Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. Supplement Series - Volume 9, Issue 1, 1992

Language planning is an activity that takes place in formal/national situations, but it also occurs in a variety of unintended ways and on smaller scales (e.g. Russo and Baldauf 1986). This paper documents the informal language planning which has occurred as part of the process of developing and implementing Arizona’s Elementary Foreign Language Mandate. It is a case study which demonstrates the problems and effects of informal language planning in public education systems such as Arizona’s. The study focuses on the initial specifications of the mandate and the efforts of individual school districts to comply in a timely manner. The difficulties encountered by one school district as it considers ways to implement the mandate are examined in detail. The data for this study was gathered from official documents, personal interviews, videotapes, newspaper articles, public meetings and independent research related to language policy in the state of Arizona. The study suggests that a greater awareness of language planning skills at this level could lead to the development of more effective language programs.

University language teaching in Australia has undergone significant changes over the past few years in spite of considerable constraints. Many institutions have responded positively to the changing needs of their students with new courses, study abroad programs and summer schools. This paper focuses on some recent innovations taking place in language teaching at the University of Melbourne. These relate to both policy and practice and include the establishment of a School of Languages. Taken as a whole these innovations constitute an important step in the development of a coherent university language policy and provide new directions in language teaching at this University.

More than 90 different languages are spoken in Australia, and approximately 14 percent of children in Australia’s schools speak a language other than English at home (Clyne 1988:22). In many classrooms, between 70 and 100 percent of children fall into this category, particularly at their entry point into formal schooling, usually at the age of five or six. As a result, the majority of mainstream teachers, especially those in early childhood programs for children under the age of eight years, find themselves unwitting language teachers. Yet the majority of these teachers, even those who are themselves bilingual, have had only a rudimentary orientation to bilingual teaching models and methodologies in their preservice training. Currently, the most common model of English language teaching in Australia’s schools (with some significant but relatively minor exceptions) combines limited specialist intervention with classroom ‘submersion’. The recent policy paper, Australia’s language, does not signal any change to this situation. It is the thesis of this paper that, within the unified national system of tertiary education, there resides potential for closer links between Schools of Education, Schools of Linguistics and Schools of Modern Languages that might enable the education system to make better use of its existing linguistic resources for the good of both individuals and the nation.

The methods employed to study languages at university are less important for producing competent language users than the availability of in-country experience. The principal issue to be addressed with regards to this experience is that of equity of access. Real equity can only be achieved through a substantial government commitment to in-country language learning.

A joint research project between Edith Cowan University and the Guangzhou Foreign Language University, China, is seeking to find out whether university students achieve greater proficiency than otherwise when instruction is given intensively or by immersion approaches. This paper situates the research in the context of research on intensive and immersion language education at University level, particularly in the U.S.A. and Canada, outlines some principles and problems associated with the research and reports on the progress of the first phase of the project.

This ethnographic study is of an eleven-minute segment of an English as a Second Language lesson in a Year 8 class in Torres Strait. It focuses on a tandem activity where students are asked to get information from each other in ‘proper English sentences.’ Though the aim is laudable, the task is structured more to get the information than to practise the process of talking. Furthermore, it is not situated in a social setting despite student attempts to context it socially. The students have difficulty understanding the complex language used to introduce the task, but ultimately engage in it for a substantial time, practising communicating with each other and with the teacher. However, the neophyte teacher’s goal of grammatical competence plays down the importance of sociolinguistic competence.

It is proposed that teaching and learning the schemas of language is important for effective language learning. In the first part of the paper, the cultural and linguistic interdependence of schemas is discussed. In the second part of the paper, 40 Chinese letters of request written by Mainland Chinese to Radio Australia are considered. The schemas and rhetorical structures of two of them are analysed in detail to illustrate points made in the first part of the paper. Finally a brief description is given of how the letters might be used to teach a request schema for Modern Standard Chinese to Australian tertiary students learning Chinese.

Phonetic correction – class time does not always allow it, and perhaps near enough is good enough from a communicative point of view. Language laboratories allow students to work at their own pace using reliable models, but teacher monitoring and correction tend to be fleeting and intermittent. Computers can provide stimulating presentation and immediate feedback, but it is difficult to talk to them. This paper discusses the constraints imposed on phonetic correction in the classroom, and proposes a solution through the establishment of individual student pronunciation profiles coupled with computer and language laboratory exercises.

This paper reviews a number of articles that have been published since 1988, just after the release of Lo Bianco’s National policy recommendations on language. The review, which covers two sections 1) theoretical LOTE issues and 2) practical LOTE issues, is by no means exhaustive. The aim of this paper is to provide teachers, students and researchers with an overview of what has been happening, theoretically and practically, in the area of LOTE teaching in Australia during the past 4 years.