Chapter 5 builds your understanding of the thousands of students who are adding English to their language repertoire and offers many excellent teaching strategies. The chapter does not attempt to provide detailed professional development in EAL/D pedagogy but is more concerned with how harnessing English language learning can connect with wellbeing and achievement. The two overarching goals for this chapter are that you develop empathy with English learners’ perspectives, and that you acquire a wide variety of strategies to support English learning, across the curriculum, with high expectations for all students. Chapters 3 and 4 have stressed that it is important for students to maintain and develop the languages they bring to school, as well as to add English proficiency. Strong English proficiency enables participation in all areas of Australian society and economy, and participation in global communities where English is a shared language.

The chapter examines the formatting of initial turns by customers at the counter, before they decide and in order to select what to buy. On the basis of recordings in bakeries in Finland, France, and Switzerland, it is shown how customers may face a range of practical problems in making decisions as to what or whether to purchase, including seeing items that might look appealing but which they don’t recognize or for which they do not know the ingredients. Through the design of their questions, drawing on verbal, material, and embodied resources, customers make publicly available to the sellers their epistemic access to the products (e.g., they do not know enough about the item to formulate its identity with anything more than a demonstrative pronoun or demonstrative determiner plus ‘empty’ noun). With their answers sellers provide information that may be immediately useful for the customer in making their decision, or which may need further elaboration. The referential practices employed by both customers and sellers reveal features of items that are locally relevant for the practical purposes of buying, in particular sequential, material, and embodied locations in interaction.