Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 19, Issue 2, 1996

Baker and Freebody (1989) argued that the teaching of reading was the teaching of culture, and in learning the culture of schooling, children were learning how to respond to the authority of the teacher and the school texts. Their interest in analysing the talk around text which occurred in primary schools lay in critiquing the politics of school knowledge. In this paper, a transitivity analysis within a systemic functional grammar will be used to explore what the discourse of reading lessons looks like in one secondary school context, to examine what is being communicated about the culture of schooling and to come to a different conclusion to that of Baker and Freebody about the value of teacher and text-authorising strategies.

CALL has been promoted for nearly 30 years essentially on the basis, not of fact, but of the myth, that it demonstrably produces positive language learning outcomes. In reality, there is no reliable evidence to support such claims. If the effectiveness of CALL is to move beyond the stage of myth to that of demonstrably “certified” fact, development in the field needs a clear theoretical base from which to operate. SLA theory can provide insights and help ensure that we are at least asking the right questions. Likewise, it has reliable research methodologies available to properly frame hypotheses and evaluate the results of CALL efforts. No less so, however, SLA theory very much needs the kind of “hard” language learning input which CALL can deliver. Collaboration in the design of CALL programmes offers a valuable means of eliciting linguistic data essential to the testing of SLA hypotheses. Even more importantly for SLA theory construction, the ability of computer-based programmes to unobtrusively track the behaviour of learners, offers a unique “window of observation” on the processes underlying observed performance. Despite much promise, and nearly three decades of efforts by CALL enthusiasts, effective exploitation of educational technology in language teaching remains to be achieved.

This paper explores a model for teaching communicative performance which integrates the teaching of norms of interaction in French with the teaching of kinesics, prosodies and the grammar of spoken French. Students’ own perceptions of stereotypes were used as an entry point into the discourse practices of the target culture. Students were filmed while they perform role plays in which they try to reproduce the rules of French conversation. The group viewed the filmed performances and feed back was given to students who are encouraged to discuss their response to learning foreign codes of cultural behaviour. The paper looks into the complexities of teaching culture and language as an integrated process.

An interest in investigating the effect of instruction on interlanguage development prompted me to conduct a study on a small group of adult migrant learners of English. As a first step, the learners were assessed for their stage of syntactic development. This assessment showed that a structure-do-fronted questions – had not been acquired by some of the learners but was one for which they were syntactically ready. Because questioning is an important and complex speech act, the learners were then given instruction which focused their attention on do-fronting. The follow-up assessment indicated that instruction can be successful because the learners acquired do-fronting. The study supports the claim that form-focused instruction can make a difference. It also lends weight to Pienemann’s claim that the effectiveness of instruction depends on whether a structure is learnable for an individual learner. The study shows that form-focused instruction can provide an innovative linguistic focus to communicative language teaching and give important assistance with the second language acquisition of the learners.

Despite rapid growth in the provision of alternative dispute resolution services by governments, little sociological attention has been paid to the emerging form these services take. In this paper I offer a preliminary analysis of mediations conducted by the Community Justice Program in Queensland. I focus on the interactional management of two competing constraints on the talk. On the one hand mediation services must provide an accountably standardised and recognisable process. This creates the need for formalisation of the mediation process. On the other hand, because of philosophical commitments to disputant control over the dispute and its outcome, Community Justice Program mediations must be conducted in such a way as to display this commitment to disputant control and authority in the proceedings. This creates a conflicting need for displays of informality. This paper focuses on some strategies which appear to be designed to achieve this mix of formality and informality in Community Justice Program mediations.

Using the theoretical framework developed by Clyne this paper examines the factors influencing language maintenance among a cohort of secondary school students of Vietnamese ethnic background in Adelaide. It reports on a survey of 197 students who were asked (1) to estimate the extent to which, in Australia, they used Vietnamese when speaking to close others; how often these people used Vietnamese when speaking to them; and how often the students used Vietnamese in certain social contexts; and (2) to rate their ability in written and oral Vietnamese and written and oral English. Variables derived from these measures were then correlated with a number of other demographic, social, cultural and attitudinal factors in order to determine the major influences on language maintenance. Language use was greater with parents and grandparents than with members of the students’ own generation. Vietnamese language was used more in private and ethnic settings such as the home and community events than in public settings. Vietnamese language competence declined and English language competence increased with length of residence. Overall length of residence in Australia and age at which that residence commenced were more influential in language maintenance than ethnic identity or attitudes to cultural maintenance.

Japanese and Chinese are often labelled as difficult-to-learn languages, due to the fact that their written forms use logographic characters. Students of Japanese frequently have an aversion to learning Chinese characters – called kanji – claiming that they are ‘too difficult’ or that there are 4too many’ of them. This paper aims to examine the role of sound in reading Japanese script Major arguments for semantic vs phonological identification will be examined with a view to determining the relative importance of phonological processes in reading kanji and kana, and to see if any conclusions can be drawn which may assist the teaching of kanji to learners of Japanese as a second language.