Lesley Harbon

Robyn Moloney

Language Teachers’ Professional Knowledge Landscapes is a collection of fourteen narratives from teachers of different languages, at different school levels, in different contexts across Australia. This volume brings together not simply language teacher stories, but also more political stories of the problems associated with school programs and contexts. Highlighted through these stories are some of the major political issues in schools that impact language teachers’ work, and their students’ success in sustained language study. The book is conceptually framed by the work of Clandinin and Connelly (1996) and their notion of ‘levels’ of stories told by teachers about their classrooms: the secret, the sacred and the cover stories. The term ‘professional knowledge landscape’ is used to indicate how teachers can critically situate their work, and thereby understand it better. The collection includes the stories of two outstanding primary language educators, and a story of mixed success in a rural program in teaching the local Aboriginal language (Ngarrabul). There are stories of frustration with policy failures, particularly in supporting the learning of Asian languages. Many of the teacher narrators ask the confronting question: ‘What blocks language learning in Australia?’ They offer the strategies which they have developed, that they see making a difference. Other narratives offer autoethnographic tracking of careers, for example, as a teacher of Latin and Classics, Japanese, French, Spanish, Russian, and of teachers’ ongoing vigour and creativity in advocacy. A number of teachers examine their own identity story for the intercultural learning, which they then offer and extend in student learning. Consistently expressed, there is the need for teachers to take up individual responsibility, while still being strongly supported by their professional community: ‘It is us’ who make the difference, one teacher concludes. Supported by a strong Foreword by Canadian scholar F. Michael Connelly, this ground-breaking collection of narratives represents a form of social research in providing critical illustrations of the issues needing attention for national language education enhancement. It is the only extended inquiry into language teaching in the context of an active policy initiative environment, and the first volume to address the language education landscape through the voices of active language teachers.

Language Teachers' Stories from their Professional Knowledge Landscapes

Michelle Kohler

Anne-Marie Morgan

Dari Kami Ke Kita is a new national Indonesian series of sequenced and cumulative resources designed to form the basis of a Years 7-10 teaching program. Currently, middle years Indonesian classrooms are not well served with stimulating material and resources, which recognise the cognitive stage of development of their learners. This series aims to provide students who have beginning levels of proficiency with an engaging and challenging way into language learning. Ita s modern and introduces Indonesian in a fast-paced, dynamic way. The TRPs offers easy and quick hints on how to use the different resources in within the SB, the WB and the CD-ROM. The teacher's book offers the shrunk version of the student book with easy hints on how to introduce topics, hints on how to best address language points and other quick and easy suggestions for easy teaching while in class. The teacher's CD-ROM offers the student's workbook with overprinted solutions, unit tests for each chapter (covering the main strands) and additional Blackline Masters with more consolidating tasks and games.

Lesley Harbon

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