Developing L2 learners' productive mastery of vocabulary is a challenging task. Recent research has called for greater attention to understanding how receptive vocabulary may be transformed for productive use (Schmitt, 2019). Using a design-based research methodology, this study investigated adult ESL learners' productive oral vocabulary…

Purpose: This study aims to seek to demonstrate how explicit teaching of SFL metalinguistic and multimodal "grammars" enhanced 8-9-year-old children's deeper understanding and production of multimodal texts through critique of the construction of mini-documentaries about animals: the information, language of narration, composition of…

This article presents a qualitative study of the differential uptake of SFL-inspired metalanguage and SFL-based pedagogy by two senior secondary history teachers in Australia. The teachers were involved in design-based research aimed at improving disciplinary writing for high stakes examinations. While both attended the same training seminar and…

Although "VCE English Language (EL)" has been offered for twenty years in Victoria, Australia, the subject, and especially students' experience of it, has had little evaluation. Using data from four surveys conducted across seven years with over 1500 Unit 3-4 "EL" students, augmented by VCAA enrolment data, a profile of…

For most Anglophone countries, the history of grammar teaching over the past 50 years is one of contestation, debate and dissent: and 50 years on we are no closer to reaching a consensus about the role of grammar in the English/Language Arts curriculum. The debate has been described through the metaphor of battle and grammar wars (Kamler, 1995;…

In this article, the author reflects on keynotes by Debra Myhill and Wayne Sawyer in a search for ways with grammar. One of the keynote speakers, Debra Myhill, shared her research into teaching grammar that she had conducted in the UK. Myhill had asked a sample of teachers to follow a specified unit plan and had conducted pre- and post-testing to…

The inclusion of the Knowledge about Language strand in the recently introduced Australian Curriculum: English (AC:E) is both promising and challenging. For the first time, students across primary and secondary years of schooling are expected to develop "a coherent, dynamic, and evolving body of knowledge about the English language and how it…

The transmission and dissemination of knowledge in Aboriginal societies for the most part occurs orally in an Aboriginal language or in Aboriginal English. However, whilst support is given to speaking skills in Indigenous communities, in our education system less emphasis is given to developing equivalent oral communicative competence in Standard…

This paper presents research conducted with teachers and students in one year 7 and one year 8 English classroom that worked to support in school English language learning by calling on the resources and repertoires of plurilingual students. In this work, students and teachers were engaged as linguistic ethnographers of their own language…

We report in this paper on one aspect of a project designed to support teachers with the demands of the Language strand of the Australian Curriculum for English as this guides their development of a coherent account of knowledge about language and their implementation of this in building their students' literacy repertoires. We map the changing…

This study examines whether the process of interacting in a second language, versus observing others interact, may differentially affect learner's awareness of language. This study involved 26 university students of intermediate-level French. Two experimental groups, Interactors and Observers, engaged in three sessions of dyadic task-based…

This article presents the results of a study examining the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (CF) on the simple past tense and the impact beliefs may have on students' uptake of the feedback they receive. A seven-week study was carried out with 42 advanced EFL learners in Vientiane, Laos. Students' beliefs about written CF were first…

Teacher education is effective when pre-service teachers are able to transfer knowledge from content areas to practice. This study investigates the extent to which curriculum and assessment designs, along with teaching practices, supported pre-service teachers to transfer knowledge gained about language from a first-year course into a second-year…

This paper takes up the sea-faring metaphor at the centre of this special edition and asks what kinds of navigational tools (metalanguages) are necessary to steer English through the digital seas of contemporary communication. Much of this territory is yet to be mapped and the disciplinary "boat" is buffeted by contrary winds such as…

Five examples are presented of how native speakers may try to explain a grammatical point to a linguist, and in the absence of a suitable meta-language, adopt some "lateral" way of demonstrating the point. (five references) (Author/LB)