A national English curriculum far all Australian youth: Making it work for teacher and students everywhere

The authors draw on some powerful practitioner research they have been associated with recently to nvision ways in which a national curriculum might redress the inequities experienced by Australia's most disadvantaged young people.

English language study abroad program : an investigation of Hong Kong pre-service teachers’ experiences of a language immersion program

There has been minimal research focused on short-term study abroad language immersion programs, in particular, with home-stay families. The importance of authentic intercultural experience is increasingly clear and was acknowledged as central to the process of language learning (Liddicoat, 2004). In Hong Kong, education programs for pre-service language teachers have significantly emphasised language and intercultural training through short-term study abroad, and these short overseas language immersion courses have become a compulsory component for teacher training (Bodycott & Crew, 2001) in the last decade. This study aims to investigate eight Hong Kong pre-service teachers’ and their home-stay families’ experiences of a short-term (two months) language immersion program in Australia. The focus is on listening to commentaries concerning the development of communicative competence, intercultural competence and professional growth during the out-of-class study abroad experience. The conceptual framework adopted in this study views language and intercultural learning from social constructivist perspectives. Central to this framing is the notion that the internalisation of higher mental functions involves the transfer from the inter-psychological to the intra-psychological plane, that is, a progression process from the socially supported to individually controlled performance. From this perspective, language serves as a way to communicate about, and in relation to, actions and experience. Three research questions were addressed and studied through qualitative methodology. 1. How do the pre-service teachers and their home-stay families perceive the out-of-class component of the program in terms of opportunities for the development of language proficiency and communicative competence? 2. How do the pre-service teachers and their home-stay families perceive the out-of-class component of the program in terms of the development of intercultural competence? 3. How do the pre-service teachers and home-stay families perceive the outof- class component of the program in terms of teachers’ professional growth? Data were generated from multiple data collection methods and analysed through thematic analysis from both a “bottom up” and “top down” approach. The study showed that the pre-service teachers perceived that the immersion program influenced, to varying degrees, their language proficiency, communication and intercultural awareness, as well as their self-awareness and professional growth. These pre-service teachers believed that effective language learning centres on active engagement in the target language community. A mismatch between the views and evaluations of the two groups – the pre-service teachers and the home-stay family members – provides some evidence of misalignments in terms of expectations and perceptions of each other’s roles and responsibilities. The study has highlighted challenges encountered, and provided suggestions for ways of meeting these challenges. The inclusion in the study of the home-stay families’ perceptions and commentaries provided insights, which can inform program development. There is clearly further work to be done in terms of predeparture orientation and preparation, not only for the main participants themselves, the students, but also for the host families.

A kiss is just...

This paper proposes that a survey of representations of men not-kissing men in recent television drama series makes clear a particularly hysterical fascination. While the Australian program GP has managed to produce a banal representation of two men kissing, American equivalents have resorted to a series of strategies which make insistently clear that not only can men not kiss-but that the act of not-kissing must be repeatedly displayed. By refusing to have lovers kiss; by having lovers kiss but refusing to show the act; by having gay lovers, but having one played by a woman; by having men kiss but rendering the act ridiculous; in these ways, American television programs make clear the importance of this act by consistently pointing towards it and declaring its impossibility. This paper calls for the justice of equal access to public images of kissing.

Assessment policy change in relation to English language teaching and learning in China : a study of perspectives from two universities

In response to concerns about the quality of English Language Learning (ELL) education at tertiary level, the Chinese Ministry of Education (CMoE) launched the College English Reform Program (CERP) in 2004. By means of a press release (CMoE, 2005) and a guideline document titled College English Curriculum Requirements (CECR) (CMoE, 2007), the CERP proposed two major changes to the College English assessment policy, which were: (1) the shift to optional status for the compulsory external test, the College English Test Band 4 (CET4); and (2) the incorporation of formative assessment into the existing summative assessment framework. This study investigated the interactions between the College English assessment policy change, the theoretical underpinnings, and the assessment practices within two Chinese universities (one Key University and one Non-Key University). It adopted a sociocultural theoretical perspective to examine the implementation process as experienced by local actors of institutional and classroom levels. Systematic data analysis using a constant comparative method (Merriam, 1998) revealed that contextual factors and implementation issues did not lead to significant differences in the two cases. Lack of training in assessment and the sociocultural factors such as the traditional emphasis on the product of learning and hierarchical teacher/students relationship are decisive and responsible for the limited effect of the reform.

English Teachers at Work : Narratives, Counter Narratives and Argument

Do English teachers around the world share a common set of values, knowledge and experiences? Do they face the same kind of challenges? What can English teachers from different national settings learn by engaging with dialogue with one another? What histories shape the professional practice of English teachers? What impact have government policies and curricula had on English teachers' sense of professional identity? English Teachers at Work focuses on the professional knowledge and practice of teachers of English in a range of national settings.

A voting mechanism for named entity translation in English-Chinese question answering

In this paper, we describe a voting mechanism for accurate named entity (NE) translation in English–Chinese question answering (QA). This mechanism involves translations from three different sources: machine translation,online encyclopaedia, and web documents. The translation with the highest number of votes is selected. We evaluated this approach using test collection, topics and assessment results from the NTCIR-8 evaluation forum. This mechanism achieved 95% accuracy in NEs translation and 0.3756 MAP in English–Chinese cross-lingual information retrieval of QA.

‘Just stupid drama queens’ : how police constrain, regulate, and punish the public visibilities of sexual/gender diversity as out of place

Using interview data on LGBT young peoples’ policing experiences, I argue policing practices work to constrain public visibilities of sexual and gender diversity in public spaces. Police actions recounted by LGBT young people suggest the workings of a certain kind of visuality (Mason, 2002) and evidenced more subtle actions that sought to constrain, regulate, and punish public visibilities of sexual and gender diversity. Aligning with the work of sexualities academics and theorists, this paper suggests that, like violence is itself a bodily spectacle from which onlookers come to know things, policing works to subtly constrain public visibilities of “queerness”. Policing interactions with LGBT young people serves the purpose of visibly yet unverifiably (Mason, 2002) regulating displays of sexual and gender diversity in public spaces. The paper concludes noting how police actions are nonetheless visible and therefore make knowable to the public the importance of keeping same sex intimacy invisible in public spaces.

What do beginning English teachers want from professional development?

This qualitative, interpretive case study allows insights into the reflective emerging teacher practitioner as it explores pre-service and beginning teachers’ preparedness to deal with curriculum change and the demands of the classroom and school community. Five beginning teachers were asked what they want from professional development in a period of rapid curriculum change. The study aligns with emerging local and national agendas for teacher professional development and accreditation in Australia. The data analysis, based on “community of practice” perspectives, shows that new teachers have clear ideas about the professional development they need and want. Professional development is seen as integral to their developing professional identities. The paper has implications for the way leadership teams offer and how new teachers take up professional development opportunities, upon which registration is contingent.

Knowing about the English language: “a wrinkle in time”

Beryl & Gael discuss the ‘new’ metalanguage for knowledge about language presented in the Australian Curriculum English (ACARA, 2010). Their discussion connects to practice by recounting how one teacher scaffolds her students through detailed understandings of noun and adjective groups in reading activities. The stimulus text is the novel ‘A wrinkle in time’ (L’Engle, 1962, reproduced 2007) and the purpose is to build students’ understandings so they can work towards ‘expressing and developing ideas’ in written text (ACARA, 2010).

Parsing the Australian curriculum English : grammar, multimodality and cross-cultural texts

The release of the Australian Curriculum English (ACE) by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has revived debates about the role of grammar as English content knowledge. We consider some of the discussion circulating in the mainstream media vis-à-vis the intent of the ACE. We conclude that this curriculum draws upon the complementary tenets of traditional Latin-based grammar and systemic functional linguistics across the three strands of Language, Literature and Literacy in innovative ways. We argue that such an approach is necessary for working with contemporary multimodal and cross-cultural texts. To demonstrate the utility of this new approach, we draw out a set of learning outcomes from Year 6 and then map out a framework for relating the outcomes to the form and function of multimodal language. As a case in point, our analysis is of two online Coca-Cola advertising texts, one each from South Korea and Australia.

No Exit

Jean Paul Sartre’s 1944 play No Exit comes alive in this new English adaptation by academics and theatre practitioners Caroline Heim and Christian Heim. It is the most complete articulation of the ideals of Sartre’s existentialism. No Exit is an absurdist play about three people who meet in hell. This new adaptation premiered at the World Psychotherapy Congress in Darling Harbour, Sydney in August 2011. The production integrated and extended Sartre's concepts of "The Gaze", "Love and Sadism" and "Nothingness." Post-performance discussions were held after the performances to explore the discourses of the play.