How Language Creates a “Crisis”: An SFL Look at Media Stories about “Literacy Crisis”
By: Dr Helen Cozmescu
As language and literacy educators, we have closely monitored (and contributed) to the debate about the teaching of English. Last year, we published an article that drew on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough 1989) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Halliday, 1978; 1994) to examine how editorials published in The Age newspaper shape the debate in the field of early literacy (see Ahn et al., 2025).
CDA and SFL helped us trace patterns in the editorial headlines and examine word choices, quotations and evaluative language. The research revealed how editorial discourse actively produces polarised positions. We noted that patterns consistently simplified a complex pedagogical field into a binary opposition: phonics was framed as a scientific, urgent necessity, while balanced literacy was framed as vague, ideological, or responsible for failure.
For example, balanced literacy was repeatedly described through strongly evaluative terms such as “hopeless,” “useless,” and “a waste of time,” while phonics was associated with positively charged phrases such as “best practice,” “scientifically evidence-based,” and “what actually works.” The editorials also framed literacy as in a state of emergency through crisis-oriented headlines and lexical choices. Headlines described Victoria as producing “a generation of kids who can’t read,” and referred to literacy practices as “hopeless,” constructing failure as widespread and urgent. Across the editorials, phrases such as “one in four Victorian students who cannot read proficiently,” “school illiteracy,” and “students falling behind” reinforce a narrative of crisis and decline. This crisis language and moral judgement position phonics as the only rational response to a failing system, while balanced literacy is framed as an approach that must be abandoned.
It is not only through editorials about literacy that the narrative about literacy is shaped. Media, social media and advocacy groups also contribute to creating the current view of literacy education. In this blog post, we expand the critique we began in the aforementioned paper and include a piece written for The Conversation and an opinion piece published online for the Centre for Independent Studies. Despite different institutional characteristics, the versions of reality created by these two sources have reflected the same version of the world presented in The Age editorials. CDA and SFL again provided a framework for our analysis.
Let’s begin with The Conversation, which carries a particular claim to authority and credibility, making it reasonable to expect a high standard of intellectual rigour and transparency. When academic authority is used to frame contested issues, readers should be able to expect well-informed analysis and careful acknowledgement of uncertainty, competing perspectives and the limits of the evidence, with evidence, interpretation and advocacy carefully distinguished.
On 7th May, The Conversation published an article by Genevieve McArthur at the Australian Catholic University’s Australian Centre for the Advancement of Literacy. The author’s academic credentials confer a degree of epistemic authority, so a high standard of scholarly rigour is anticipated. A textual analysis of this article reveals the construction of a “literacy crisis”, reflecting the same position as The Age editorials. The crisis is established in the headline, which reads More than 1 in 3 Australian adults are functionally illiterate. How can we fix this? A highly assertive opening statement follows: “Australians spend more money per capita on education than most comparable nations. We should have high levels of literacy – but we don’t.” A normative expectation is created using the modal word “should”, constructing a causal relationship between expenditure and expectation. The conjunction “but” then explicitly signals Australia’s problem, that is, Australia spends a lot of money on education yet fails to produce the corresponding literacy outcomes. This is rhetorically powerful, as readers are presented with a relatively simple trajectory. The trajectory goes like this: Australia spends money on education; therefore, there is the expectation that literacy rates will be high; literacy rates are disappointing; this is a national failure. The phrase “national disgrace” is used to suggest that this perceived failure is a moral problem requiring political action.
As expected in such articles, statistics provide empirical evidence. “44%”, “9.4 million”, “one in three”, “millions of Australians”. These numbers create a strong impression of objectivity and legitimise the discourse. However, when we examine the numbers, we see that they do not represent the clear-cut evidence they are intended to convey. For example, The Conversation article is centred around a 2013 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which presents results from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).
The Conversation article states,
“It found 44% of Australian adults have literacy skills below the ‘necessary proficiency level for navigating modern work and life’. In other words, they were functionally illiterate.”
The percentage quoted refers to the number of adults at different levels as defined by the OECD Report. The OECD Report presents statistical categories, described as 6 levels, with Levels 1-5 and below Level 1. At Level 1, adults can locate information in relatively short texts and perform basic tasks. At Level 2, adults can integrate information from two or more sources, compare and contrast information, and carry out relatively straightforward inferences. At Level 3, adults can understand and respond appropriately to dense or lengthy texts, identify and evaluate information, make inferences, and perform multi-step operations. At Levels 4–5, adults can deal with increasingly complex and sophisticated texts and information. Level 2 is particularly significant. In Australia, 44% of adults are at Level 2 or below. The report provides a description of Level 2 (which makes up the larger part of the 44%)
At this level, the medium of texts may be digital or printed, and texts may comprise continuous, non-continuous, or mixed types. Tasks at this level require respondents to make matches between the text and information, and may require paraphrasing or low-level inferences. Some competing pieces of information may be present. Some tasks require the respondent to
• cycle through or integrate two or more pieces of information based on criteria;
• compare and contrast or reason about information requested in the question; or
• navigate within digital texts to access and identify information from various parts of a document. (OECD, 2013).
Describing individuals at Level 2 as functionally illiterate is unjustified. Many adults whose proficiency sits at this level may experience difficulty when required to integrate multiple pieces of information, evaluate evidence, or make complex inferences from long or dense texts. To label these people as “functionally illiterate” is a much stronger, stigmatising and more emotionally loaded term than “below OECD Level 3 proficiency. Inflating “not highly proficient” into “cannot functionally read” is misleading. In fact, in a Parliamentary Report by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training, Level 2, is described as equivalent to Level 2 in the Australian Core Skills Framework (ACSF), and considered as the level required to meet the basic demands of work and life.
The 44% of those claimed to be functionally illiterate is then presented as 9.4 million Australians. No explanation is provided as to how this number was reached. However, the author does qualify to some extent the claim they make by stating “If we assume 44% Australians adults are still functionally illiterate, this means around 9.4 million people lack the skills…”. The grammatical modality used here acknowledges uncertainty, but the broader rhetorical structure simultaneously suppresses its significance. Readers are more likely to remember the figure of 9.4 million than the words “if we assume”.
Additionally, the aforementioned parliamentary report presents the PIAAC data for adults aged 15–74, rather than the 16–65 age range used in the OECD international reporting. It reports that 3.7 per cent (620,000) of Australians aged 15 to 74 years had literacy skills at Below Level 1, 10 per cent (1.7 million) were at Level 1, and 30 per cent (5 million) were at Level 2. Taken together, this means that approximately 43.7 per cent, or 7.3 million Australians, were at or below Level 2. This is around 2 million fewer people than the 9.4 million cited in The Conversation. The difference is therefore worth examining, particularly because the parliamentary report identifies Level 2 as the level considered necessary to meet the basic demands of work and life. Rather than simply treating the 44 per cent figure as evidence that almost half of Australian adults are “functionally illiterate”, the different age ranges, population estimates and proficiency descriptions warrant closer attention.
Similar misreading of data can be found in the reference to NAPLAN. Grounded in policy and media discourses surrounding educational accountability and national testing, the statement “NAPLAN results indicate one in three primary and secondary students do not meet basic national standards in reading and writing” is not quite accurate. It mixes the old NAPLAN reporting system with the one introduced in 2023. Since 2023, NAPLAN no longer reports students against national minimum standards. Before 2023, the dominant distinction was "above" or "below the national minimum standard." Since 2023, students are described as Exceeding, Strong, Developing, or Needs additional support. The new categories construct different identities for students. "Developing" suggests progression and growth, whereas "below the minimum standard" implied failure to reach a threshold. However, the author combines the two lower categories and reports that "one in three students are not meeting expectations," producing a discourse of educational crisis, even though the reporting framework has changed.
Having established the narrative of crisis, the article then constructs a preferred solution to the literacy problem it has diagnosed. A particular pedagogical discourse is presented, which includes “evidence-informed literacy assessment, explicit instruction and targeted intervention” and “phonics” and “morphology”. These lexical choices, which are firmly grounded in the technical terminology of the field, function as a form of legitimation without explicitly establishing the evidentiary basis for why these approaches should be privileged over alternative pedagogical approaches. The specialised educational terminology provides authority, as the article positions its proposed solution as objective, scientific and evidence-based, potentially narrowing the space for debate about the complexity of literacy acquisition and the range of factors that contribute to literacy outcomes.
In contrast to technical language, the article is laden with words and phrases that encode attitude and evaluation - “national disgrace”; “highly effective solution”; “very heartening”; “wonderful job”; “extremely hard work”; “far more complex” and “biggest literacy challenge”. In doing so, the author moves between the voice of the researcher who provides evidence, the advocate who evaluates the literacy crises and the policy expert who prescribes solutions. These voices are sometimes blended together, making it difficult for the reader to distinguish empirical claims from professional judgement.
Our analysis does not negate the need to attend to adult literacy, but it does point out a narrow view of literacy reflected in this article and common in media discourse. Literacy is presented as a functional and economically necessary competence, one which should be quantifiable. Literacy is framed in terms of work, everyday life, technology, health, finances and economic productivity. Less attention is given to cultural participation, identity, pleasure, critical citizenship, creativity, access to literature, and linguistic diversity. In fact, linguistic diversity is often erased from the discourse. This was certainly the case in this article where no distinction was made between those whose first language is English and those who come to English as a second or additional language. Australia has a large immigrant population. Some adults score lower on English literacy tests because English is not their first language and/or they arrived in Australia as adults. These adults may be literate in another language. The article frames low English literacy entirely as educational failure, which oversimplifies the issue.
The same ideology that framed The Age articles and The Conversation article can be found in opinion pieces produced by think tanks, such as the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS). Such texts can be analysed as policy advocacy discourse, which is mediated by the ideological and policy mission of CIS. A recent online opinion piece by Trisha Jha, published on July 29, 2026, was titled “Ben Carroll’s record on schools shows he is not a typical Labor lefty”. In this positive evaluation of Victorian Premier and former Victorian Education Minister, Ben Carroll, evaluative language, presuppositions, modality and strategic lexical choices construct Ben Carroll as a principled reformer while simultaneously legitimising a particular educational ideology.
Throughout the article, Carroll is represented through highly positive lexical choices. For example, "quiet revolution", "what truly matters", "held up", "prepared", "key principles", "stare down opposition". These expressions position Carroll as courageous, evidence-driven and morally committed to education. This language attributes agency and leadership to Carroll. As with The Conversation article, scientific terminology performs an important ideological function, framing certain pedagogical approaches as objective truths rather than contested educational philosophies. The notion of evidence is used for legitimation. For example, "the evidence is in", "science of reading", "science of learning", "body of knowledge", "evidence-based teaching practice". Alternative educational perspectives become implicitly irrational or anti-scientific, as demonstrated in our analysis of The Age editorials that referenced Balanced Literacy.
This process of creating ideological positions that are then presented as common sense can be described as naturalisation (Fairclough, 1989). The CIS opinion piece uses presuppositions to contribute to the ideological positioning. Many claims are presented as though they are already accepted facts. For example, "which should sit at the heart of education policy." This presupposes there is agreement about education's primary purpose. Similarly, "declaring the reading wars over" presupposes there is now consensus. In reality, debates around literacy instruction continue internationally. The use of modality also assists the ideological frame and strengthens the authority of the discussion. For example, "the evidence is in", "will become", "will elevate", "is informed". The absence of hedging helps claims appear objective rather than interpretive. Additionally, intertextual references draws legitimacy from numerous external voices - The Age Schools Summit, Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO), cognitive science, educational psychology, Jason Clare, Susan Close and CIS.
Like the other texts examined, the opinion piece repeatedly frames education in terms of measurable outcomes. Students should leave school with "fundamental knowledge and skills". Success is evaluated through phonics checks, evidence and instructional consistency, aligning with broader trends emphasising accountability, performance metrics and evidence-based governance.
CDA seeks to make explicit the voices heard in a discourse and in turn the voices silenced. In the articles examined, politicians supporting structured literacy, AERO, CIS, cognitive scientists and educational psychologists feature prominently. Classroom teachers, literacy researchers with different theoretical perspectives, students, advocates for differentiation, or those who recognise plurilingual perspectives are not included.
Our analysis shows that linguistic moves – crisis metaphors, selective sourcing of expert voices, and language that presents certain positions as commonsense and unquestionable help to shape the perception of English education and literacy more generally. The collective analysis illustrates how educational debates are never solely about pedagogy, but are grounded in whose knowledge counts, whose voices are heard, what constitutes legitimate evidence and who has authority to define educational problems. We argue that these media texts play a powerful role in shaping public understanding of literacy education not by neutral reporting, but by constructing a particular version of reality through language.
Source
Ahn, H., Cozmescu, H., & Yeo, M. Y. F. (2025). Discursive constructions of a “literacy crisis” in Australian newspaper editorials. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 33(75). https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.33.896
References
Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. Longman.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. Edward Arnold.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). Introduction to functional grammar. Edward Arnold.
House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training. (2022). Don't take it as read: Inquiry into adult literacy and its importance. Parliament of Australia.
OECD (2013), OECD Skills Outlook 2013: First Results from the Survey of Adult Skills, OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264204256-en
About the author
Helen Cozmescu is a Senior Lecturer in Language and Literacies Education at the University of Melbourne, where she teaches in the Master of Education course. Her research interests include critical literacies, early years education, and the teaching of First Nations texts. Her current projects investigate teacher professional development in literacy education, dialogic encounters with picture books, and phonics and pronunciation. Helen’s research is situated within sociocultural perspectives and employs qualitative methodologies. Her work bridges academic research and professional practice, with a particular focus on working with teachers and translating research into resources for classroom practice.