Chris, this is David Hornsby. We taught in the same school way back in the late 60s. Sorry mate, you didn't get it then, and you still don't get it. If our English teaching is based on sand, how do you explain the fact that the OECD has just (again) ranked Australia 5th in literacy (see http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/09/australia-ranks-fifth-in-literacy-and-13th-in-numeracy-says-oecd/print). We're always in the top 10 countries and we're way ahead of the USA and the UK (who use approaches similar to those you're advocating). Chris, we need to look at ALL the evidence! Cheers.

Reply to David Hornsby
We taught at the same school in Fitzroy over 40 years ago. My reported facts stay as they are because they are (as always) factual and verifiable. You really have assumed that you actually know what I am currently recommending. Like you so emphatically advised, we really do need to need to examine ALL of the evidence. Might I also suggest that we keep both eyes open as well?

A well-reasoned article, Chris, with one major English communication problem, however.
Your continuous use of split infinitives!
I would have thought that a specialist teacher, especially one who expresses so well on the problems exisitng with the teaching of correct English use, would get one element of that use, albeit one with its origins on Latin grammar, correct.

A reply to Ponder: I you don't got your grammar right then you don't got nuthin' right. I do apologise for split infinitives. I use them so much in my speech that I don't notice them in my writing, and this despite training in Latin some 55 years ago. Perhaps we could argue that English is still alive and developing but that Latin has long since suffered its rigor mortis. I hope you forgive the blatant excuse with my apology.

When I left industry in 1998 there was a perceptible problem with getting young workers who were literate to safe standards, hence the firms for which I worked tended to hire older people because they had an acceptable standard of written and spoken English.

Sydney University had a remedial English course for 1st year undergraduates in the '80s and it was the practice in some disciplines to allow students to read their essays/tutorial papers to the person who was in the unfortunate position of marking them, because their writing was indecipherable.

One only has to visit various Australian forums on the net to see the appalling standard of the English used.

"your" for "you're" being so common as to be almost normal usage.

Listen, youse! Weall went to school, din we? Weall got bits of paper that said we were illiterate, din we?

I studded Shakespeare and Ican recite lions from his playze. So there. "Weall fight them on the beaches!" Howzat?

Schools shood be banned. Teachers aren't fardinkumology! They only do it for the hols. Tke the holdiaze away and teachers wood go the way of the dodo, a lizard in the Doldrums or Galipoli or somepink.

I am thinkn of studying a Doctorator, youno, a PHddiddly squat at Sydeny Uni! Being called 'docta' must be edigyfying. I might study Fizziks or Pornographic Symbolzm. Several unis are fightin to get me. It's called presstig.

Aisle keep in touch. Up your nostril.

Darrell!