In this paper, we report on an international collaborative project designed to address the professional development needs of Vietnamese teachers for the implementation of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). We collected data on a group of CLIL Vietnamese teachers and leaders through online interviews. Drawing on Cultural-Historical…

This paper investigates the communication strategies of schools to engage linguistically diverse parents through enrollment information on their websites. The importance of the study is due to the known educational disadvantage experienced by migrant children as well as the known positive influence of parental engagement on educational…

Most Indigenous peoples live in urban and regional locations across Australia and no longer speak their traditional languages fluently. Instead contact languages, creoles and dialects, are widely spoken. In many educational settings, educators may know little about the first languages of the Indigenous children they teach, and not recognise these…

This study evaluates the potential for incidentally learning early reading vocabulary through the extensive viewing (EV) of children's movies/television with subtitles. Recent research has investigated how much exposure to important vocabulary EV and extensive reading (ER) provides. Investigations compute the number of repetitions of target…

The increasing diversity of learners and teachers of languages (of both English as an Additional Language or Dialect [EAL/D] and Languages) coincides with major efforts to reconceptualise the nature of additional language learning towards multilingual and intercultural orientations. In this paper I first describe the policy context of EAL/D in…

Research from the fields of science representation, genre pedagogy and disciplinary literacy for adolescents indicates that achievement for students, including those from linguistically diverse backgrounds, will improve if they engage with the meaning-making conventions of disciplinary texts, but there is no current agreement on the nature of…

The learner's guide (LG) is a genre of pedagogical materials for Australian Indigenous languages, but LGs developed by field linguists are often questioned regarding their capacity to effectively facilitate language learning and, eventually, language revitalisation. This reflects a gap in the literature where applied linguistics perspectives are…

Language learners often require appropriate scaffolding to engage in digital multimodal composing to maximise its potential for learning. This illuminates the need for pre-service teachers to be ready for these experiences both on teaching placements and at the beginning of their careers. However, little is known about their readiness for digital…

Affective engagement, as one facet of the engagement model, takes on the role of activating other aspects to facilitate continued action in partaking in learning activities. Recognising the silences of Bernstein's theoretical oeuvre on the affective aspect in the process of cultural transmission, this paper applies his concepts of classification…

School improvement has become a goal in many education systems globally, with the mantra of 'whole school change' adopted as key to achieving that goal. However, whole school change is complex and interpreted variously. In Australia, a case in point is the drive to lift literacy outcomes. Drawing on qualitative data from a study of literacy…

This article presents a qualitative study of the differential uptake of SFL-inspired metalanguage and SFL-based pedagogy by two senior secondary history teachers in Australia. The teachers were involved in design-based research aimed at improving disciplinary writing for high stakes examinations. While both attended the same training seminar and…

To acknowledge the lasting and increasing influence of Halliday's theory of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) on teacher education, this article outlines Critical SFL Praxis (CSFLP) in teacher education as an activist effort in research and practice. Informed by systemic functional linguistics, the critical approach seeks to push back against…

This paper reports on research which has explored essential requirements for pedagogies of hope, including the expansion of teachers' semiotic knowledge. The study, a professional learning intervention with teachers of young multilingual learners engaged in science inquiry, was informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) descriptions of…

The Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) talk sequence dominates whole-class talk in school lessons but frequently provides limited talk options for students. This article examines a variant of the sequence produced by young children and their teacher in an early years' classroom. The multiple-response sequences were identified in classroom…

While recent literacy research shows an increasing uptake in multimodal literacies, there remains a disjunction between multimodal literacy teaching and assessment. This paper offers a critical review of assessment in the context of teaching multimodal literacies and begins by reviewing the notion of literacy and reframing assessment in…