The influences of Bislama on lexical choices in children's written English: A case study in Vanuatu

In Vanuatu, there have been concerns that Bislama (the national language of Vanuatu and a creole with an adapted English vocabulary) hinders English language learning. Consequently, previous language policy restricted the use of Bislama in schools. The findings from this study offer significant insights and implications that may assist teachers with using Bislama in their classrooms in a way that furthers English language and literacy development. This research is timely because the Vanuatu Government have recently implemented a new language policy that allows the vernacular island languages and Bislama to be used as a linguistic resource in schools.

Team building activities in dance and discoveries from reflective essays

The purpose of this study was to determine if using team building activities within a university Latin dance course enhances cohesion. Students (N=30) completed the Group Environment Questionnaire (GEQ; Carron, Widmeyer, & Brawley, 1985), which measures group integration (individuals’ perceptions of the closeness, similarity, and bonding within the group as a whole) and individual attractions to the group in terms of both task and social cohesion. Students also completed an evaluation of the team building activities and wrote reflective essays about their experiences in the course. The course consisted of twenty 90-minute classes. In the third class students were provided an information sheet describing the research. In the fourth class the students completed a demographics questionnaire and the GEQ. The students completed the GEQ again during the ninth class. In classes 10 to 14 team building activities took up roughly the first third of each class. The students completed the GEQ again in classes 15 and 20. In class 16 the students completed the evaluation. The reflective essays were submitted two weeks after the last class. There were no significant differences across time in social cohesion. Group integration task, however, was significantly higher at times 3 and 4 compared to time 1. Students agreed that the team-building activities helped to bond class members, and felt it was valuable for these activities to be included in the unit in the future. The reflective essays indicated the students felt the team building activities improved social factors, and interpersonal, dance, and personal mental skills.

A comparison of motivation to learn English between English major and non-English major students in a Vietnamese university

Despite the plethora of literature examining higher education students’ motivation to learn a second language, it is not known if students who choose to study English as their major differ from those who are required to study English as the minor component of their wider degree. Drawing on self-determination theory, this paper reports on the findings of a quantitative study designed to investigate the types of motivation demonstrated by English major (n=180) and non-English major students (n=242), and their levels of effort expended in learning English in a Vietnamese university. The findings revealed that both groups demonstrated high levels of motivation to learn English to prepare for their future profession. English major students felt more intrinsically motivated and less obligated to learn English. In addition, for both groups, intrinsically motivated students invested the highest levels of effort in learning English. This paper argues that it is imperative for lecturers to foster students’ intrinsic aspirations to learn English to improve the quality of the teaching and learning of English in Vietnamese higher education.

Orientations to Critical Literacy for English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) learners: A case study of four teachers of senior English

Recently, the debate around critical literacy has dissipated as literacy education agendas and attendant policies shift to embrace more hybrid approaches to the teaching of senior English. This paper reports on orientations towards critical literacy as expressed by four teachers of senior English who teach culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Teachers’ understandings of critical literacy are important given the emphasis on Critical and Creative Thinking as well as Literacy as General Capabilities underpinning the Australian Curriculum. Using critical discourse analysis and Janks' (2010) Synthesis Model of Critical Literacy, interview and classroom data from four teachers of English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) learners in two high schools were analysed for the ways these teachers constructed critical literacy in their talk and practice. While all four teachers indicated significant commitment to critical literacy as an approach to English language teaching, their understandings varied. These ranged from providing access to powerful genres, to rationalist approaches to interrogating text, with less emphasis on multimodal design and drawing on learner diversity. This has significant implications for what kind of learning is being offered to EAL/D learners in the name of English teaching, for syllabus design, and for teacher professional development.

Using collaboration and technology to enhance Vietnamese students' English language writing skills

This action research study investigated face-to-face and wiki technology collaboration to enhance students' English writing skills in a second language (L2) class in Vietnam. The thesis is underpinned by socio-cultural theory and argues that collaborative learning using wikis led to an enhancement in L2 writing skills. The findings show that collaborating via wikis challenged traditional L2 writing pedagogy in the following ways: increased student autonomy; understanding formative feedback; and awareness of process writing, genre and audiences. This study contributes practical knowledge about affordances and constraints of collaborative writing using wikis in Vietnam and other countries where traditional pedagogies are prevalent.

A case study of teaching English and multimodality with ICTs: Constraints and possibilities

Current Australian policies and curricular frameworks demand that teachers and students use technology creatively and meaningfully in classrooms to develop students into 21C technological citizens. English teachers and students also have to learn new metalanguage around visual grammar since multimodal tasks often combine creative with critical General Capabilities (GC) with that of the of ICTs and literacy in the Australian Curriculum: English (AC:E). Both teachers and learners come to these tasks with varying degrees of techno-literacy, skills and access to technologies. This paper reports on case-study research following a technology based collaborative professional development (PD) program between a university Lecturer facilitator and English Teachers in a secondary Catholic school. The study found that the possibilities for creative and critical engagement are rich, but there are real grounded constraints such as lack of time, impeding teachers’ ability to master and teach new technologies in classrooms. Furthermore, pedagogical approaches are affected by technical skill levels and school infrastructure concerns which can militate against effective use of ICTs in school settings. The research project was funded by the Brisbane Catholic Education Office and focused on how teachers can be supported in these endeavours in educational contexts as they prepare students of English to be creative global citizens who use technology creatively.

What counts as English in the internationalised Australian university: Implications for teaching and learning

English is currently ascendant as the language of globalisation, evident in its mediation of interactions and transactions worldwide. For many international students, completion of a degree in English means significant credentialing and increased job prospects. Australian universities are the third largest English-speaking destination for overseas students behind the United States and the United Kingdom. International students comprise one-fifth of the total Australian university population, with 80% coming from Asian countries (ABS, 2010). In this competitive higher education market, English has been identified as a valued ‘good’. Indeed, universities have been critiqued for relentlessly reproducing the “hegemony and homogeneity of English��� (Marginson, 2006, p. 37) in order to sustain their advantage in the education market. For international students, English is the gatekeeper to enrolment, the medium of instruction and the mediator of academic success. For these reasons, English is not benign, yet it remains largely taken-for-granted in the mainstream university context. This paper problematises the naturalness of English and reports on a study of an Australian Master of Education course in which English was a focus. The study investigated representations of English as they were articulated across a chain of texts including the university strategic plan, course assessment criteria, student assignments, lecturer feedback, and interviews. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Foucault’s work on discourse enabled understandings of how a particular English is formed through an apparatus of specifications, exclusionary thresholds, strategies for maintenance (and disruption), and privileged concepts and speaking positions. The findings indicate that English has hegemonic status within the Australian university, with material consequences for students whose proficiency falls outside the thresholds of accepted English practice. Central to the constitution of what counts as English is the relationship of equivalence between standard written English and successful academic writing. International students’ representations of English indicate a discourse that impacts on identities and practices and preoccupies them considerably as they negotiate language and task demands. For the lecturer, there is strategic manoeuvring within the institutional regulative regime to support students’ English language needs using adapted assessment practices, explicit teaching of academic genres and scaffolded classroom interaction. The paper concludes with the implications for university teaching and learning.

Secret Squirrel Stuff in the Australian Curriculum English: The genesis of the ‘new’ grammar

In much the same way that a squirrel stores a range of food in a range of places, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s (ACARA) Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2015) stores references to grammar in a range of places. This paper explores some seemingly ‘hidden’ grammars within the AC:E to (re)discover their genesis and how they unfold across Foundation to Year 6. The first ‘Secret Squirrel’ moment centres on the introduction of a new grammar which weaves traditional Latin-based and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory. The second ‘Secret Squirrel’ moment centres on the use of one sub-system of SFL Theory, the System of Appraisal, and its potential to provide an analytical lens for ‘reading’ the interpersonal meaning within narratives. The remainder of the paper draws on Goodson’s (1990) notion of curriculum as a social construction, paying attention to the levels of processes and (potential) practice. This part of the paper focuses on the System of Appraisal as it is introduced in the AC:E and then translates the Content Descriptions to an example analysis. One stimulus text, Melanie Watt’s (2012) children’s picture book ‘Scaredy Squirrel at the Beach’, is introduced then analysed using the System of Appraisal as an analytical lens for identifying how language choices ‘go to work’ (Macken-Horarik, 2003, p. 285) on readers, that is how Watt’s language choices are crafted so a ‘compliant’ child reader (Martin & White, 2005, p. 62) has the opportunity to ‘feel with’ and thus ‘adjudicate’ the behaviour of characters in particular ways (Macken-Horarik, 2003, p. 285).

Author-Illustrator

This essay investigates the concept author-illustrator by drawing on two influential essays – ‘Death of the Author’ by Roland Barthes and ‘What is an Author?’ by Michel Foucault. By engaging with the key points of debate that emerge from these positions, this essay argues that the notion of author-illustrator is part of a wider discursive field that is embedded in a complex, commodified, multimedia public sphere where the author is paradoxically reinscribed and erased. This environment is changing the nature of the text, authorship, and reader-text interaction, but until now the concept author-illustrator has been largely absent from these discussions.

Critical Discourse Analysis research methods for the English classroom

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is an approach to analysing the discourses that operate in social contexts, such as classrooms in schools, and their material effects on people, such as teachers and learners. CDA offers a range of ways of engaging with the relationship between texts in context and the power they exercise. In this article, I overview key approaches and provide detail of Fairclough’s (1992, 2003) textually-oriented, linguistic method of CDA, with an example from my own research. I offer a challenge for English teachers, as researchers, to ‘make strange’ the familiar world of their classroom work, and in so doing, identify possibilities for productive change.

Design based research methodology for teaching with technology in English

Design based research (DBR) is an appropriate method for small scale educational research projects involving collaboration between teachers, students and researchers. It is particularly useful in collaborative projects where an intervention is implemented and evaluated in a grounded context. The intervention can be technological, or a new program required by policy changes. It can be applied to educational contexts, such as when English teachers undertake higher degree research projects in their own or others’ sites; or for academics working collaboratively as researchers with teams of teachers. In the case described here the paper shows that DBR is designed to make a difference in the real world contexts in which occurs.

Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry

Review of Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry, by Jennifer Neville (Cambridge UP, 1999).

Overview of the 2015 ALTA shared task: Identifying French cognates in English text

This paper presents an overview of the 6th ALTA shared task that ran in 2015. The task was to identify in English texts all the potential cognates from the perspective of the French language. In other words, identify all the words in the English text that would acceptably translate into a similar word in French. We present the motivations for the task, the description of the data and the results of the 4 participating teams. We discuss the results against a baseline and prior work.