ABSTRACT

This chapter emerges from a long-term action research project, Learning to Read: Reading to Learn, in which Indigenous and other Australian students at primary, secondary and tertiary levels learn to read texts across their curricula, and to use what they learn from reading in their writing (Lui-Chivizhe et al. 2004; Rose et al. 1999). In this light I examine unequal development of orientations to reading through primary and secondary schooling, and the roles of instructional and regulative classroom discourse in maintaining inequality, guided by Bernstein’s model of schooling as a ‘pedagogic device’ (1990, 1996). Four general stages are proposed for the sequencing of reading development, from pre-school through junior and upper primary to secondary school, constituting a literacy curriculum that underlies the overt content of school syllabi. It is suggested that children from highly literate communities access this underlying curriculum tacitly, while many Indigenous and other children from less highly literate communities are effectively excluded. Four learning interactions are analysed to illustrate how patterns of pedagogic discourse in home and school can build both orientations to ways of meaning and children’s identities as successful or unsuccessful learners.