing task in the Australian national high-stakes assessment task, adopts the Toulmin (2003) model of persuasive text. However, privileging this model fails to provide access to the texts of modern institutions. We thus consider another form of knowledge, that which draws on the field of linguistics, and extends to a more nuanced metalanguage for multimodal text design. We conclude by considering how each form of persuasive text knowledge contributes to developing the minimum conditions of democracy: the right to individual enhancement, social inclusion and political participation (Bernstein, 2000).

Authors

• Beryl Exley, Queensland University of Technology

• Kathy Ann Mills, Australian Catholic University