Learning English in an English speaking world : examining opportunities for intercultural understandings and connectedness through representations of identities in English language textbooks

With the recognition that language both reflects and constructs culture and English now widely acknowledged as an international language, the cul-tural content of language teaching materials is now being problematised. Through a quantitative analysis, this chapter focuses on opportunities for intercultural understanding and connectedness through representations of the identities that appear in two leading English language textbooks. The analyses reveal that the textbooks orientate towards British and western identities with representations of people from non-European/non-Western backgrounds being notable for their absence, while others are hidden from view. Indeed there would appear to be a neocolonialist orientation in oper-ation in the textbooks, one that aligns English with the West. The chapter proposes arguments for the consideration of cultural diversity in English language teaching (ELT) textbook design, and promoting intercultural awareness and acknowledging the contexts in which English is now being used. It also offers ways that teachers can critically reflect on existing ELT materials and proposes arguments for including different varieties of Eng-lish in order to ensure a level of intercultural understanding and connect-edness.

Rights versus reality : the difficulty of providing 'access to English' in Queensland courts

This project reviewed the success of the Aboriginal English in the Courts booklet which was published by the Department of Justice and Attorney-General in 2000, with a view to improving access to the courts for speakers of Aboriginal English in Queensland. Surveys and interview were conducted with judges, magistrates, prosecutors, legal aid lawyers and courts registry staff. The feedback from the research has shown that the handbook has had little impact on ‘access to English’ in Queensland courts. The problems relate to the tension between protecting the rights of the accused under an adversarial system and legitimately introducing the issues of language uncertainty to the court in a non-prejudicial manner. In addition, the interviews have brought to light emerging language issues in remote communities that cannot be remedied under existing language policy mechanisms, such as the provision of interpreters or friends of court.

‘Personal Response’ and English Teaching

A case study relating to secondary education, examining the teacher student relationship as it operates within the English classroom is the topic of this paper. It describes how a certain conception of 'personal response' to literature provided a means for the teacher/counsellor to form the ethical capacities of children. 'Personal response' is usually associated with the moment in which the child is freed to be most natural. But for all the emphasis upon the irreducibly individual nature of the 'genuinely felt response', this pedagogic exercise finds its place within a series of strategies designed both to cherish and correct the child, to nurture and to scrutinise, to guide and to reconstruct.

Stories of cross-dressing and the body : family memories in fiction

Ruth Finnegan (2006, 179) describes how family myths have the power to provoke images that recur throughout generations. This paper will document my own encounter with such persistent images in the stories of a mother and daughter. Both mother and daughter told stories about encountering cross-dressing men in the streets of Brisbane, and both showed similar anxiety over their own body size. As a creative writer working with oral histories, I found these stories of the disguised body compelling. By drawing on the storytelling strategies and preoccupations present in the interview, I used imagination and fictional techniques to investigate the possibility of symbolic resonance of memories across generations. In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987) uses the notion of ‘rememory’ to describe how characters actively make and suppress meanings in their recollections. Like Morrison, my writing speaks to notions around the way stories are remembered and told.

Reading in the Australian curriculum English : describing the effects of structure and organisation on multimodal texts

The recently introduced Australian Curriculum: English Version 3.0 (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2012) requires students to ‘read’ multimodal text and describe the effects of structure and organisation. We begin this article by tracing the variable understandings of what reading multimodal text might entail through the Framing Paper (National Curriculum Board, 2008), the Framing Paper Consultation Report (National Curriculum Board, 2009a), the Shaping Paper (National Curriculum Board, 2009b) and Version 3.0 of the Australian Curriculum English (ACARA, 2012). Our findings show that the theoretical and descriptive framework for doing so is implicit. Drawing together multiple but internally coherent theories from the field of semiotics, we suggest one way to work towards three Year 5 learning outcomes from the reading/writing mode. The affordances of assembling a broad but explicit technical metalanguage for an informed reading of the integrated design elements of multimodal texts are noted.

Sourdough & other stories : a story told in parts (a mosaic novel and exegesis)

The mosaic novel - with its independent 'story-tiles' linking together to form a complete narrative - has the potential to act as a reflection on the periodic resurfacing of unconscious memories in the conscious lives of fictional characters. This project is an exploration of the mosaic text as a fictional analogue of involuntary memory. These concepts are investigated as they appear in traditional fairy tales and engaged with in this thesis's creative component, Sourdough and Other Stories (approximately 80,000 words), a mosaic novel comprising sixteen interconnected 'story-tiles'. Traditional fairy tales are non-reflective and conducive to forgetting (i.e. anti-memory); fairy tale characters are frequently portrayed as psychologically two-dimensional, in that there is no examination of the mental and emotional distress caused when children are stolen/ abandoned/ lost and when adults are exiled. Sourdough and Other Stories is a creative examination of, and attempted to remedy, this lack of psychological depth. This creative work is at once something more than a short story collection, and something that is not a traditional novel, but instead a culmination of two modes of writing. It employs the fairy tale form to explore James' 'thorns in the spirit' (1898, p.199) in fiction; the anxiety caused by separation from familial and community groups. The exegesis, A Story Told in Parts - Sourdough and Other Stories is a critical essay (approximately 20,000 words in length), a companion piece to the mosaic novel, which analyses how my research question proceeded from my creative work, and considers the theoretical underpinnings of the creative work and how it enacts the research question: 'Can a writer use the structural possibilities of the mosaic text to create a fictional work that is an analogue of an involuntary memory?' The cumulative effect of the creative and exegetical works should be that of a dialogue between the two components - each text informing the other and providing alternate but complementary lenses with which to view the research question.

The relationship between listening and other language skills in International English Language Testing System

Listening comprehension is the primary channel of learning a language. Yet of the four dominant macro-skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), it is often difficult and inaccessible for second and foreign language learners due to its implicit process. The secondary skill, speaking, proceeds listening cognitively. Aural/oral skills precede the graphic skills, such as reading and writing, as they form the circle of language learning process. However, despite the significant relationship with other language skills, listening comprehension is treated lightly in the applied linguistics research. Half of our daily conversation and three quarters of classroom interaction are virtually devoted to listening comprehension. To examine the relationship of listening skill with other language skills, the outcome of 1800 Iranian participants undertaking International English Language Testing System (IELTS) in Tehran indicates the close correlation between listening comprehension and the overall language proficiency.