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Despite decades of often ambitious policies in Australia, languages education is still characterized by intermittent commitment to the teaching of languages, with inequitable access particularly entrenched in rural and regional contexts. While research has focused on the practical and material constraints impacting on policy implementation, little research has investigated the role of the discursive terrain in shaping expectations and limitations around what seems achievable in schools, particularly, from the school principal perspective. Beginning with an overview of policy interventions and an analysis of contemporary challenges, we use Q methodology to identify and analyze viewpoints at work in similarly-positioned rural and regional schools. In doing so, we seek to determine what seems possible or impossible across settings; the role of principals in enabling and constraining pathways for the provision of school language programs, and the need for macro-level language policy to be informed by constraints specific to rural and regional contexts.

In this paper I argue that linguistic diversity is one of the most common characteristics of human history, so much so that it could be considered a "natural" characteristic of humanity (Skutnalb-Kangas, Maffi, & Harmon, 2003). Linguistic diversity combines with interaction among human groups and, in this combination, is produced bilingualism (I use this term as a shorthand for multiple language skill) and other modes of communicating across our differences. Bilingualism, understood here as functioning in more than one language, in which many individuals and most groups use more than one linguistic code for communication, is usually organised purposively. This means that communication skills are differentiated according to purpose, function, or interlocutor. This combination of multiple languages meshed with diverse purposes makes for a very complex pattern of language capabilities and usage.

This article discusses ideas for a new literacy compact in Australia that would encompass multilingual, language revitalizing, and Indigenous grounded perspectives. A key question posed is whether a uniquely Australian literacy order can be imagined, one that would extend the historically inherited tradition of Western grammar-centred practices as conventionally typified in print-based English book and letter reading and its digital equivalents, to include the many languages of the nation and their distinctive literacies, whether Indigenous and immigrant in origin. Any such imagining must understand the inherited and dominant tradition it seeks to change, the colonial legacy of damaged language vitality, and the various revitalization practices underway, and therefore must be situated in the concrete circumstances of contemporary communication issues. This means more than merely teaching non-dominant languages and literacies, but re-conceiving what the national project of 'becoming literate' is taken to be, incorporating multiple perspectives, interests, and circumstances. This re-imagining would tie literacy outcomes not just to academic curriculums and assessment purposes, but also to health and wellbeing of populations, to regenerative cultural vitality, and to linguistic human rights. Such aims represent a challenge to current Closing the Gap policy, which is based principally on ameliorating group comparisons of reading performance. The article argues that public discussion about literacy should be able to comprehend such different activities in a coherent and overarching literacy endeavour to grasp the opportunity represented by contemporary social movements calling for a reconstruction of Australian national identity and direction. None of this should lose sight of the need to improve reading acquisition nor deflect from how what counts as literacy is itself being transformed in response to new economic and technological developments as discussed by Farrell, Newman, and Corbel (Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 42 (6):898-912, 2020). Keywords Multilingualism * Multiliteracies * Indigenous education * Identity * Language revitalization, 1 Visualizing literacy: a cameo In 2017, I was on sabbatical in Florence, Italy, writing up results of language planning fieldwork in multilingual Southeast Asia (Lo Bianco, 2019), an improbable [...]

This article discusses the different effects arising from deliberations on language policy in conferences dominated by professionals compared with the interests, priorities and demands of geo-political and military security coming from defense interests. The paper proposes a three dimensional way to understand language policy: text, discourse and performance, and discusses strains and tensions placed on language policy that aims to serve explicit security agendas. Such tensions and strains are particularly strong for those languages spoken by minority populations who are sometimes forced into ambivalence between local and national identity, citizenship loyalty and the promotion and retention of needed language skills. Technical or rationalist approaches to language planning analysis fail to capture the performative and discursive dimensions of language planning under such strains, remaining at the descriptive level of policy texts and their formal declarations of intent. Community or heritage language activists negotiate such tensions but for some categories of language professional, such as interpreters in war zones who are required to mediate between occupying and occupied forces, these tensions can be extreme. The paper considers language in espionage where severe tensions are imposed between its communicative-secretive functions.

The article presents information on the author's analysis of the connection between the two activities of saving languages and teaching languages. He states that he is interested in sociocultural domain of language, and describes both, the British applied linguistics and Australian applied linguistics.

An excerpt from the report "Australian Education Review 54, Second Languages and Australian Schooling," by Joseph Lo Bianco and Yvette Slaughter is presented.

Literacy and health are deeply influential in social participation, utilisation of social resources and quality of life. This paper discusses interacting discourses and common conceptual points shared by the adult literacy and public health fields and situates how the sub-field at the intersection of these two domains, known as 'health literacy', is constructed and enacted. Emerging approaches that recognise the convergence of education and health within international policy, research and in practice are articulated. The paper argues a case for re-thinking the literacy-health connection from a cross-sectoral perspective and for more effective approaches furthering the interests of both life-long learning and wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article reports on research conducted during late 2004 on the language abilities of Australia's parliamentarians and a parliamentary debate in 2005 on languages in Australia. A small questionnaire was administered to all members of the nine legislative structures of Australia comprising six states, two territories and the one Federal parliament. This is the first such survey in Australia. While the response rate was uneven, from good to poor, the survey does shed light on the range and number of languages other than English spoken by Australia's parliamentary representatives, where their language capabilities were gained, how proficient they estimate themselves to be, and in what settings their language skills are used. The paper includes a comparison between these Australian data and equivalent, though slightly less sketchy, data from the UK. The article concludes with the text and debate of a recent private members' bill on languages and makes comments on the responses in light of the language abilities of the parliamentarians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines specific issues encountered in various areas of Chinese teaching in Australia. These issues are linked to the spheres of language planning as acquisition and as recovery and language planning as retention (Lo Bianco, 10.1007/s10993-006-9042-3). Specifically relevant to Chinese in Australia is its current prominence in formally declared national language policy, its changing status over time and its similarities and differences with Chinese in the United States (Wang, 10.1007/s10993-006-9043-2). The internationalization of education, and its commodification, has in recent years led to a major expansion in the range of offerings in Chinese in Australia, now catering to growing, and in some institutions to numerically dominant, groupings of native speakers with radically different language and academic needs from the traditional clientele of tertiary and school Chinese programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses findings in a year-long study funded by the National Council for Vocational Education and Research which explored the relationship between literacy practices and the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in adult literacy education. The study generated a report, an extended literature review and detailed descriptions of case-study sites. Among key understandings from the study is that new literacies required for effective and critical use of ICT in adult literacy education are multiple and multimodal, and are based around the integration of previously separate modes of communication.

Using the work of Dante to provide a historical perspective, this paper discusses the connection between nations, states and languages. Dante practiced both policy and cultivation approaches and, as a language strategist, he had a profound impact on the language directions of fourteenth-century Italy. By introducing the questione della lingua Dante set the terms of language debate in Italian public life and established himself as a language planner, and as a theorist of nationality and linguistic nationalism. Today, urbanisation, progressive aggregation of populations into larger identity groupings and the globalisation of economies appear to have led to a contraction in the vitality of many languages and pluralisation within and across communication systems. Alongside this reduction in language vitality is the challenge to nationalism itself. What relevance can Dante’s thought offer to those engaged with the possible dissolution of both nations and national languages — key ideas in the poet’s language planning work? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An excerpt from the report "Australian Education Review 54, Second Languages and Australian Schooling," by Joseph Lo Bianco and Yvette Slaughter is presented.