While there is much that Australia has done well with respect to languages education, many problems still persist in terms of mainstream provision of quality languages programs, attaining real outcomes and gains in language learning, and in relation to retention of students studying languages through to the senior years of school. The success of…

In his examination of successful innovation and change in education in many settings, Fullan (2001) identifies the three broad options for effecting change that public authorities have at their disposal. They can seek to bring about change through imposing accountability (system-wide or targeted), or through providing incentives (either…

Discusses a research project that aims to study the grammatical development of two groups of language immersion students, one that is participating in an Internet project involving collaboration with learners in France and Canada, and another that is exposed to the teaching of grammar that has been integrated with content area studies. (Author/VWL)

Provides a dialogue that is a series of semi-structured interviews with a language educator who taught French for 4 years before becoming a full-time mother. After 9 years, she became involved in teaching in a French immersion program in Canada. The interviewer is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia. (Author/VWL)

Describes the German partial immersion program at St. Peters Lutheran College in Brisbane, Australia. The study confirms that content-based partial immersion teaching produces effective, communicative production in the language of immersion, and confident, competent language speakers even when the learners are quite young. (Author/VWL)

Presents data on interlanguage development obtained from a storytelling exercise using a picture storybook for children in an Australian French-English immersion program. (Author/VWL)

This article is the second part of a report on research that examined immersion language teachers' strategies to modify their speech in order to maintain use of the target language. As described in the first part in "Babel," Volume 40, Number 2 (Veque, 2005), this classroom-based research, undertaken at Methodist Ladies College (MLC) in…

Provides observations from a study of an attempt to introduce Indonesian in an Australian high school. Data collection was done through interviews and classroom observations. Classroom test results were used to compare achievement in subject content and language learning. Findings are discussed. (Author/VWL)