This paper illustrates how spaces were created for children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to emotionally engage in traditional Chinese literacy practices in a primary school in Sydney, Australia. The ethnographic data allow insight into how ordinary activities organised around character tracing and writing can…

This research investigates a cohort of bilingual Chinese teachers' use of a multimodal approach in their Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) teaching. The data include the participants' CFL teaching practices and their reflections on multimodal teaching as recorded in their theses and a focus group discussion. The theoretical underpinning of this…

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…

Learning to read and write the Japanese language is not an easy task. For the non-Japanese speaker this can be a struggle and a challenge. Some schools in Western Australia offer children the opportunity to learn Japanese as a foreign language. Consequently, Japanese as a foreign language unit is offered to all undergraduate students in Education.…

The idea of "powerful knowledge" has been developed by Young (2008; 2010; 2012; 2013), who argues for a subject-based curriculum. This notion has created widespread debate within the fields of sociology of knowledge and the sociology of the curriculum. Young's work takes a social realist perspective to describing the academic disciplines…

One of the thorniest aspects of teaching languages is developing students' vocabulary, yet it is impossible to be "an accurate and highly communicative language user with a very small vocabulary" (Milton, 2009, p. 3). Nation (2006) indicates that more vocabulary than previously thought is required to function well both at spoken and…

In the Australian education context, there are typically two cohorts of language learners at the secondary school level, those who commence their study of the target language early in their primary schooling (early starters), and those who commence their study later, at the beginning of secondary school (late starters). The two groups may have…

This article presents the results of a study examining the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (CF) on the simple past tense and the impact beliefs may have on students' uptake of the feedback they receive. A seven-week study was carried out with 42 advanced EFL learners in Vientiane, Laos. Students' beliefs about written CF were first…

This report presents the "English Language Proficiency" (ELP) and Employability Framework", which has been designed to inform and support higher education institutions' (HEIs) policies and practices on ELP and graduate employability. The "Framework" was developed through a review of the national and international…

This longitudinal qualitative study investigates how cultural experiences of staying in Japan may affect attitudes and self-directed learning of kanji among learners of Japanese as a foreign language. Six beginner learners pursued semester-long weekly kanji learning sessions and their diachronic behaviours were observed and recorded for attitudes…

A sample of elementary school-and high school-age deaf students in special education programs in the Australian state of Queensland using Australasian Signed English (ASE) took the Test of Syntactic Abilities (Quigley, Steinkamp, Power, & Jones, 1978) and wrote a story in response to a wordless picture sequence. Several analyses of the…

Premature discontinuation rates among second language students in New Zealand are higher than for most other subjects in secondary schools, although this phenomenon has not given rise to a great deal of debate within the NZ language teaching community. In a recent study into premature discontinuation in Christchurch, NZ, the most frequently cited…

Suggests that use of grammatical and lexical features of non-standard English varieties may contribute to the confusion of international students at Australian universities when discerning the intended meaning of written words. Suggests that the establishment of assessment criteria may simplify assessment difficulties and urges that efforts be…

The historical development of written Japanese has resulted in an extremely complex system. Modern Japanese is usually written in logosyllabic script consisting of a combination of "kanji," the Chinese characters, and "kana," the Japanese syllables originally formed from them. There are two types of "kana," the…

One of the difficulties secondary non-Chinese-speaking background (NCSB) learners are facing is to remember the characters learned in order to recall them when necessary. The traditional way of teaching secondary NCSB learners to remember Chinese characters is through mere repetition, e.g. writing out each single character by following its stroke…