The power of the coloniser within colonial Australia is clear when we consider how central to the teaching and learning and schooling in Australia is the privileging of Standard Australian English. Prior to 1788, the peoples and the lands of this country were abound with languages. That was until the coloniser exerted their power and insisted on a…

The word "grammar" can be used in many ways: a general theory of language description; a theory for describing one language; a description of a particular language, either in the form of a book (an "English grammar") or the contents of that book; an ideal as opposed to actual description of a language; the properties and processes of a language…

A review of the changes in the English elementary and secondary school curricula in Canada from about l900 reveals two kinds of language knowledge: knowing "how" (knowledge measuring aspects of language performance) and knowing "that" (factual information about language). Until approximately l900, the belief existed that knowledge about the…

A three-week conference on the future of the English curriculum in elementary through postsecondary education is discussed. English students would study a variety of works. They would analyze the historical, cultural, and political dimensions of what they read and writing would be an integral part of the curriculum. (MLW)

The rationale behind the approach taken for an academic writing course, "Communicate in Writing: the English of Academic Study," is discussed. The first step was to provide a theoretical framework for the analysis of specimens of appropriate texts in functional terms. This analysis was made in order to identify the most frequently occurring…