A grammatics ‘good enough’ for school English in the 21st century: Four challenges in realising the potential

Abstract

In a complex communicational environment and at the dawn of an Australian curriculum, teachers need new kinds of knowledge about language (KAL). Our paper investigates the character of a 'good enough' KAL through 'grammatics' - a metalanguage based on careful study of grammar - a way of thinking with grammar in mind. It identifies four challenges facing any grammatics that is going to be adequate to the discipline: (1) Building a coherent account of KAL for contemporary English; (2) Fashioning a rhetorical grammatics for improving students' compositions; (3) Improving continuity and cumulative learning through the years of schooling; and (4) Developing a grammatics adequate to multimodal communication. Our paper draws on the resources of systemic functional grammatics to explore these challenges and considers the implications for teachers and students.