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…

Boys have long been positioned as marginalised participants in the education system, where categorical notions of boys as failing and girls as achieving persist. These ideas have played out strongly in western societies in the areas of literacy and reading, with a convergence of boys and literacy 'crises'. While it has been documented that some…

Neoliberal approaches to education policy have led to increases in teacher and student accountability, a preference for evidence-informed measurable outcomes and the standardisation of teaching and learning. Judgements of quality teaching and teacher practice are increasingly focused narrowly on students' testable knowledge and skills. This is…

While there have been various investigations into the impact of standardised testing in Australian schools over the decade since the introduction of NAPLAN testing, few of these have focused on the extended writing component in particular or on the experiences of secondary English teachers. These teachers are of interest because, despite…

English teachers often feel blamed for low results on high-stakes standardised literacy tests such as Australia's National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). Faced with pressure for their students to produce high scores, teachers can react by making changes to both content and strategies which result in a narrowing of curriculum…

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…

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 review essay begins with the premise that we are all writers. However, for a number of reasons, many teachers struggle to identify as writers and teachers of writing. In the current environment, the need for schools to adopt pedagogical practices facilitating the development of disciplinary literacies means that teachers cannot avoid the task…

This paper examines the ideological underpinnings of the English as an Additional Language (EAL) curriculum that drive the practice of secondary teachers in Victoria, Australia, and how students' needs and rights are seen and addressed in and through English discourse and hegemony. Bakhtin's (1986) dialogic approach and van Lier's (1996) AAA…

Prior scholarship suggests that many boys are disengaged from school-based literacy because they do not see its value or significance in their lives. In response, this study investigates the role of popular culture and new literacies in motivating adolescent boys within secondary English. Drawing on sociocultural approaches to literacy research,…

In this article, I report on the first stage of a whole school literacy project," Embedding Literacies in the KLAs" (ELK), which aims to support multilingual learners to access the literacies they need for high stakes curriculum learning. As it is "quality teaching" that has been found to have the greatest impact on student…

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…

The fundamental purpose of education is surely to ensure all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in the economic and creative life in both the local and global community. Where does literacy fit in this definition? Everything depends on how you define "literacy". This article argues that all too often…

This article was written as an auto ethnography, which allowed for a complex and personal exploration of professional standards, teachers' professional identities, neoliberal reforms, and approaches to literacy and creativity. This article reflects on a practicum which involved teaching Romeo and Juliet to two year nine classes at an all boys'…

Attainment of functional English literacy skills by all students has been a focus of Australian national policy since the 1989 Hobart Declaration (MCEETYA, 1989). This focus underpins current educational accountability policy enacted through the National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). The Adelaide and Melbourne Declarations…