This article examines the transformation of Australian EAL/D (English as an additional language/dialect) classrooms, transitioning from a monolingual focus on Standard Australian English (SAE) to embracing plurilingual and intercultural approaches in English language and literacy teaching and learning. Employing hermeneutic phenomenological and…

Education systems around the world have moved to develop literacy progressions that describe a sequence of development in oral language (talking and listening), reading/viewing and writing. In Australia, the National Literacy Learning Progression (ACARA, 2021) is designed to support students' literacy development across the years of primary and…

This essay uses storytelling as a mode of inquiry to explore how students with languages other than English and with diasporic experiences and identities negotiate a pathway for themselves in a relentlessly Anglophone environment. I share a story that provides a small window into the everyday work of an English teacher in a large, linguistically…

This paper presents data from an Australian high school classroom, investigating how students and their teacher negotiate readings of literature in order to arrive at meanings that are valued by subject English, as well as understood by the students. Subject English acts a vital agent for the transmission of both literacy and literary knowledge in…

Australia has recently moved from having curricula developed within individual states to national curricula, including in English. This move in Australia has coincided with debate over Michael Young's call for 'bringing knowledge back in'. English has historically been epistemologically unstable with an ever-contestable knowledge base, and this is…

This article takes up questions about knowledge and the school curriculum with respect to literary studies within subject English. Its intention is to focus on literary studies in English from the context of current waves of curriculum reform, rather than as part of the conversations primarily within the field of English, to raise questions about…

This review essay begins with the premise that we are all writers. However, for a number of reasons, many teachers struggle to identify as writers and teachers of writing. In the current environment, the need for schools to adopt pedagogical practices facilitating the development of disciplinary literacies means that teachers cannot avoid the task…

A comparative analysis of English in the primary curricula of England and Australia reveals markedly different policy perspectives of the functions and purposes of language, literacy and literature in these two Anglophone countries. Whilst the Australian curriculum incorporates 'the basics' with broader socio-linguistic views of language in an…

Teachers of subject English across Australia have been involved in a wide range of professional learning experiences to support implementation of the "Australian Curriculum: English" since its introduction in 2010. This article investigates the professional learning experienced by a small number of primary school teachers in two Catholic…

Despite the growing numbers of migrant students enrolling in Australian secondary schools, and an official acknowledgment of their complex support and learning needs, there has been little policy focus on the pedagogical changes that need to be made by teachers to accommodate these needs. There is also little understanding of the depth and…

This article was written as an auto ethnography, which allowed for a complex and personal exploration of professional standards, teachers' professional identities, neoliberal reforms, and approaches to literacy and creativity. This article reflects on a practicum which involved teaching Romeo and Juliet to two year nine classes at an all boys'…

The global neoliberal context and the emergence of new forms of 'governance by numbers' is now recognized as a ubiquitous educational phenomenon. In this context, large-scale assessments such as are used to justify marketised ideals of education that rely on comparison by numbers. In Australia, one of the key arguments for large scale standardised…

This paper uses a narrative constructed from diary entries made over the course of a year teaching English as a platform for examining some of the political, economic, educational and socio-cultural contexts into which the Digital Education Revolution (DER) was launched as policy. It analyses the underlying imperatives, components and balance of…

This article explores the use of digital poetry in a secondary English classroom and its implications for adolescents' multimodal composition and identity development. The authors--an English teacher and a library media specialist--collaborated over the course of three years to design, implement, and reiterate a digital poetry curriculum. Through…

Over the past twenty years much work has been done by teachers of secondary English to describe and make explicit the semiotic resources used to access and critique the discourses of powerful institutions such as schooling. At the same time, however, there has been a growing recognition that the rhetorical resources needed for adolescents to…