The coal-face and the cutting-edge: a grammar for interfacing traditional and new literacies in the English curriculum

Abstract

The requirement for grammar to be explicitly taught as part of the English curriculum is common in government syllabus documents in Australian states (and in the National Curriculum for England). This requirement now seems to have achieved fairly broad acceptance, although there has been some contention about how (and what kind of) relatively recent developments in grammatical description should be endorsed in syllabi. For the most part, traditional grammar terminology has been retained, although some Australian States also incorporate functional grammatical concepts from systemic functional linguistics (SFL), sometimes known as Hallidayan linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Martin, 1992).