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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 Australia, which shapes the reality of EAL/D provision and practices. I then discuss some expansions of key constructs related to additional language learning and the way in which these might inform EAL/D practices. In particular, I focus on the need to consider (a) the mediating role of languages and cultures in language learning, and (b) the need for an interpretive, reflective and reflexive stance towards learning, highlighting how these notions pertain to both student and teacher learning. Next, I discuss examples of teachers’ work with students drawn from two case studies of EAL/D practice that explore these notions in a programme of ongoing practitioner research. I conclude by discussing the situatedness of teachers (and their students), the need to consider the personal interpretations of meanings that teachers make and that form their professional learning, and the need for a kind of reflexivity that will lead to the ongoing development of self-awareness as a basis for working in and with diversity. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

A core consideration of any curriculum development undertaking must include an examination of how it is that learning and knowing are conceptualised. In this paper I interrogate the conceptual bases of the Australian Curriculum, specifically by discussing how learners and their life worlds, the enterprise of learning itself, knowledge and knowing and the curriculum as a whole are conceptualised. I conclude with a reflection on the consequences to reform when such a consideration is absent. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Setting the scene : the situated nature of language learning In offering comments as we engage in an effort to reconceptualise the nature, goals and outcomes of the learning of additional languages, we foreground our own situatedness in Australia, working as researchers, curriculum and assessment developers, and teacher educators in languages education in Australian education. We see Australia itself as connected in a global, networked world and as a multilingual and multicultural society wit...

This chapter explores the assessment of intercultural capabilities in language learning. It frames assessment as a cycle that involves conceptualising, eliciting, judging, and validating as a process in which each part of the cycle interconnects with and influences the others. Using this cycle, the authors present a discussion of assessment that is not simply a set of procedures but a way of working. They argue for an overall orientation to assessment that foregrounds a qualitative paradigm as a way of engaging with intercultural capabilities in language learning. Quantitative paradigms are not sufficient and part of the difficulty in assessing has been an over-reliance on traditional modes of assessment without considering their relevance to encompassing, expanded understandings of language and cultural capabilities. It recognises that learners develop distinctive capabilities related to ‘moving between’ languages and cultures. The chapter adopts a multilingual approach that recognises that languages constitute a repertoire in which all languages are relevant and necessary for understanding learners’ capabilities. This challenges models of assessment driven by tests and scales developed within a monolingual frame. The chapter foregrounds short- and long-term perspectives and the need to move beyond viewing assessment as episodic to seeing it as situated within ongoing learning.

This paper reports on a semester-long study that explored the experience of a group of local and international students from multiple disciplines, and their teachers, in a core Intercultural Communication undergraduate course of 550 students in which there is an orientation to learning, teaching and assessment that seeks to develop students’ intercultural learning capabilities. To capture the experience of learning, teaching and assessment in a highly diverse Australian university, data were collected over the life cycle of the course. The research design was ethnographic and collaborative, involving the research team, members of the teaching staff, and members of the university’s learning and teaching unit. The data include interviews with students and teachers, students’ written assessments, and observations of weekly teaching staff meetings. The overarching finding of the study is that, to enable students to develop their intercultural learning capabilities, there is a need to rethink notions of experience and engagement, specifically to attend to the central role of language/s and culture/s in all students’ experience of learning, teaching, and assessment. Analysed examples from the data are used to illustrate four specific guiding principles underpinning this (re)orientation to learning. The study was one of two case studies funded by the University of South Australia as part of a larger project: Developing English Language and Intercultural Learning Capabilities.1

In this paper we draw attention to people who journey from one temporal and spatial setting towards another in the ‘South’, who aspire to a reconfigured sense of belonging, prosperity and wellbeing, and their multilinguality and multilingualisms. Through three vignettes of journeys we illustrate how in changing of place that linguistic diversities are encountered and mediated. During moments of North–South and South–South entanglement and exception we argue that multilingualisms re-ecologise along horizontal axes of conviviality, and / or re-index along vertical axes of exclusion. We suggest that ‘rooting’ and ‘rerouting’ multilingualisms are not only multidimensional, but they are also multifaceted as people who choose or are obliged to experience dis.-placement, undertake journeys of anticipation of replacement into regulated or unregulated situations. Multilingualisms in the memories, dreams, complex selves, materiality and complicities of coping have yet to receive sufficient attention from linguists. We attempt to capture these aspects and suggest that southern multilingualisms have much to offer and entice northern multilingualisms. We illustrate how closely integrated are multilingual repertoires with mobilities and temporalities of dislocation and change; with loss, nostalgia and the anticipation of new beginnings; and with multi-scaled complicities between individuals as they re-calibrate lives in turbulent and changing circumstances. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper reports on a project of structural and curriculum change in the Languages learning area in three Australian schools that implemented new models of Languages provision over a 3-year period and seeks to examine the ways that school cultures influence processes of change. The project adopted a qualitative collective case study approach that involved collaboration between teachers, school leadership and the research team on activities related to implementing the models, including a contextual analysis of policies and structures, collaborative curriculum planning and implementation, planning of interventions relevant to each site, monitoring, and ongoing evaluation and annual reporting. It also collected structural data in the form of school profiles, including information about the school context and learner groups, curriculum data, including program documentation, resources, student work samples, tasks and assessment data, and teacher and student evaluation data. Interviews were conducted with participating teachers, school leaders and students on a continuous basis, gathering each participant’s perspectives on the process of change over time. The paper examines the ways that the culture of schools, and in particular the structures that existed in the schools in relation to timetabling, the organisation of curriculum, the planning and enactment of teaching, learning and assessment and the approach to staffing, influenced what was possible in terms of change and ultimately the sustainability of change, particularly in relation to a learning area that is perceived to be ‘specialist’. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Transformations associated with the increasing speed, scale, and complexity of mobilities, together with the information technology revolution, have changed the demography of most countries of the world and brought about accompanying social, cultural, and economic shifts (Heugh, 2013). This complex diversity has changed the very nature of communication within and across languages, in society in general, and in education. These changes in turn require a reconceptualization of our approach to language/s education in ways that recognize a diversity of goals for people from different backgrounds, people who are learning a variety of languages in diverse settings and who may be interested in developing different capabilities and achieving different outcomes. In this article, we address the reconceptualization of the goals and outcomes of learning additional languages and processes for their formulation and realization. We will make explicit the educational values that underpin our position. Recognizing the immense diversity that the learning of additional languages in diverse contexts encompasses, our consideration is necessarily conceptual. The point of departure for our discussion is communicative language teaching, the dominant paradigm for language teaching for the past 40 years. We briefly trace its historical development and provide an account of some of the conceptual and theoretical expansions since its initial formulation. In light of this expansion we then discuss goals for learning additional languages by: (a) reaffirming the multilingual character of communication and learning to communicate, focusing on the exchange of meaning, (b) (re-)inserting the importance of personal development and aesthetics, and (c) recognizing the centrality of reflectivity and reflexivity in communication and learning to communicate. We conclude with a set of principles that are intended to capture the expanded nature of goals and their rendering for the purposes of teaching and learning. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The provisioning of community languages in Australian education has had a long and successful history when judged in the context of the number of specific languages being offered and assessed at senior secondary level in the formal examinations that provide the basis for entrance to tertiary education. However, although this provisioning is a direct result of languages policies that supported linguistic and cultural diversity in a nation with a history of migration, policies for teaching the languages of migrants have not been sustained. At the same time, the current context of complex diversity and globalized multilingualism prompts a reconsideration of the very nature and orientation of language learning (Stroud & Heugh. Languages in education. In R. Mesthrie (Ed.), Cambridge handbook of sociolinguistics (pp. 413–429). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). In this chapter, I consider briefly some dimensions of the provision for community languages in Australian education, highlighting the provisioning and the efforts on the part of communities to gain legitimacy for their languages and cultures, the complexity of national collaboration that has made it possible, and issues related to the nature and quality of programs. I then propose a reconceptualization of the learning goals and pedagogies for the learning of community languages. Both are necessary to ensure that they remain a distinctive form of provision in languages education in Australia and that this provision is responsive to the diverse and dynamic affiliations, desires, and expectations of learners of these languages in contemporary times. I conclude with a reflection on necessary research that would sustain the provision of community languages.

Linguistic and cultural diversity is a feature of most, if not all, modern societies, whether it results from historical processes of state formation, from the aggregation of colonial possessions a...

With globalization and advances in communication technologies, the movement of people and their ideas and knowledge has increased in ways and at a pace that are unprecedented. This movement changes the very nature of multilingualism and of language, culture, and language learning. Languages education, in this context, needs to build on the diversity of languages and other semiotic modes that learners bring to the classroom, as well as their diverse biographies and trajectories of experience, knowledge, language, and culture. Equally, the context demands a reconceptualization of the role of teachers of languages. Teachers enact the teaching of particular languages in their local context as members of distinctive multilingual and multicultural communities. They bring their own particular repertoires of languages, cultures, and histories of experiences that shape their frameworks of knowledge, understandings, values, and practices. It is these frameworks of interpretive resources that they use in mediating language learning with students who, in turn, use their own interpretive resources. In this article I draw on collaborative research with teachers of languages to investigate teacher understanding of the preconceptions, often tacit, that they bring to their teaching practice in the diverse interlinguistic and intercultural contexts of primary and secondary school education in Australia. I describe an expanded view of language, culture, and learning, the three fundamental concepts in languages education. Discussion follows on debates about the appropriate knowledge base and whether discourses about “learning to apply formal knowledge” and “best practice” in teacher professional learning are sufficient to assist in the development of teachers' capability to interpret their own teaching and learning practices and their students' learning as acts of reciprocal meaning-making in the context of local and global diversity.

In school languages education in Australia at present there is an increasing diversity of languages and learners learning particular languages that results from a greater global movement of students. This diversity builds on a long-established profile of diversity that reflects the migration history of Australia. It stands in sharp contrast to the force of standardisation in education in general and in the history of the development of state and national frameworks for the learning of languages K-12 in Australia and indeed beyond. These frameworks have characteristically generalised across diverse languages, diverse learner groups and diverse program conditions, in particular, the amount of time made available for language learning. In addition, in the absence of empirical studies of learner achievements in learning particular languages over time, the development of such frameworks has drawn primarily on internationally available language proficiency descriptions [such as the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), the International Second Language Proficiency Rating Scale (ISLPR), and more recently the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR)] that were developed primarily to serve reporting and credentialing rather than learning purposes. Drawing on a description of the current context of linguistic and cultural diversity and on a brief characterisation of the history of curriculum and assessment framework development for the languages area, I provide a rationale for acknowledging in the development and use of frameworks (i.e. descriptions of achievements) the diversity of languages that comprise the languages learning area in Australia and, in particular, the diverse learner groups who come to their learning with diverse experiences of learning and using particular languages. The Student Achievement in Asian Languages Education (SAALE) study provides an example of the development of descriptions of achievement that are sensitive to these dimensions of context. I discuss the rationale for such context-sensitive descriptions in relation to their potential purposes and uses at the language policy and planning and educational systems level, at the teaching and learning level, and in ongoing research.

Understanding and working with the complexity of second language learning and use in an intercultural orientation necessitates a re-examination of the different theories of learning that inform the different schools of second language acquisition (SLA). This re-examination takes place in a context where explicitly conceptualizing the nature of learning in SLA has not been sufficiently foregrounded. It also necessitates understanding how language itself, as the substance or object of learning a second language, is conceptualized. Neither the theorization of learning, nor of language on its own is sufficient to provide an adequate account of second language learning for contemporary times. In particular, this paper argues that views of language and learning derived solely from the field of (applied) linguistics are not sufficient to address the complex language learning needs of contemporary times and that a more interdisciplinary approach to language and learning is required. It is this interdisciplinary understanding that provides the basis for views of both language and learning that we consider to be necessary within an intercultural orientation. In particular, the paper will emphasize the interpretative nature of learning and the ways that such a view contributes to our understanding of learning in language education. From this perspective, the process of learning to communicate in a second language can be characterized as involving both a ‘moving between’ linguistic and cultural systems and an acknowledgement of the role of mutual interpretation in exchanging meanings through the acts of both communicating and learning. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This first entry on culture and language assessment is written at a time of much reconsideration of the major constructs in language/s learning and language assessment. This is in response at least partly to the increasingly complex reality of multilinguality and multiculturality in our contemporary world. Culture is one of these constructs and is considered in its interrelationship with language and learning. It is because of this reconsideration that the discussion in this chapter is focused on scoping the conceptual landscape and signaling emerging rather than established lines of research. The discussion encompasses (a) the assessment of culture in the learning of languages, including recent interest in assessing intercultural practices and capabilities, and (b) the role of culture (and language), or its influence, on the assessment of learning where multiple languages are in play. The discussion considers the place of culture in conceptualizing the communicative competence and understandings of the role of culture in all learning. Developments related to the assessment of intercultural practices and capabilities in foreign language learning are described, as well as multilingual (and multicultural) assessment approaches. The assessment of capabilities beyond the linguistic poses major challenges to traditional conceptualizations and elicitation and judgment practices of assessment. This is because what is being assessed is the linguistic and cultural situatedness of students of language/s as they communicate and learn across linguistic and cultural systems. This challenges the traditional assessment paradigm and also raises important ethical issues. This conceptual and practical stretch can only extend thinking about educational assessment.

This paper examines the development of the First Language Maintenance and Development (FLMD) program in South Australia. This program is the main language policy activity that specifically focuses on language maintenance in government primary schools and has existed since 1986. During this time, the program has evolved largely as the result of ad hoc changes, often resulting from decisions made outside the immediate scope of language maintenance provisions. The program was initially introduced as a general reform of language education in primary schools but eventually became a program focused specifically on language maintenance. The paper traces the ways that ad hoc changes have shaped the program, and how these have shaped the program over time. As a result of these changes over time, first language maintenance has moved from being an integrated focus within core language policy to being a peripheral language policy activity. As a result, although the FLMD represents an aspect of South Australia’s language policy, it does not have either a clear position within that policy nor does it have a clearly developed focus of its own Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In the context of internationalisation, the delivery of higher education programmes increasingly combines open learning with collaborations among people of diverse languages and cultures. In this paper we argue that while the literature on international education focuses on mapping modes of delivery in international education, there is also a need to recognise that it is these modes, together with language and culture, which mediate the delivery of programmes. Drawing on data from a case study of collaboration between an Australian university and an educational institution in Malaysia, we argue that international education per force involves collaboration and that this collaboration is mediated.

This paper describes how more than 40 languages gained and retained legitimacy as subjects for graduation from upper secondary schooling and for tertiary entrance selection in the South Australian educational system. Essentially the process required conforming with administrative, curriculum and community structures and fitting the mould of evolving language policies and generic frameworks. While the success of language communities in achieving this status is recognised, questions remain about overall uptake of languages and the fundamental rationale for maintenance.

In situating the challenges in languages education policy in Australia in current times,I give an account of policy and curriculum development for the learning of languages in school education. In so doing, I highlight (1) the integral relationship between languages education, literacy and multiculturalism policies; (2) the meaning and consequences of the absence of a national policy on languages; and (3) the fundamental challenge of addressing the pervasive ‘monolingual mindset’, particularly in school education, as a major site for the formation of knowledge, understanding and values. I then draw on my recent experience of working on the framing of Languages as a learning area in the national curriculum, which is currently being developed in Australia, to illustrate the complexity of doing languages policy and curriculum policy work and the efforts to resist the forces towards simplification. I conclude with a discussion of the challenge of ‘unlearning’ monolingualism, both for those involved in the field of languages education and for those involved in education in general. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In the context of globalisation and super-diversity we are seeing in education an increasing mobility of students, global flows of knowledge and the internationalization of teaching and learning. This phenomenon influences learning in general and language learning in particular. In languages education there is an increasing diversity of learners with diverse life-worlds and learning trajectories, and an increasing diversity of languages offered in different settings. The impact of this diversity in education is particularly marked in assessment because of its characteristic tendency towards generalisation and standardisation. In this paper I discuss the impact of globalisation on ways of describing frameworks of learner achievement that recognise the diversity of learners. I describe a recent national study that investigated learner achievements in Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Korean K–12, relative to learner background and time-on-task. The resulting context-sensitive descriptions of learner achievements provide a framing of learner achievements in a way that does justice to students’ diverse linguistic and cultural repertoires.

This introductory chapter, intended to both frame and provide a brief overview of those that follow, takes as its point of departure the realisation that in a world of globalization, where 'super diversity', multiculturalism and multilingualism increasingly characterize communities, and where language contact and cross-cultural interactions have become the norm, a change in the way in which we think about languages and languages education is needed. In particular, languages education needs to be developed on the basis of an understanding of the interplay of all the languages and cultures available in local contexts. In addition, it needs to be developed in such a way that students, as language users and language learners, become effective mediators of meanings across multiple languages, cultures and semiotic systems, thereby undergoing a process of personal transformation. We suggest that the need for such development should urge language planners, policy-makers and educators to adopt a relational perspective on language and languages that both respects and accounts for different world views and which has important implications for curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and evaluation. Each of the chapters of this volume, in its own way, provides insights into the need for and consequences of such a perspective.

The increasing influence of sociocultural theories of learning on assessment practices in second language education necessitates an expansion of the knowledge base that teacher-assessors need to develop (what teachers need to know) and related changes in the processes of language teacher education (how they learn and develop it). Teacher assessors need to acquire concepts from diverse assessment paradigms; they need to learn to use these concepts in developing, using and analysing assessment procedures and results; they need to exercise critical perspectives on their own assessment practices for particular purposes in diverse contexts, especially in seeking to do justice to all in education. In this paper I argue that, to develop language assessment literacy with the dual goals of transforming teacher assessment practices and developing teacher understanding of the phenomenon of assessment itself and themselves as assessors, it is necessary to reconsider both the knowledge base and the complex processes of language teacher education. I draw on projects I have conducted on developing and investigating teacher understanding and practices in second language assessment, to discuss the need to work with the often tacit preconceptions, beliefs, understandings and world-views about assessment that teacher-assessors bring to teacher professional learning programs and that inform their conceptualizations, interpretations, judgments and decisions in assessment. I discuss the need in developing language assessment literacy for processes that develop teacher-assessors' capability to explore and evaluate their own preconceptions so as to become aware of how they interpret their own assessment practices and their students' second language learning. Through these processes they develop a deeper understanding of the interpretive nature of assessment and their own self-awareness as assessors. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In an increasingly interconnected world, all students in higher education, both those from overseas and local, need to learn and to understand how to use their discipline knowledge in practising their disciplines/professions in increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse contexts. The issue is particularly pressing for overseas students because their learning involves constantly moving between at least two languages and cultures (the students’ first language(s) and, typically, English) and, as such, is a continuously interlingual and intercultural process.

The article examines intercultural capability in learning languages. The author explains that the cultural component of language learning has traditionally comprised a generalized body of knowledge about the target country and its people. She explains that an intercultural orientation to teaching languages seeks the transformation of students' identities in the act of learning. Intercultural orientation in Australia is discussed. The article looks at the notion of "stance" in language learning which is used to capture the overall framework of knowledge. A reconceptualization of the assessment process is also discussed.

Teachers of languages, as well as educators in general and employers, increasingly recognise the importance of developing intercultural capability. This recognition, however, brings the question of how this is evidenced as an outcome of learning. The assessment of this capability poses a range of theoretical and practical challenges. I begin with a description of languages learning within an intercultural orientation and a model for understanding assessment. I then discuss issues of conceptualising and defining the construct, as integral to the process of assessment. Next, I consider issues in eliciting intercultural capability in a proposed framework that includes assessment as both communicative performance (elicited in ‘critical moments’) and meta-awareness (elicited in commentaries). To conclude, I discuss issues related to identifying and judging evidence of the development of the intercultural capability and warranting the inferences made about students’ developing understanding. The discussion is based on the experience of ongoing studies investigating the assessment of the intercultural capability in learning languages and in international education. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The history of the role of assessment in policy-making for languages education in Australia over the past 20 years is characterised by a complex and shifting interface between language policy, curriculum and assessment. Three phases can be identified during which significant changes occur. These highlight an ongoing struggle for legitimacy for languages as an area of study and for its intrinsic diversity. Common themes in this account include the relationship and tensions between (1) language policy and general educational policy, (2) national and State/Territory-based educational developments in Australia, and (3) the influence and consequences of both inclusion and exclusion from nationwide assessment in education. The paper demonstrates the ways in which the dominant discourses at particular moments of history shape educational policies and practices which, in turn, operate to shape the place and status of languages learning in school education of children.

This paper addresses changing meanings attached to the concept of community in languages education in the school setting in Australia. The change consists of a shift from community as a necessary definitional category, created in the mid 1970s to mark the recognition of languages other than English used in the Australian community, to a recognition, in the current context of increasing mobility of people and ideas, of the need to problematise the concept of community towards working with the complexity of the lived, dynamic languages and cultures in the repertoires of students. Intercultural language learning is discussed as a way of thinking about communities in languages education in current times. Copyright 2007 Angela Scarino. No part of this article may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

The Australian Language Levels (ALL) Project is a national project funded jointly by the Curriculum Development Council, Canberra and the S.A. Education Department. It has been set up to develop an organizational framework and curriculum guidelines which will permit all those involved in language education (teachers, syllabus planners, advisers, curriculum writers) to work together to bring about curriculum renewal in language teaching in Australia. This paper examines the curriculum implications of the complexity of the language situation in Australia and the processes through which the ALL Project is responding to curriculum needs in the languages field on a national scale.