ABSTRACT
In the context of a national education system, plans for supporting the literacy acquisition of students who experience difficulties focus crucially on the institution of the school. Plans for individuals cannot be considered in isolation from what occurs generally in policy and practice in the school literacy curriculum. Policy is enacted most crucially in the classroom where pedagogy, including student grouping arrangements and the organisation of support for students’ literacy learning, can serve to include and motivate, or exclude and alienate, those who experience difficulties. Peer support and collaborative learning can, for example, be harnessed to facilitate many aspects of literacy acquisition, including reading comprehension, and the development of writing skills. Some literacy intervention programmes are designed to be used with individual students. The same arguments about employing literacy programmes to meet clearly identified learning needs whilst acknowledging the underlying theoretical assumptions apply whether an intervention is targeted at an individual or at a group.
