In this paper, we discuss the place of plurilingualism in Language and Literacy Education. The article problematises English-only, monolingual-centric assumptions upon which much of Australia's current literacy education policy discourse has been based, to instead advance "pluriliteracies" as an alternate, more generative lens through…

Languages teachers are all aware of the significant advantages and benefits learning a language provides, and believe in the importance of second language acquisition. However, why is it that languages teachers need to justify learning a second language and work hard to encourage more students to see the importance of learning a language and to…

In this article we introduce the special issue: Language(s) across the curriculum in Australian schools. The special issue includes a focus on English as an additional language in mainstream classes, Indigenous education, heritage languages and foreign languages, and we give background to these different--though frequently overlapping--contexts.…

Many people imagine dictionaries to be bulky tomes that are hard to lift and are only useful for quick translations or to check the meaning or spelling of difficult words. This paper aims to dispel that myth and show how online versions of monolingual English learners' dictionaries (MELDs) can be used pedagogically to engage students in academic…

This paper aims to (re)engage ESL with the broader literacy debate, by calling for a better recognition of what literacy means for second language learners within contemporary Australian education systems, and acknowledging the specialist professional knowledge that ESL teachers bring to the mainstream. The literacy debate that has shaped so much…

The Northern Territory's bilingual education programmes, in which local Australian Aboriginal languages and English were used side by side in a minority of Aboriginal primary schools in remote northern Australia, came into being in 1973 under the broader federal government policy imprimatur of "self-determination" for Indigenous…

This paper considers psycholinguistic aspects of bilingualism from two perspectives: the psychology of the individual and social psychology. The linguistic development of children is described and research is presented that compares bilingual and monolingual children with respect to cognitive development. The emotional consequences of parents'…