When an endangered or minority language is spoken by children and taught in schools, both oral and literacy skills are crucial for continued language maintenance. In school settings, literacy skills are often prioritised to support the transition to second language literacy, and rich oral language development is overlooked. This paper presents a…

While teachers of English have long recognised the vital role they play in developing students' knowledge and effective use of language, the emergence of the Australian Curriculum: English has led to a great deal of discussion concerning the representation of language and the type of meta-language needed to share understandings of literacy and…

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…

In this article, I report on the first stage of a whole school literacy project," Embedding Literacies in the KLAs" (ELK), which aims to support multilingual learners to access the literacies they need for high stakes curriculum learning. As it is "quality teaching" that has been found to have the greatest impact on student…

Repeated assessments of literacy skills have shown that Aboriginal students do not achieve at the same level as their non-Aboriginal peers. Many Aboriginal students speak Aboriginal English, a dialect different from the Standard Australian English used in schools. Research shows that it is crucial for educators in bidialectal contexts to be aware…

There are now significant numbers of children who speak a language other than English when they enter the formal school system in Australia. Many of these children come from a language background that is entirely different from the school language. Many Indigenous children, however, come from creole-speaking backgrounds where their home language…

Curriculum guidelines, including the emergent Australian curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2009-10), indicate expectations that teachers will support their students' interpretation and creation of multimodal texts. However, English curriculum guidelines are yet to advise on a detailed metalanguage to…

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…

The term "multiliteracies" was coined by the New London Group in 1996 to describe the emergence of new literacies and changing forms of meaning making in contemporary contexts of increased cultural and linguistic diversity. The proliferation of powerful, multimodal literacies means that previous conceptions of literacy as "writing…

Linguistics is a subject that has remained largely confined to the academy, rather than being integrated into school curricula. This is unfortunate but not surprising, as although some teacher education programs include courses on linguistics, it is not comprehensively integrated into teacher education, so it is largely absent from the curriculum.…

In this paper I argue that an understanding of the role of language and literacy in learning disciplinary content should be a key component of the pedagogical content knowledge covered in the preparation of high school teachers. I identify three components of this "literacy pedagogical content knowledge" (LPCK): knowledge about how…

Reports on research that was undertaken as part of a Bachelor of Teaching Honours degree program where researchers looked at a Japanese program in a Tasmanian government primary school. Describes the strategies that were used to develop learners' metalinguistic awareness. (Author/VWL)

This paper reports on a sociocultural study conducted in a Catholic primary school in the Australian outback and provides insights into how policy related to Languages Other Than English (LOTE) programmes is implemented in a specific location and interwoven within the literacy practices of children, parents and teachers. A case study that tracked…