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…

The paper examines the appropriateness of translation and interpreting tasks for language teaching. To this end, it analyses an advanced-level Japanese language subject taught at an Australian university, utilising the concept of intercultural language learning (ICLL) as a theoretical framework. The study also investigates the learning experience…

It is quite common for Australian schools introducing Japanese as a foreign language to engage native Japanese volunteers to assist in the classroom using a collaborative team-teaching approach. These volunteer Japanese assistant teachers, commonly referred to as Japanese Assistant Teachers (JATs), are an indispensable asset to school language…

In this paper, the literature related to the use of technology in the languages classroom will be explored. In relation to the teaching and learning methodologies and approaches past and present as well as current research, comparisons are made between the audio-lingual/visual classroom and the digital classroom by way of describing and comparing…

Stories and storytelling have been used for millennia to entertain, challenge and educate. As a shared form of language interaction, storytelling has engaged communities in developing and perpetuating common understandings of both language and culture, as critical foundations to harmonious societies. Stories and storytelling provide a rich source…

Many novice language teachers have difficulty putting into practice their developing knowledge of language teaching. This article focuses on one of seven case study teachers as an exemplar of those involved in a New Zealand in-service professional development program for teachers of languages (Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Spanish) in…

This article investigates the role of film in language education based on a study of the 2009 "Melbourne International Film Festival" (MIFF). It is structured around a literature review and results from surveys of students and teachers who participated in the young people's section of the program, Next Gen. The article argues that film can provide…

In 2008 the New South Wales Board of Studies included Hayao Miyazaki's film "Spirited Away" as the prescribed text for the Higher School Certificate Japanese Extension course. A study of the film in this context requires students to engage with the text in three distinct ways: through language, cultural symbolism and relevance, and detailed…

The emergence of communicative language teaching as the dominant paradigm in foreign language pedagogy cast "communication" in a central role in language acquisition, both as an aim and as a medium of instruction. Despite its centrality, the concept of "communication" is generally taken as widely understood and is seldom defined. This paper…

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…

The Professional Standards Project (PSP) is a nationally coordinated professional learning program for languages teachers, to improve the quality of languages teaching and, thereby, improve student learning. It is based on the use of the "Professional standards for accomplished teaching of languages and cultures" (hereafter, "the Standards") as a…

In his examination of successful innovation and change in education in many settings, Fullan (2001) identifies the three broad options for effecting change that public authorities have at their disposal. They can seek to bring about change through imposing accountability (system-wide or targeted), or through providing incentives (either…

This paper addresses the complicated issue of attribution of gender in French nouns. Firstly, it presents a range of views on how native speakers address noun gender allocation, plus some insight into why they are accurate with most, but by no means all, gender attributions. Secondly, the paper explains some of the inconsistencies in noun gender…

For students of Indonesian, learning to identify base words is very important, but can often be quite tricky. This article describes how one of the authors used interactive digital content from The Le@rning Federation (TLF) together with an extensive range of offline activities within an intercultural language learning (ICLL) framework. It helps…

Intercultural language learning gives a place to the use of both the target language and the learners' first and/or other language(s). There is a need to develop a balance, however, as each language contributes differently to learning. The purpose of thinking about language use in the classroom is to develop an informed approach to using as much…