Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are affected by chronic middle ear infection or otitis media from infancy that has a negative impact on development of listening and communication skills. Deficits in these skills are often not detected until school-age when the opportunity for early intervention is lost. Primary health and early…

An increase in migration of Sudanese and South Sudanese people to Australia due to civil unrest in their home country has increased the numbers of Sudanese students at university. Migrant experiences, particularly those of English as a second language, can impact negatively on education and learning. Inconsistencies between student scores on…

Chinese is not only a tonal but also a visual language represented by tens of thousands of characters which are pictographic in nature. This presents a great challenge to learners whose mother tongue is alphabetical-based such as English. To assist English-speaking background learners to learn Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) well, a good…

The main objective of this study is to determine the knowledge, education and attitudes of Chinese, Indian and Arab speaking students in Australia towards the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) test. A questionnaire was administered to 200 students at six university language centers to investigate their overall response towards…

In the era of quality assurance (QA), close scrutiny of assessment practices has been intensified worldwide across the board. However, in the Australian context, trends in QA efforts have not reached the field of modern/foreign languages. This has largely resulted in leaving the establishment of language proficiency benchmarking up to individual…

This article reports some outcomes from an exploratory study that compares children diagnosed with ADHD and without language impairment with typically developing children for aspects of language use. Discourse analysis based on a systemic functional linguistics approach is applied to spoken and written samples from three different text types that…

Investigates effect of task type on resultant candidate discourse and input of the interlocutor. The experimental design ensured an information gap in one of the interview tasks for prospective immigrants to Australia. Findings indicate that candidate discourse differs in quantity and quality between situations when an information gap exists and…

Identifies six approaches to teaching English practiced by Australian teachers: basic literacy, language meaning, oral language, creative performance, passive listening, and literary discussion. (HOD)