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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 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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.