and Learning in the 1980s: Themes, schemes, and schisms: Part One

In Australia, language and academic skills advisers have been responsible for designing and delivering programs to develop tertiary students ‟ academic writing since the early 1980s. Thirty years on, the Association for Academic Language and Learning (AALL) has begun compiling a searchable database of Australian publications in this field. I am engaged in a historical review of this literature, with the aim of orienting readers to the philosophical, pedagogical and professional issues that have occupied academic language and learning (ALL) practitioners in our region. This article, in two parts, surveys the literature of the formative decade of the 1980s which shaped a distinctive Australian approach to ALL, with a focus on mediating the epistemologies, purposes, forms and conventions of the disciplines, as revealed in their texts. Part One traces the development of ALL from its origins, often in counselling services, charged with mediating problems attributed to the expansion of Australian tertiary education by remediating its “non