Many reports over the past 40 years have investigated aspects of language education in Australia. While the majority of these reports have made recommendations to improve Australia's national language capability, few, if any, seem to have been implemented effectively. In this paper we attempt to gauge the impact of a 2007 Australian Council for…

This study compares the willingness to communicate (WTC) of Canadian Anglophone and Francophone students to measures of their self-assessed, multiskilled second language proficiency and strategy use before and after a short-term intracountry bilingual exchange experience. The central question is whether a student's WTC exists before an opportunity…

The Research Centre for Languages and Cultures (RCLC) at the University of South Australia hosts an annual symposium on current issues related to languages and language education. The hallmark of the RCLC symposia is that they intend to raise critical, current issues in the languages field for wider debate, include presenting cutting edge research…

The controversy over the place of translation in the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is a thriving field of inquiry. Many older language teaching methodologies such as the Direct Method, the Audio-lingual Method, and Natural and Communicative Approaches, tended to either neglect the role of translation, or prohibit it entirely as a…

Despite research suggesting that teachers highly influence their students' knowledge and use of language learning resources such as dictionaries (Loucky, 2005; Yamane, 2006), it appears that dictionary selection and use is considered something to be dealt with outside the classroom. As a result, many students receive too little advice to be able…

The discussion of standards in this article reveals a number of common features. First, they all focus on macro-level statements about teachers' professional work rather than attempting to detail what that work may be based on. Second, they do not make specifications about the nature and standard of relevant disciplinary knowledge (as would be the…

Research has found that literacy in the first language of a student of English as a second language (ESL) aids in the acquisition of English, but there has been little exploration of the processes that underlie this. This pilot project investigates children's experiences of literacy in their first language (Hebrew), instruction in strategies…

While Government commitments to supporting instruction in languages other than English have largely been honoured, bilingual education as a form of learning has not been widespread. Acknowledging the benefits of learning a language other than English, the most recent Australian national languages policy statement nonetheless makes no mention of…

This article describes how recent trends in improving literacy outcomes in the early years of schooling have provided the opportunity for Camberwell Primary School to identify the "best practice" that promotes high levels of achievement in English literacy and transfer this learning and knowledge to the French literacy program. The linguistic…

The study of curriculum materials is of interest to social researchers seeking to understand the social constructions of reality. All texts embody a number of purposeful choices about how reality is to be represented, and these choices have consequences for what is "foregrounded, backgrounded, placed in the margins, distorted, short-cut, glossed,…

Carr (2002), in her investigation of boys' alienation from languages and language learning, addressed the question of an "appropriate curriculum" for boys and boys' understanding of masculinity. Boys reported in that research that they preferred physical activities so found the written text orientation of language learning to be "hard" and…

The focus of this study is the relationship between language attitude, beliefs, efficacy, English language competence, and language achievement. Two hundred and eighty-five students from five metropolitan primary schools in Western Australia completed a specially designed questionnaire based on the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (Gardner,…

In this paper, the author looks back over some 43 years of involvement in language teaching and examines the progress educators have made as a profession. He also considers their present situation, given a Federal Government, which, at least until this year, has seemed antipathetic to languages education, and State and Territory Governments which,…

Summarizes the main criticisms aimed at English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) instruction in Japan. Each criticism is followed by a commentary that attempts to deconstruct the underlying cultural assumptions. Suggests that the frequent calls for the development of EFL from outside Japan need to respect the principles of cultural continuity.…

Compares Queensland teachers' conceptions of communicative language teaching with those held by 11 Japanese junior high school teachers of English, interviewed in 1997 as part of a s part study on the development of language teaching in Japan. (Author/VWL)