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…

Reporting on a qualitative study, informed by Australian Government Indigenous education and literacy policies, this article unveils early career teacher reflections about infusing Aboriginal perspectives in the English curriculum using multimodal texts. Forging a praxis between the Aboriginal practice of yarning (Bessarab & Ng'andu, 2010) and…

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…

Is digital fiction worthy of serious consideration as a literary text and does it have a place in the English classroom, particularly in light of the establishment of a stand-alone Literature subject as part of the Years 11-12 English program in the Australian Curriculum? To answer these questions this paper briefly looks at the development and…

This paper explores connections and disconnects between identity and literacy for a group of adolescents in a second level classroom setting. We build on Mead and Vygotsky's conceptualisations of identity formation as an intricate emergent happening constantly formed/reformed by people, in their interactions with others [Mead, G. H. 1999.…

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…

This article uses documentary evidence to review debates on spoken language and learning in the UK over recent decades. It argues that two different models of talk have been at stake: one that wishes to "correct" children's spoken language and another than encourages children to use talk to learn and represent their worlds. The article…

This article explores the use of Bourdieusian analysis for examining how policy and practice interact in the teaching of English and therefore in the development of children's language and literacy, in particular how. Bourdieusian analysis uncovers the ways in which teachers' practice has been influenced unconsciously by centralised shaping of the…

Fiji is a multicultural and multilingual community and English is one language taught in Fiji schools. This study aimed to describe the English language proficiency of Fiji primary school students. Direct assessment measures of 75 students' English language (listening and speaking) and literacy (reading and writing) skills were obtained (Year 1: n…

In this paper we focus on one facet of Asia literacy and examine the potential of intercultural understanding through two films about Asians in Australia, as the basis for exploring Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia "inside" and not through the more accepted mode of "outside" the nation. In doing so we foreground how…

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…

A yearlong classroom-based intervention was designed to explore the reading-writing connection in second-language literacy by examining whether the development of reading improves writing and vice versa. Middle school learners of English as a foreign language (N = 300) in South Korea were assigned to three treatments that involved extensive…

I begin with an account of my own observation of an English lesson taught by one of my student teachers using a teaching resource, "The Island," that I used myself as a new teacher more than 20 years ago and of my own responses on finding it transformed by two decades of change in educational policy and practice. It has become almost a…

In recent years, the Education for All movement has focused more intensely on the quality of education, rather than simply provision. Many recent and current education quality interventions focus on literacy, which is the core skill required for further academic success. Despite this focus on the quality of literacy instruction in developing…