Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 31, Issue 1, 2008

This article reports on a case study of negotiation that occurred in peer group oral interactions under assessment conditions. Discourse analysis was used to illustrate how participants negotiated and co-constructed the assessment format itself as well as meaning exchange sequences. Analyses of the data point to the advantage of using peer group discussion task in generating the interaction patterns representative of natural conversational situations. By concentrating on the situated dynamics and process of peer group functioning, this study also demonstrates the importance of peer learning opportunities that resulted from collaborative reasoning under assessment conditions, which have typically been ignored in the conventional testing paradigm. Implications of these findings over validity issues in oral language assessment are discussed.

There is a common expectation, particularly amongst international students, that studying in an English-medium university should automatically produce a significant improvement in their English language skills. However, there is growing evidence to suggest that this is not necessarily the case.

This paper reports on a study which investigated the impact of one semester of study at a university on the English language proficiency of a sample of 40 international students. This was measured by comparing the students’ scores on a diagnostic English language test at the beginning and end of their first semester. A comparison of discourse measures of writing in terms of fluency, complexity and accuracy was also undertaken. Background information, including details of ESL support, if any, was collected for all participants via questionnaires, and interviews were conducted with a subset of the participants.

It was found that studying in an English-medium university generally led to an improvement in English language proficiency. The paper identifies a number of factors which appear to support language development, as well as factors that may inhibit it.

This paper addresses changing meanings attached to the concept of “community” in languages education in the school setting in Australia. The change consists of a shift from “community” as a necessary definitional category, created in the mid 1970s to mark the recognition of languages other than English used in the Australian community, to a recognition, in the current context of increasing mobility of people and ideas, of the need to problematise the concept of “community” towards working with the complexity of the lived, dynamic languages and cultures in the repertoires of students. Intercultural language learning is discussed as a way of thinking about communities in languages education in current times.

Ever since the Socratic-Platonic inquiry on the nature of language, linguistic and socio-cultural thinking in Eurocentric academic cultures about human communication has been discoursed from various philosophical perspectives based on diverse conceptualisations, perceptions, understandings, notions, theories, descriptions and explanations of the variable phenomena observed in intra- and intercultural interaction and communication. In the variable research areas of applied linguistics ‘scholars from a variety of disciplines have applied themselves to defining what the nature of intercultural communication might be and how it might be taught’ (Kramsch, 2002, p. 277). However, in the concerted effort to apply our understanding of “the intercultural” in our research and educational praxis, we ‘have no other recourse but discourse itself – the discourse of [our] discipline, laid out on the page as disciplinary truth. And that, as James Clifford (Clifford, 1988) would say, is the “predicament of culture”’ (Kramsch, 2002, p. 282). In the following essay, this “predicament” is examined in the contexts of the discourse tradition which centres on “dialogue” as a valued means of understanding self-and-other intra-and-inter-culturally. Discussion will focus on how “dialogue” can impose “situated/positioned” ways of interpreting and understanding “the intercultural” in languages education, especially when it defers engaging with variable-linguisticality and variable-traditionality in its discourse tradition.