This article explores language experiences of three Bangladeshi migrant workers with low English proficiency in Australia through narrative inquiry. The narrative of each participant presents insights into the ways in which these migrants navigated through their work and social life, and developed social and communicative strategies to survive in…

Key drivers for migrants' social integration are education, employment, and skills in the dominant language of the settlement country. Data from Building a New Life in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Humanitarian Migrants were used to examine migrants' English proficiency and how oral English proficiency facilitated or hindered participation…

With the globalisation of education, large numbers of students with interrupted schooling and low English literacy levels represent both a quantitative and qualitative shift in the kinds of students faced by teachers in classrooms. In Australia, after a year in an intensive English language programme, immigrant and refugee students are placed in…

In the context of multicultural Australia, bilingual education has generally become a viable educational option for all school age students, but there is less interest in developing bilingual skills in adults with a non-English speaking background (NESB). This paper arises out of a 1991 research study on "The Literacy Needs of NESB…

This chapter uses the insights of Dorothy Smith and Anna Yeatman, both feminist scholars, to explore the nature of policy formation through two examples from Australia. Smith and Yeatman argue that all description is both biased and interested. The article documents how the values of pluralism and equity were not served well by Australian policy…

The English article system presents many problems for non-native speakers of English, particularly when they do not have an equivalent structure in their first language. Different approaches to the teaching of articles have attempted to overcome this problem. By encouraging students to address the notion of countability and to identify specific…

This article argues that Australian universities accepting students from developing nations with native languages other than English are obligated to provide for special language needs. Language problems for students from Papua New Guinea are seen to arise more from lack of equivalence between concepts in academic discourse and in the students'…

This book focuses on a common set of circumstances in Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand in which increasing numbers of young children from minority language backgrounds are taught in mainstream English-medium classrooms. It provides a longitudinal ethnography of a group of children learning English in a Canadian…

This book examines the impact of English in countries in which it is taken for granted--Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. It explores how the impact of English affects the development of national language policies, the maintenance of minority languages, the ability to provide services in other languages, the efforts…