This article explores the kinds of teacher knowledge promoted in TESOL-related curriculum standards in five jurisdictions (Australia and England at the national level, New York City and New York State in the United States, and Ontario, Canada, at the subnational level). Such documents are increasingly important in defining, and potentially…

There is a growing body of literature about the qualities of professional teacher educators (TEs) and their impact on preparing professional teachers. However, English Language Teaching (ELT) research has fallen behind in this regard, despite the fact that different programs worldwide suffer from different limitations, due to certain aspects…

The experience of teaching languages in rural schools differs markedly from teaching languages in urban contexts, in relation to the size and nature of communities and their interactions, numbers of teachers of languages, in and out of school contact, and in the cultural and language backgrounds of students and their likelihood of opportunities to…

"Language across the curriculum" has been pivotal in establishing a knowledge base on the role of language for accessing opportunities afforded by the curriculum. Yet, the ubiquity of language "within" all facets of human activity--not least of all the more abstract domains of thinking and relating with others--can easily…

This article reports on the first comprehensive survey of public school teachers in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) around issues of multicultural and English as Second Language (ESL) education. While there is substantial literature on multicultural education--what it should and shouldn't be--there is much that is left unexplored in…

In this paper, I explore the impact of linguistic super-diversity on the teaching of languages at tertiary level. Through a small-scale study of university-based language teachers in Australia and the United Kingdom, I examine to what extent these teachers have become aware of the changed language profiles that their students are bringing to the…

The transmission and dissemination of knowledge in Aboriginal societies for the most part occurs orally in an Aboriginal language or in Aboriginal English. However, whilst support is given to speaking skills in Indigenous communities, in our education system less emphasis is given to developing equivalent oral communicative competence in Standard…

English as a second language (ESL) teaching is partly a thinking process in which teacher knowledge plays a pivotal role in making instructional choices (Breen, Hird, Milton, Oliver, & Thwaite, 2001). The present study contributes to understandings of teacher knowledge by exploring the types of knowledge, which practicing teachers value in…

This article reports a study on a little-researched area: the linguistic repertoires of teachers of English as a second language (ESL) to adults. It proposes that, to heed recent calls to recognise learners' plurilingualism and to incorporate learners' languages in the ESL classroom, teachers' plurilingualism must be acknowledged and valued. This…

Language pedagogy in Australia, North America and Europe has been influenced in the past 20 years by a sociocultural understanding of language and culture, which has asked teachers to adopt an intercultural approach, integrating critical cultural reflection within language learning. Due to the diversity of backgrounds, however, different groups of…

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…

This study presents an insight into content and language integrated learning (CLIL) practices in the Australian state of Queensland. The article comprises four main sections. The first section outlines the context of CLIL in Australia and Queensland; there follows a brief review of the literature on stakeholders in CLIL programmes, such as…

This paper aims to (re)engage ESL with the broader literacy debate, by calling for a better recognition of what literacy means for second language learners within contemporary Australian education systems, and acknowledging the specialist professional knowledge that ESL teachers bring to the mainstream. The literacy debate that has shaped so much…

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…

This paper examines the curricula for English language teacher education in two universities, one in Australia and the other in Vietnam. Specifically, it analyses the structures of the two curricula, compares and contrasts them, and examines how the development of the curricula was shaped by distinctive contextual factors. Sources of data include…