The teaching of English as an additional language or dialect (EALD) in Australia has been problematised partly due to teachers' limited understanding of learners' linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The gap could be potentially bridged with the integration of intercultural pragmatics (IP). Adopting a qualitative case study approach, this study…

In this paper, we build on southern and decolonial theories of multilingualism and invite a south-north conversation through a concept we propose as "reciprocal multilingual awareness." Reciprocity is a core value of southern societies that balance pluralities of episteme, language, and communality. Central features of southern…

Although "VCE English Language (EL)" has been offered for twenty years in Victoria, Australia, the subject, and especially students' experience of it, has had little evaluation. Using data from four surveys conducted across seven years with over 1500 Unit 3-4 "EL" students, augmented by VCAA enrolment data, a profile of…

The Language Strand of the Australian Curriculum: English (Australian Curriculum, Assessment & Reporting Authority (ACARA), 2016b) includes the sub-strand of "Language Variation and Change". This sub-strand is a marked space for discovery and discussion of the history and politics of language use. As such, this sub-strand points to…

In this article the authors report on the use of a scaffolding pedagogy (Gibbons, 2009), informed by systemic functional linguistics, to support the writing of English language learners in middle years curriculum learning. They focus on the work of one teacher and her English class across the first 18 months of a longitudinal design-based literacy…

The aim of this article is to foster dialogue between proponents of Alexander's notion of dialogic teaching and those working with educational linguistics--in particular those working with systemic functional theory. To this end, the article begins by highlighting important points of alignment between dialogic teaching and systemic theory: their…

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…

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…

Bilingual students have, at times, been thought to be at a disadvantage in learning mathematics because of an assumed interference between their two languages. Earlier research, confirmed again in this study, shows that this is a naive view to take. Although some bilingual students do have a harder time, others seem to be at an advantage. This…

Data are presented on some aspects of metalinguistic awareness in Dutch adults who emigrated to Australia at least 25 years ago. The findings show that the migrants do not differ significantly from a control group in the Netherlands, suggesting that first-language metalinguistic skills are extremely resistant to attrition. (Contains nine…