Although "VCE English Language (EL)" has been offered for twenty years in Victoria, Australia, the subject, and especially students' experience of it, has had little evaluation. Using data from four surveys conducted across seven years with over 1500 Unit 3-4 "EL" students, augmented by VCAA enrolment data, a profile of…

The installation of the new Australian Curriculum offers rich possibilities for rethinking English in Australia, and beyond. This paper proposes that rhetoric is usefully drawn into this work of reconceptualisation, as strategically an organising principle for English curriculum theory and practice. It reviews existing work on rhetoric and…

A renewed interest in diversity for English following the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey of 2017 aligns with the concerns of inclusive education. Since previous special issues of "English in Australia" on gender in 1994 and 1995, the field of inclusive education has burgeoned and become recognised as a discipline in its own right.…

In this paper we take on Green's (2017) orientation of the Australian Curriculum: English and consider what might it hold for the students of Australia. We set about analysing eighteen minutes of storytelling by a group of young 9-12 year old Kunibídji males from Maningrida in the far North of the Northern Territory in Australia, making this…

The role of the English teacher in Australia is constantly being negotiated and with every ideological development teachers are positioned to question their professional values and practices. Much attention has been afforded to this discussion. The purpose of this paper is to (a) provide an analysis of the evolution of the art of being an English…

Many English teachers identify as readers, drawing on broad literary knowledge to shape their pedagogy and to meet ever-increasing curriculum demands. Teachers identifying as writers, however, face the paradox of enabling authorial agency while adhering to time constraints and rigid assessment criteria. This article examines the role of the…

It came as a surprise to me, after an extensive Google search and reading of numerous policies, that English, and more specifically Standard Australian English, is not the official language of Australia (ACARA, 2016c; Lo Bianco, 1987). There are examples cited by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (1999) that state, 'English is regarded as…

This article begins by discussing the Australian Curriculum: English and its remit to contribute to this nation's reconciliation agenda. Ever cognisant of our individual identities as non-Indigenous teachers and teacher educators and our relations to this topic, we hone in on one Content Description from Year 10, and analyse one stimulus text, an…

This paper will begin by looking at globalisation, education and transnationalism in the context of Australia's post-war immigration history leading to a brief examination of the international literature surrounding second and third generation immigration. A brief review of international educational trends in English language teaching in recent…

In this paper we focus on one facet of Asia literacy and examine the potential of intercultural understanding through two films about Asians in Australia, as the basis for exploring Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia "inside" and not through the more accepted mode of "outside" the nation. In doing so we foreground how…

The year 2012 is significant for English teachers in Australia, not only is it the National Year of Reading, but it is also the year when an increasing number of English teachers across the country are implementing the "Australian Curriculum: English," the first national curriculum in the history of the nation. This paper addresses the…

This paper is concerned with how refugee stories can be used as the means of exploring values and developing intercultural understanding in the English classroom. To illustrate this possibility, André Dao's (2005) "Vuot Bien--The Search for Freedom: Huong Thi Nguen's Story," about the impact of war and oppression on people's lives,…

This paper focuses on Australian texts with Asian representations, which will be discussed in terms of Ethical Intelligence (Weinstein, 2011) explored through drama. This approach aligns with the architecture of the "Australian Curriculum: English" (AC:E, v5, 2013), in particular the general capabilities of "ethical…

This paper uses a narrative constructed from diary entries made over the course of a year teaching English as a platform for examining some of the political, economic, educational and socio-cultural contexts into which the Digital Education Revolution (DER) was launched as policy. It analyses the underlying imperatives, components and balance of…

Despite the emphasis in the press and elsewhere on the print-based nature of English curriculum, opportunities to develop digital English, with attention to web-based and multimodal forms of text, literacy, location, and activity, are present in the draft national (Australian) curriculum for English, alongside more traditional forms. This paper…