Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 28, Issue 1, 2005

Gossip has mainly been investigated as an oral discourse practice, one that serves as a mechanism to reaffirm relationships and to construct, monitor and maintain social norms and values within communities. This study investigates how a group of Aboriginal English speaking teenage girls constructed norms, values and identities in their email gossip. Adopting a communities of practice perspective and a social constructionist understanding of identity, the study draws on ethnographic data collected on the writing practices of a group of Indigenous girls in a high school program for educationally ‘at risk’ students. The findings indicate that the girls used email gossip to do friendship while constructing multifaceted identities and negotiating social norms and values relating to four themes: 1) the social practices of girls in friendship circles; 2) the physical attributes, characters and social practices of boys; 3) the relationships between girls and boys; and 4) risk-taking practices. By creating spaces in the curriculum for email writing (and gossip), teachers can make school a more personally meaningful place for ‘disaffected’ students. It can also enhance students’ writing, computer and analytical skills and raise their language awareness with respect to constructing identities needed to participate in the workplace and wider community.

Changing global and local conditions have given rise to complex issues of identity. Within such conditions, the challenge for educators is to help students to develop a language with which to describe the new and dynamic cultural identities and relationships constitutive of what Hall (1996a, p.223) describes as ‘New Times’. Students need opportunities to encounter and to negotiate ways of shaping the world through language that are more representative of ‘New Ethnicities’ (Hall, 1996a, p. 481) that characterize Australian society in the context of dynamic global networks. A dialogic pedagogy can provide opportunities for students to engage in an ethically reflexive dialectic with the various discourses of ethnicity available for appropriation in Australian society. A study of the language exchanged by a group of Grade 5 students within the context of a Studies of Asia curriculum project highlights such struggle between different discourses of ethnicity.

This study investigates achievement in second language learning (Chinese) in primary school in relation to learner variables such as amount and duration of instruction and home language background.1 Currently in the State of Victoria it is recommended that all students learn a second language from the beginning of primary school to the end of Year 10. As the majority of students in some LOTE (Languages Other Than English) classes such as Chinese are background speakers, some parents and teachers are concerned that non-background learners can be disadvantaged compared with classmates who have some exposure to the LOTE outside school. In order to examine whether home language use has any impact on achievement, we developed a test of four skills and administered it to Year 6 students in two primary schools in Melbourne. The results showed that Chinese background students scored much higher than non-Chinese background students in all four areas. However a close examination of the data revealed that other variables such as Chinese study outside school and the number of years of study at school also influenced the test scores. This research has strong implications for developing a LOTE curriculum for both background and non-background speakers.

Mathematics educators are concerned about students’ lack of ability to translate mathematical word problems into computable forms. Researchers argue that linguistic problems lie at the root of students’ difficulties with mathematical word problems. The issue becomes more complicated for bilingual students. It is argued that if students study mathematics in a second language they cannot be as successful as when they study in their first language. This study investigates the relationship between reading comprehension and performance on mathematics word problems in L1 and L2 for students learning English as a second language in a delayed partial immersion program. Data were collected from 250 Turkish students from Grade 8 of a private school in Istanbul through reading comprehension tests in L1 and L2 and an algebra word problems test prepared in L1 and L2. The results indicate a positive relationship between reading comprehension and mathematics performance. They also show that the students who participated in this study were not disadvantaged when they studied mathematics in English.

This article analyzes the self-correction of spelling by learners of intermediate Japanese. Participants in this study consisted of 20 students with kanji (Chinese characters) background and 43 without. This study investigates (1) types of spelling errors made; (2) the success rate of corrections made when codes for types of errors (error-codes) were given; (3) strategies used for correcting spelling errors; (4) reasons for a failure to correct errors; and (5) measures for further improvement in correction rates. Three methods, including ‘think-aloud’, observation notes, and the writing of an essay before and after corrections, were used as research tools. The findings show a high rate of success in the self-correction strategies. The errors made by the students may be attributed to a number of different causes. On the basis of the findings, this article puts forth the following suggestions, among others: the provision of increased time for corrections, of more detailed instruction in kanji, and of correct pronunciation instruction; increased practice in the use of dictionaries; and improved codes to indicate types of errors.

The project reported in this paper aims to test the concept of learner developmental readiness’ and its pedagogic effectiveness in the teaching of foreign language grammar. It focuses on the teaching of English as a second language (ESL) in a formal classroom context. The aim is to ascertain whether a specific teaching order based on the concept of developmental readiness, can enhance learning outcomes in foreign language classrooms. The main theoretical approach used is the Teachability Hypothesis articulated in Pienemann’s (1998) Processability Theory (PT), which “predicts that stages of acquisition cannot be skipped through formal instruction and that instruction will be beneficial if it focuses on structures from ‘the next stage’” (Pienemann, 1998, p. 13). Past teachability studies (e.g. Boss, 1996; Dyson, 1996; Ellis, 1989; Pienemann, 1984; Spada& Lightbown, 1999) have employed predicted order testing. However in this study subjects were exposed to English syntax structures either in the predicted or in the reversed orders outlined under PT. The findings of this study show that learners exposed to instruction in accordance with the developmental order predicted in PT produce the target language (TL) structures with a higher grammatical accuracy than those exposed to the reversed order. This suggests that instruction is more beneficial, in relation to grammatical accuracy, when it focuses on the TL structures in a developmentally implicational manner.