Getting it write : a comparison of whole language and genre appraoches to literacy education

This project examined the effects of a Whole Language teaching program and a Genre based teaching program on the written products of 72 Senior Primary School students aged from 11 to 13 years. More specifically it attempted to expand the theories of researchers such as Graves (1983), Britton, Burgess, Martin, McLeod and Rosen (1975), Cambourne (1984). Martin and Rothery (1980), and Christie (1985). and to document the comparison in teaching pedagogy of both writing theories and the effects the programs had on the writing skills of young students across Narrative and Factual genres. The texts were scored for their bulk and density as well as schematic elements as developed for this research, with Multivariate Analyses of Variance being used to analyse the results. It was concluded that: for Narrative, both program groups became more competent writers of the Narrative genre, however, the Whole Language writers produced significantly longer and lexically more dense texts overall than the Genre writers; but for the Explanation genre, the Genre program writers had greater mastery of the genre Explanation at both pre- and post-intervention with lexical density also increasing.