This chapter focuses on the knowledge pre-service and in-service teachers need to develop and evaluate oral communication (oracy) within a student’s first language, and it also explores its application in English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D) contexts. A range of practical teaching strategies, interactive activities and integrated approaches are suggested to promote speaking, interacting and listening capabilities in students. Multimodal integrated strategies are presented that focus on oral communication, but also help develop students’ reading, writing and viewing skills, fostering well-rounded learners capable of critical thinking, effective communication and cultural awareness.

Chapter 3 emphasises the importance of developing skills among pupils progressively throughout language learning and discusses how each skill complements the others to improve overall communicative competence. Practical advice on how to develop each individual skill is given, as well as how to create multi-skill and multi-task activities. Tasks designed to give student teachers practice in developing these individual skills are included. The development of reading skills is given particular attention, as this is an area which can affect the others if not given due care and consideration.

From the moment of birth, infants are immersed in a world of communication. Attentive adults look into their eyes, smile and coo at them, and use touch, eye contact and simple sentences to connect. In return, newborns respond to the human voices that they have been hearing in utero by looking towards the adult’s face and moving their bodies and faces. They also respond neurologically, with parts of their brains associated with auditory language processing activated by human speech more so than by other human sounds such as humming or non-distinct speech. Within the first six months, they not only use cries, coos and facial expressions to communicate feelings and needs, but also engage in rudimental back and forth exchanges with attending caregivers. The desire to connect with others through language and communication is indeed a very strong and uniquely human trait.

Chapter 2 examines historical and current approaches to the learning and teaching of foreign languages and considers the features of each approach. The term ‘post-method’ and whether we are in a period that can be described as such are discussed before a consideration of why foreign languages are learned. A very important aspect of foreign language learning and teaching is how to increase exposure to the target language and how to promote target language use amongst pupils. Through analysis of commonly perceived problems associated with language teaching, advice will be given to help teachers develop strategies to stay in, or increase their use of, the target language.

As children learn to speak, read and write, they not only utilise and draw on the sounds of language, or phonemic and phonological awareness, they also implicitly and explicitly recognise and apply knowledge of how sounds are combined systematically in a language to form meaningful units called morphemes. A morpheme is a meaningful unit of a language that cannot be further divided, such as single word units (e.g. at, the, table) or parts of words that modify meaning (e.g. un-, mis) or grammatical forms (-ed, -ing, -s).

Chapter 6 builds on unit planning and analyses the fundamentals of modern foreign languages lesson planning and the features of a successful lesson. It emphasises the importance of planning learning across a series of lessons and walking through your planning in advance. Successful lesson planning must be based on a sound knowledge of pedagogy and teachers need to know the most effective ways of learning and teaching languages. This in turn needs to be coupled with skilled use of the appropriate modes of teaching used at the appropriate time. This all needs to happen within a planned framework, which allows and supports pupils’ development and progress across a sequence of learning goals. Chapter 6 gathers these factors together and leads student teachers through the essential steps of effective lesson planning.

In Chapter 4, we discussed the two approaches to grammar that have been taught in Australian schools: traditional grammar, and Halliday’s functional grammar. We highlighted some limitations of traditional grammar and outlined the key concepts of functional grammar, which significantly influences English curricula in Australia and globally. While Chapter 4 emphasised explicit grammatical knowledge required by teachers, this chapter focuses on genres, text types, and the teaching of grammar and text types through explicit pedagogical methods.

This chapter outlines essential knowledge for pre-service and in-service teachers regarding the all-encompassing component of language and literacy development: critical literacy. In the current information-saturated world of ‘fake news’ and algorithms that decide the social media content we view, it is important to empower students with the ability to critically engage and knowingly accept or resist what they are reading or viewing. Critical literacy requires text users to approach their consumption of texts with a questioning mindset. It helps them develop an understanding of how texts work – the ability to analyse and identify the visual, linguistic and multimodal features of texts that create meaning implicitly and explicitly. Drawing upon foundational theories and critical literacy models, this chapter demonstrates how to integrate the five macro-skills of reading, writing, listening, speaking and viewing of both textual and multimodal sources to develop students’ critical comprehension and production of various text types.

For many adults, the idea that infants and toddlers are ‘knowers, thinkers and theorisers’ is a strange one. Such concepts are often associated with older children whose abilities to build and express understandings are more evident and align more readily with traditional ideas about learning and teaching. Furthermore, cognitive states and processes such as ‘knowing’, ‘thinking’ and ‘understanding’ are not visible in the same way that physical, social and emotional behaviours. This means that they have to be inferred and interpreted, especially when pre-verbal infants and toddlers cannot tell you what is going on in their heads. Together these challenges may result in a deficit view that, instead of seeing infants and toddlers as active and capable learners, positions very young as waiting to learn. Also, an emphasis on meeting physical and emotional needs may come at the cost of overlooking infants and toddlers cognitive capabilities and potentials.

Grammar has historically been an important component of language and literacy education. It has been understood and defined in various ways, depending on the different linguistic perspectives throughout history. This chapter discusses two main historical perspectives on grammar: traditional grammar and functional grammar. Both implicitly and explicitly underpin the Australian Curriculum: English. The metalanguage and concepts used in the Curriculum and the National Literacy Learning Progression are a combination of traditional and functional grammar terms. Many traditional grammar terms (e.g. nouns, verbs, subject-verb-object) are used alongside functional grammar terms (e.g. participants, processes, circumstances, noun groups, verb groups) to describe sentence-level components, but functional grammar terms are mostly used to describe text-level components. Therefore, it is crucial for pre-service and in-service teachers to be equipped with explicit knowledge of these two grammar traditions to be able to teach in contemporary English classrooms.

Human emotional responses are a complex mixture of physiological, cognitive, social and communicative activity. Emotional activity occurs in response to inner and outer worlds and is deeply shaped by the social and cultural environments in which it is embedded. Very young children experience (and learn about) emotions by feeling, understanding and showing them. These sophisticated emotional capabilities lay the groundwork for co-creating social affective relationships with important people in their lives. As the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) states, when educators tune into and try to understand children’s emotions and feelings within respectful and reciprocal relationships, they support their learning, development and wellbeing. Emotional wellbeing can be seen as the glue that holds children’s learning and development together. Similarly, an educator’s emotional wellbeing can bind their professional learning, development and satisfaction together. Without emotional wellbeing, learning and development for both children and educators can be negatively impacted.

It is very important that teaching and learning activities and assessment are designed to cater for the needs of schools and pupils. Chapter 8 looks at the connection between learning and assessment and includes approaches and strategies for both formative and summative assessment. How to plan for and manage assessment of learners’ progress is examined in detail with practical advice on how to do this in a structured way. How to use assessment for learning within a framework of formative assessment is detailed, including self-assessment and peer-assessment techniques with practical examples for use in class. The development of metacognitive strategies in learners is explored and advice is given on how to promote and develop this in learners in stages. The importance of giving regular feedback to pupils on their learning is also emphasised. Techniques and suggestions in this chapter can be adapted for different classes and year groups.