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.

Games production in Australia : Adapting to precariousness

In this chapter, we pay full attention to the structural conditions and human cost of precarious labor in a particular local instance of the games industry. But at the same time, we attempt to shift the debate on precarity from the existential (the creative individual attracted to industries promising autonomy and meaningful work and finding only casualization, no work/life balance, and poor management) and the totalizing (all work under regimes of neoliberal hypercapitalism is increasingly characterized by precarity; indeed a whole new class—the precariat1—is posited as emerging) to a focus on analysis for actionable reform.

Negotiating Chineseness through learning Chinese as a Heritage Language in Australia: The role of habitus

While education researchers have drawn on the work of a wide diversity of theorists over the years, much contemporary theory building in these areas has revolved around the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Theory as Method in Research develops the capacity of students, researchers and teachers to successfully put Bourdieu’s ideas to work in their own research and prepare them effectively for conducting Masters and Doctoral scholarships. Structured around four core themes, this book provides a range of research case studies exploring educational identities, educational inequalities, school leadership and management, and research in teacher education. Issues as diverse as Chinese language learning and identity, school leadership in Australia and the school experience of Afro-Trinidadian boys, are covered, intertwined with a set of innovative approaches to theory application in education research. This collection brings together, in one comprehensive volume, a set of education researchers who place Pierre Bourdieu’s key concepts such as habitus, capital and field at the centre of their research methodologies. Full of insight and innovation, the book is an essential read for practitioners, student teachers, researchers and academics who want to harness the potential of Bourdieu’s core concepts in their own work, thereby helping to bridge the gap between theory and method in education research.

Learning Chinese as a Heritage Language: An Australian Perspective

Summary: This book explores the fascinating topic of heritage language learning, looking in particular at Chinese Australians' learning of Chinese. The author studies the investment, challenges and benefits of heritage language learning across varied contexts including school, work, home and in the community. The book investigates how Chinese Australians navigate and negotiate their Chineseness and how resources are used to support their learning. The book is based on a mixed methods study which uses Bourdieu's sociological theory, and offers implications for sociologists of language and education, Chinese heritage language learners and teachers, as well as language and cultural policy makers. Review: This book is a compelling account of the habitus of Chineseness in a world of mobility. It offers up a plethora of insights into the implication of heritage language learning in the constitution of Chinese identity; it makes available a sophisticated mixed methods approach for using the thinking tools of Pierre Bourdieu; it adds to these tools a nuanced cultural dimension. Karen Dooley, Queensland University of Technology, Australia In our increasingly trans-migratory world, language can be central to cultural identity. Dr Mu’s research breaks new ground by adapting Bourdieu’s insights to examine how cultural identity (‘Chinese-ness’) is linguistically learned and practiced in Australia. His remarkable book will interest educators and researchers grappling with how language pertains to identity. Tom Strong, University of Calgary, Canada A thought-provoking, highly engaging work that has deftly shown how Bourdieusian framework can be applied in the research field of literacy education and Heritage Language learning. A must-read for those interested in overseas Chinese communities and Heritage Language learning across various immigrant communities in general! Liang Du, Beijing Normal University, China

A game of balance and disguise: Examining experiential value and game attributes in social marketing m-games

Experiential value is an important driver of customer repeat behaviour and is necessary for achieving sustained behaviour. Understanding the value gained by consumers is particularly important when adopting innovative techniques, such as new technology. Social marketing (behaviour change) practice is increasingly using the technology of mobile games (m-games), yet there is little scholarly research to explain how these games can create experiential value for the user, or which game attributes influence this value. A key finding of this thesis is the importance of achieving a balance between entertainment value and behaviour value through the use of key game attributes relating to disguise and performance. The research offers a contribution to address current managerial problems faced by social marketing practitioners looking to employ m-games to achieve behavioural outcomes.

Introduction to "Learning Chinese as a Heritage Language : An Australia Perspective"

The book grapples with the complex entanglement of identity construction, language choice, cultural heritage, and social orders. Specifically, the book investigates how Chinese Australians negotiate their Chineseness and capitalise on resources through learning Chinese as a heritage language in Australia and beyond. Though the book is concerned with Chinese Australians, knowledge built and lessons learned can provide insight into other multicultural settings where people of Chinese descent are becoming increasingly prominent in representing the cultural and linguistic diversity of the society, and more recently, in contributing to the economic dynamics of the society. In addition, the focus on the potholes and distractions as well as the benefits and gains of heritage language learning is not restricted to Chinese diaspora, but relevant to ethnic minority individuals and communities elsewhere.

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.

Mortality reduction following the air pollution control measures during the 2010 Asian Games

Though increased particulate air pollution has been consistently associated with elevated mortality, evidence regarding whether diminished particulate air pollution would lead to mortality reduction is limited. Citywide air pollution mitigation program during the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou, China, provided such an opportunity. Daily mortality from non-accidental, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases was compared for 51 intervention days (November 1–December 21) in 2010 with the same calendar date of baseline years (2006–2009 and 2011). Relative risk (RR) and 95% confidence interval (95% CI) were estimated using a time series Poisson model, adjusting for day of week, public holidays, daily mean temperature and relative humidity. Daily PM10 (particle with aerodynamic diameter less than 10 μm) decreased from 88.64 μg/m3 during the baseline period to 80.61 μg/m3 during the Asian Games period. Other measured air pollutants and weather variables did not differ substantially. Daily mortality from non-accidental, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases decreased from 32, 11 and 6 during the baseline period to 25, 8 and 5 during the Games period, the corresponding RR for the Games period compared with the baseline period was 0.79 (95% CI: 0.73–0.86), 0.77 (95% CI: 0.66–0.89) and 0.68 (95% CI: 0.57–0.80), respectively. No significant decreases were observed in other months of 2010 in Guangzhou and intervention period in two control cities. This finding supports the efforts to reduce air pollution and improve public health through transportation restriction and industrial emission control.

Stochastic differential games with multiple modes

We have studied two person stochastic differential games with multiple modes. For the zero-sum game we have established the existence of optimal strategies for both players. For the nonzero-sum case we have proved the existence of a Nash equilibrium.

Evolutionary games with two timescales

We consider a two timescale model of learning by economic agents wherein active or 'ontogenetic' learning by individuals takes place on a fast scale and passive or 'phylogenetic' learning by society as a whole on a slow scale, each affecting the evolution of the other. The former is modelled by the Monte Carlo dynamics of physics, while the latter is modelled by the replicator dynamics of evolutionary biology. Various qualitative aspects of the dynamics are studied in some simple cases, both analytically and numerically, and its role as a useful modelling device is emphasized.

Differential Games of Mixed Type with Control and Stopping Times

We study a zero sum differential game of mixed type where each player uses both control and stopping times. Under certain conditions we show that the value function for this problem exists and is the unique viscosity solution of the corresponding variational inequalities. We also show the existence of saddle point equilibrium for a special case of differential game.

Generalized Query-By-Rule: a heterogeneous database query language

This paper describes the design and implementation of a high-level query language called Generalized Query-By-Rule (GQBR) which supports retrieval, insertion, deletion and update operations. This language, based on the formalism of database logic, enables the users to access each database in a distributed heterogeneous environment, without having to learn all the different data manipulation languages. The compiler has been implemented on a DEC 1090 system in Pascal.