Reporting a Brisbane Catholic Education (BCE) project spanning 2018-2020, this paper looks at what happened when early primary English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) learners were given eReaders with multilingual texts to take home to read together with their families. The shift in pedagogy to view our learners as multilingual and…

Despite the increasing levels of cultural and linguistic diversity represented in Australian classrooms, many universities do not adequately prepare teachers to teach English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D). Moreover, in neoliberal educational regimes, teaching tends to remain steadfastly focused on monolingual conceptions of literacy…

The recent implementation of The Victorian Curriculum F-10: EAL requires content teachers who teach EAL students to be familiar with the revised EAL curriculum for the purposes of planning and developing approaches to assist learners' development in English. In the literature and in curriculum frameworks, word knowledge is considered an important…

Two Anishnabek kindergarten teachers discuss four principles of Indigenous pedagogies in a project with a university researcher that created a context for children to engage in activities to learn their Anishnabek language and culture, and create positive identities. The university researcher sent a rabbit puppet named Niichii (Friend), who was…

Evidence shows that when young children's diverse language heritages are valued and supported, there are benefits for their linguistic and conceptual development, their sense of identity and their learning. However, there are few early learning settings in Australia which nurture young children's bilingual repertoires. And, while it is well…

The case study in this article offers a descriptive account of challenges involved in teaching Australian Curriculum content in the common teaching context in remote communities where an Indigenous language is spoken as the everyday form of communication and students learn English in what is essentially a foreign language setting. An on-the-ground…

Assessment of young children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds holds the potential to provide important insights into learning. Two researchers investigated an Allied Health screening program that was conducted in three kindergartens in a disadvantaged area of outer Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on narrative inquiry…

In this paper, a series of vignettes is used to explore important current challenges in TESOL. These vignettes are drawn from many different settings, including Bengali-, Pahari- and Chinese-speaking children in UK primary schools, speakers of Aboriginal English in Australia and Chinese teachers of English on courses in Higher Education. A number…

Immigration is an example of global mobility to developed nations such as Australia. Each year thousands of migrants from different parts of the world move here. Using a sociocultural framework, this article reports on English as a Second Language (ESL) parents' views on the role and importance of English in the learning and lives of their…

Action Research (AR) is recognised as an effective way for language teachers to extend teaching skills and gain more understanding of teaching, learning and the classroom environment (Burns, 2010). It can also be a useful but challenging experience for trainee language teachers. This paper reports on the experiences of Malaysian trainee primary…

Teachers are now experiencing the age of quantitative test-driven assessment, in which there is little weight accorded to teacher-based judgement about student progress. In the Australian context, the NAPLaN test has become a driving force in school and teacher accountability. The language of NAPLaN is one of bands and numerical scores and…