Oral language development and access to school discourses

In Australia, over the last decade, there has been an unprecedented political focus on literacy attainment levels. In 1998 the Commonwealth released the National Plan that focussed on the need for states to plan for system wide early assessment and early intervention. A s well the plan introduced the requirement to develop minimal standards, against which all children would be assessed and the outcomes reported to the Commonwealth. In 1998, the Ministerial Council on Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) resolved that all states would conduct full census testing in Years 3, 5 and 7 and that these would be reported to the Commonwealth against national benchmarks. Similar pressures were impacting on the work of teachers in the United States as evidenced in The National Reading Panel Review Teaching Children To Read (2000).