This chapter will introduce you to the various education systems in Australia. It focuses on the relationship between the Commonwealth and the state and territory governments, outlines the three schooling sectors – public (government), independent and Catholic – and places the Australia education system within a global context. It starts by offering a historical overview of schooling in Australia and finishes with a look at the future of schooling. The education system is examined, especially in relation to educational outcomes, equity issues and funding. You will also be introduced to support mechanisms available for teachers, including professional development requirements and union membership. To gain an understanding of schooling beyond the classroom, key education documents such as the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration will be examined.

This chapter introduces curriculum in schools and the relationship between ideology and ideas as factors shaping education curriculum development. This approach stresses that curriculum is both dynamic and contested, and focuses on the development and implementation of the Australian Curriculum to illustrate how curriculum is shaped at the Commonwealth, state/territory and jurisdictional school levels. The chapter also discusses the key learning areas, cross-curriculum priorities and general capabilities. The intention is to examine how curriculum can be an empowering vehicle to frame content areas, and inform teaching, learning programs and assessment instruments. Further, there is a recognition that curriculum must be interpreted and contextualised, so that it meets the needs of learners at different levels and in different ways. Finally, the notion of teachers as curriculum builders and enactors is a central concept in this chapter.

This chapter expands on the principles of planning for teaching introduced in Chapter 7. Chapters 7 and 8 link together to interrogate what needs to be considered in planning for effective teaching and learning. Within this chapter, you will consider the processes and preparation undertaken by Hannah (a secondary pre-service teacher) and Matthew (a primary pre-service teacher) as they consider the learning needs of their students, select a suitable lesson plan template to guide their thinking, enact their lessons and reflect on practice. Hannah and Matthew are passionate and inspired pre-service teachers focused on making a commitment to challenge themselves and their learners to achieve success (Hattie, 2011). Factors related to effective teaching and learning, such as sound curriculum, knowing your students, selecting a range of teaching strategies, differentiation and embedding assessment to inform practice, are all considered within this chapter.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of phonetics, the study of human speech sounds. It examines two main approaches: articulatory phonetics, which shows how humans produce the sounds of language, and acoustic phonetics, which explains the physical properties of speech sounds. The chapter explains how speech is produced by modifying the shape of the vocal tract and how the articulators interact. We learn why the International Phonetic Alphabet is necessary to study world languages, and ample practice in using the IPA is provided. Practice goes hand in hand with a detailed categorization and description of speech sounds, both consonants and vowels, summarized in charts and figures. The chapter also examines speech processes which lead to changes in the quality of a sound due to the linguistic context. Descriptions and examples of processes such as assimilation, palatalization, nasalization, dissimilation, epenthesis, and deletion, are included in this section. The final part of the chapter introduces readers to acoustic properties of speech sounds by focusing on spectrograms and how to interpret them.

Politics is confusing. A casual look at the daily news shows a profusion of fast-moving events, with many conflicting and incompatible interpretations of them. How can we ever make sense of such a bewildering business? The answer lies partly in our ideas, preconceptions and assumptions about politics. This mental framework of ideas, known as an ideology, helps us to understand and interpret politics and to make judgements about them.

Chapter 13 introduces second language acquisition, the acquisition of non-native grammars, by comparing it to first language acquisition (Chapter 12). The strong interdisciplinary nature of second language acquisition informs this chapter in all areas, including how it links to other branches of linguistics, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, education, etc. The chapter introduces readers to key concepts such as interlanguage and transfer from the first language. As in Chapter 12 First language acquisition, this chapter follows the development of the second language sound system, morphology, and syntax. The chapter compares and analyzes different theoretical approaches such as markedness theory, generative approaches (Universal Grammar), the monitor model, sociocultural theory, processability theory, and cognitive models such as the competition model. It examines important factors that may affect the course of second language acquisition such as: the role of age; gender; learning styles such as field dependency or independence; aptitude; motivation; and working memory. It also explores different learning contexts and approaches such as immersion and task-based learning.

Democratic government is party government: electoral competition is largely party competition, parliamentary politics is invariably party politics, and government is rarely anything but party government. For better or for worse, political parties pervade all aspects of government and politics in democracies and are central to them. They help to integrate the political system by hammering out collective policies and actions, never an easy task amid so much disagreement. They help to integrate across lines of class, gender, religion, ethnicity and region, and they form alliances with a variety of voluntary associations and pressure groups. Parties do this in different ways according to their times and circumstances, so an important task of comparative politics is to identify the different types of party and the ways in which they operate.

Democratic states appear in many different forms and stages of development, but when we look at the historical growth of democratisation, we can distinguish three distinct waves. The first, from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s, coincided with the rise of the nation-state. The second wave, starting after the Second World War and continuing to the early 1960s, was mainly the result of decolonisation. The third wave, from about 1975 to the end of the twentieth century, followed the spread of democracy in Latin America and Asia and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Although the third wave was expected by some to flow on irresistibly into the twenty-first century, it had died by then, because transition to democracy is by no means inevitable or permanent. Some countries have retained their authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, others have created partial, limited or illiberal forms of democracy, and a third group has slipped back from democratic reforms that did not take root. A few advanced democracies have weakened their democratic scores. The third wave of the democratic tide has lost its momentum and, if anything, reversed itself in many places.

Watch any newsflash or open any newspaper and you will see headlines such as ‘Trump to meet with Kim Jong-un’, ‘Germany and France renew their vows’ or ‘China organised mass detentions of Muslims’. These phrases are shorthand. They refer to US attempts to negotiate directly with North Korea, Germany and France reaching a new agreement on bilateral cooperation, and Chinese crackdowns on ethnic and religious minorities. Matters such as these are the alpha and omega of politics and governmental affairs. And states are always at the centre.

Chapter 11 focuses on one of the most important events of the last 5,000 years: the development of writing. Writing is defined as a system of more or less permanent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that it can be recovered more or less the same way without intervention. Writing is distinguished from ideograms that represent things or concepts directly. Readers are introduced to alphabets in which, though imperfectly, each letter represents one sound, syllabaries which represent the syllable, abjads, in which, typically, only consonants are written, and abujidas, in which each consonant is represented with a basic vowel. The chapter includes examples for each type of writing from many different languages. The history of writing is summarized, from its beginnings in Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica, to modern day writing in different parts of the world. Each new concept introduced is amply illustrated with images from different types of writing systems, and readers are encouraged to try to understand how reading should proceed in each case.

Chapter 9 focuses on the variation found within a language or a speech community, which is at the core of sociolinguistics. In this respect, it differs from chapters that focus on structure and the regularities and invariable properties of language. Basic concepts such as linguistic variables and variants are described and illustrated through examples related to the lexicon, phonology, and syntax. Readers learn about the possible constraints, some of which are structural, that limit the possibility of variation. The chapter then explores the difference between standard and non-standard speech varieties and to recognize that the difference between the two often is not based on any linguistic properties but rather on societal attitudes. It considers social factors that may determine the use of variants, including region, socioeconomic status gender and age. The chapter also examines individual factors such a register. It examines the roles of language planning in different societies. Finally, it focuses on the variation found in bilinguals, including code switching, and the emerging languages such as pidgins and creoles.