Cirrus@Austlit

'Those of us who teach literature at universities in Western Australia may soon find ourselves before a new cohort of first-year undergraduates, the majority of whom have not read a poem or play since the age of fifteen. Or rather, it’s now possible to imagine a scenario in which an increasing share of Australian high school graduates have not in their last two years of study been assigned any poetry or drama—there is of course nothing to prevent them from having read such texts in their spare time, other than the usual distractions of homework, co-curriculars, adolescent ennui and social media. If this scenario eventuates, one of the straws that broke the camel’s back will have been an ostensibly minor change to the structure of the Western Australian Certificate of Education [WACE] English examinations: this change stipulates that, from 2023, the two written, visual, or multimodal stimulus texts provided in the unseen section of the examination cannot be works of poetry or drama (15). Works of poetry and drama can, of course, still be assigned as set texts at a teacher’s discretion, and knowledge of these texts may be deployed by students in the second section of the examination. But this change not only removes a significant incentive to do so—previously, assigning poetic and dramatic texts would have prepared students to encounter them in the unseen section—it in fact disincentivises doing so, as assigning written or visual texts in any other genre would serve the dual purpose of familiarising students with the kind of material they may encounter in the unseen section. By the same logic, this change may have knock-on effects for the subject Drama, where students routinely put their interpretive skills to use as actors. Poetry, on the other hand, remains a mode of writing only rarely encountered in any other subject. The rationale for this change seems to have been that it might help differentiate examinations in English from those in the alternative course, Literature, for this split is a key component of WA’s curricular structure, as it is in other states. The hope seems to have been that changes to the examination might induce a few students in English to jump ship to the Literature course (in recent years there have been approximately six times as many students enrolled in the former as there were in the latter). More likely, given that undergraduates who took English in WA secondary schools vastly outnumber those who took Literature even in our discipline’s undergraduate classrooms, is that a growing fraction of our matriculants will lack more than a rudimentary familiarity with these genres of writing.'  (Introduction)