COMMENT

THE problem is huge: low levels of literacy among up to half of Australians. The solution: a new national school curriculum, literacy for the 21st century and, gasp, grammar.

Some say dropping grammar in the 1970s began the slide to today's textese - ''yng peeps cant rite proply''.

But many older Australians live with literacy levels lower than young people. The issue is the needs of people and the economy are changing and so is the curriculum.

Is boring old grammar the answer? Well, not really. It's a modern approach to grammar that's being introduced. And the ambitions are broad: lift children who slip through cracks in the education system to a level of reading and writing that reflects Australia's wealth.

Almost half of adult Australians have literacy skills lower than those needed to meet the demands of everyday life and work in a knowledge-based economy, Bureau of Statistics figures show.

Scarily, nearly two-thirds of those whose first language is not English scored below the minimum.

Even so, compared with other countries, Australia rates well on high-school students' scores in reading, maths and science tests. The problem is that achievement differs across the country - and between the disadvantaged and the better off. Last year's national tests reveal nearly one in three year 9 students in the Northern Territory is below the minimum standard in reading, writing, spelling and grammar and punctuation - they do not have rudimentary literacy skills. In NSW, about one in 10 students is at this low level.

The draft national curriculum puts grammar, spelling and punctuation at the centre of English teaching and learning. But why now?

Grammar was cut in the '70s because of a view it didn't help students' writing, said Dr Sally Humphrey from the University of Sydney's linguistics department.

''It was like, 'We're just going to give you building blocks; we're not going to show you how it works in text.''' The grammar starring in the new curriculum ''isn't a set of rules for 'correct' use'', she said, but ''a set of resources or a tool kit'' to be used according to the situation - whether it's texting, giving a presentation in class or writing a history essay.

''Each of those three situations would require different resources, different patternings of grammar, to do the job properly in that particular context,'' Dr Humphrey said. ''We want to give kids the grammatical resources for being able to do lots of different things.''

Reintroducing grammar was also part of an effort to strengthen the literacy of children from multilingual and disadvantaged backgrounds, said the lead adviser to the new English curriculum, Professor Peter Freebody from the University of Sydney. ''Our teachers and our systems are geared to doing well for the mainstream,'' he said. Imagine that school results, including literacy, are shaped like a tadpole. The fat body, representing the bulk of students, does well or quite well. But there's a long tail of people left behind.

Professor Freebody said students didn't learn to read by year 3 and then just build content knowledge. Different kinds of texts demanded different understandings, he said, ''and those things don't come free with the territory just because you're good at reading and writing when you're in year 3''.

While grammar's return may sound like going back to the '50s, the modern educator's knowledge of grammar, and its use for teaching ''reading and writing and enriching kids' understanding of content areas, that's not going backwards'', Professor Freebody said.

The new curriculum was arranged into three strands - language, literacy and literature - with grammar an ''integral component'' of each strand.

It's about ''letting kids in on the 'secret' of how good writers and good text producers do their work through the resources of language, through the resources of grammar - 'hey, this is how it's done!','' Dr Humphrey said. ''And that's an equity issue … Kids who haven't got access to middle-class homes and middle-class ways of using language that are valued in the schools, they do need [the workings of language] made explicit.''

The Australian Industry Group has highlighted the negative effect of low literacy and numeracy on productivity, safety and training. Group chief executive Heather Ridout said the new curriculum was ''a long overdue step, so we're strongly supportive of it''. Ms Ridout stressed the need for more specialist expertise in language across the board. ''We don't just not have it in schools; we don't have it in TAFE, in the VET sector, and we don't have it in the workforce.''

The draft curriculum is open for comment until May 23. You can find it at www.australiancurriculum.edu.au.