Purpose: Self-determination policies and the expansion of bilingual schooling across Australia's Northern Territory (NT) in the 1970s and 1980s provided opportunities for Aboriginal educators and communities to take control over schooling. This paper demonstrates how this occurred at Shepherdson College, a mission school turned government…

The case study in this article offers a descriptive account of challenges involved in teaching Australian Curriculum content in the common teaching context in remote communities where an Indigenous language is spoken as the everyday form of communication and students learn English in what is essentially a foreign language setting. An on-the-ground…

The term 'CLIL' has been used in Australia for over a decade, and the approach has helped to invigorate languages education in both primary and secondary schools. In particular, the flexibility of CLIL has led to a range of teachers accessing CLIL training: from teachers in structured programs where schools have committed to organisational change,…

Language immersion programs, which are a form of bilingual education, are shaped by multiple factors, including the specific characteristics of the region, the language, the community and the learners, as well as national and regional policies on language education. While the underdeveloped production skills of immersion students have been…

In this article we introduce the special issue: Language(s) across the curriculum in Australian schools. The special issue includes a focus on English as an additional language in mainstream classes, Indigenous education, heritage languages and foreign languages, and we give background to these different--though frequently overlapping--contexts.…

The current virtual and physical mobility of humans, ideas, knowledge and epistemologies has major implications for education, especially in settings where English is seen as the default medium of instruction. While diversity is inherent in mobility, English-only pedagogy is a denial of the richness and potential of diverse resources learners…

The global middle class (GMC) is a theoretical construct that seeks to globalise a set of attributes identified in studies of school choice in the global north, and to a lesser extent in developing nations in Asia. As theorised by Ball a mobile middle class with cosmopolitan sensibilities drives international education options in global cities.…

Although the importance of using students' home languages in education has been recognised for many years, home languages that are not official languages often struggle to find space in school curricula. This paper examines the ways that language-in-education policies influence the space available for non-official languages in the curriculum. It…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify and evaluate faculty and academic staff perceptions, experiences and expectations with respect to a voluntary, bilingual peer assisted learning (PAL) program, which operates for the benefit of students studying in the Faculty of Business at a regional Australian University.…

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…

This article seeks to provide a theoretical overview of bilingualism and discuss the key concepts and theories that inform classroom pedagogy with bilingual learners. Although some specific classroom strategies are introduced, the primary purpose is not to offer strategies, but rather to offer guiding principles based on theory and research to…

This study evaluated a bilingual intervention in the key learning area of mathematics. Nine typically developing Samoan-English students received math lessons in both Samoan and English. A control group of Samoan-English students received all lessons in English. The material covered and the amount of instruction was the same for each group. The…

In 2009, the then State Minister for Education in New South Wales, Verity Firth, announced a plan to introduce bilingual education in four primary schools across the state for the National Asian Languages and Studies in School Program (NALSSP) priority languages: Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Korean. This paper reports on one aspect of a…

In this volume a range of authors from different international contexts argue that the notion of communicative competence in English, hitherto largely referenced to metropolitan native-speaker norms, has to be expanded to take account of diverse contexts of use for a variety of purposes. It also discusses the popular belief that language and…

Although generally acknowledged as complex and multidimensional, bilingual education, when successful, plays an important role in maintaining and developing bilingualism, resulting in numerous benefits to those who undertake it. This essay will discuss the necessary components and principles of what is required to make a successful bilingual…