In this article, Anne-Marie Morgan, Deputy Head of School and a member of the English, Languages and Literacies Education team in the School of Education at the University of New England, and of the Languages, Literacies and Literature Research Network, presents highlights from the Summer AFMLTA National Languages Conference (20th, Melbourne,…

Languages teachers are all aware of the significant advantages and benefits learning a language provides, and believe in the importance of second language acquisition. However, why is it that languages teachers need to justify learning a second language and work hard to encourage more students to see the importance of learning a language and to…

In recent debates about curriculum, Young (2008, p. 101) has proposed school learning must involve initiation into the "powerful knowledge" of the disciplines that underpin subject domains, thereby "giving students the tools to think the unthinkable". Opponents query whether such knowledge is available in subjects such as…

Despite the recent Australian Government commitment to supporting schools in growing students into global citizens, language educators cannot rely on this alone to attract new language students. The Young Language Ambassador Program is a new initiative that started in August 2014. The Young Language Ambassador Program is a partnership between…

Queensland second language immersion programs have been in existence for three decades, and are part of a growing number of additive bilingual education programs in Australia. Most prominently, many new Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programs have been established particularly in Victoria over the past few years. This focus on…

The following is the text of the Horwood Address delivered by Associate Professor Lesley Harbon from the University of Sydney at the AFMLTA Biennial Conference in Canberra 2013. The focus of the Address is accomplished teaching of languages and cultures, known to us all through the AFMLTA's work on Professional Standards published in 2005.…

In 2008, the Faculty of Arts at The University of Melbourne embarked upon a major overhaul of curriculum in nine languages: Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese in the Asia Institute; and French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish in the School of Languages and Linguistics. This article details the changes to the beginners' Italian…

The Research Centre for Languages and Cultures (RCLC) at the University of South Australia hosts an annual symposium on current issues related to languages and language education. The hallmark of the RCLC symposia is that they intend to raise critical, current issues in the languages field for wider debate, include presenting cutting edge research…

Developing curricula for languages in the context of the Australian Curriculum is a complex undertaking that needs to address a number of demands. These include: the nature of language-and-culture learning for contemporary times within an increasingly diverse linguistic and cultural world; the goals of mainstream education and the…

It is quite common for Australian schools introducing Japanese as a foreign language to engage native Japanese volunteers to assist in the classroom using a collaborative team-teaching approach. These volunteer Japanese assistant teachers, commonly referred to as Japanese Assistant Teachers (JATs), are an indispensable asset to school language…

A look back at the first year of the Language and Cultures Network for Australian Universities (LCNAU) highlights how great the need for such a network has been within the sector and how important LCNAU's role will be in ensuring the future of languages teaching and research in universities and beyond. LCNAU was established in early 2011 as part…

Institutions of higher education teach fewer languages, in less secure ways, for less time per week, for shorter periods, by an increasingly casually employed staff, in often underfunded, underappreciated and under stress modes, but participants in the Australian Academy of the Humanities' "Beyond the Crisis: Revitalising Languages in…

The evaluation of the Professional Standards Project (PSP) highlights its success both as a set of resources that provided the catalyst for professional conversations and learning and the National and State processes of facilitation of these conversations and learning, as well as the classroom-based investigations undertaken by teachers. For the…

This paper develops the idea that classroom investigation can be an integral part of teaching and learning, an ongoing "stance" that enables us to gather valuable information about teaching and learning that may otherwise go unnoticed. This information can in turn inform how teachers understand and develop intercultural language teaching and…

This article presents selected findings from an ethnographic study of classroom-based assessment practices in languages classrooms (Indonesian) in the final year of primary (Year 6) and the first year of secondary (Year 7), respectively. In particular, the paper focuses on differences between the respective year levels in how learning was assessed…