Robyn Moloney

• Ed.D.
• Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University

Teaching for Linguistic Diversity in Schools: Student Wellbeing and Achievement explores the linguistic landscape of Australia, including English, Indigenous languages, community languages and school-taught modern languages, to help teachers recognise the extent of children’s language knowledge and to reflect on its implications for the classroom....

Since its implementation in 2000, the inland Xinjiang senior secondary school class policy (Xinjiangban policy) has promoted and funded middle-school students, mostly ethnic minorities from Xinjiang, to attend boarding schools in predominantly Han-populated cities throughout eastern China. The purpose of this policy is to improve ethnic minority st...

In this article, the authors investigated how families of Xinjiang class students perceive the benefits of the Xinjiang class policy for students. Based on the work of Melanie Walker, the authors adopted the capability approach as an analytical tool and collected data through in-depth interviews with families of Xinjiang class students over three m...

This article applies the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to interpret the experiences and struggles of students who attend Xinjiang classes, a Chinese government-funded ethnic minority boarding school program. The psychoanalytic domains theorized by Lacan are used in this article to argue that the decisions made by Xinjiang class student...

This paper was written in response to a growing need to address the perceptions and experiences of immigrant teachers. Based on a critical intercultural theoretical perspective, which moves beyond typical “culture shock” and “adaptation” models of understanding and explaining immigrants’ experiences, this paper makes use of the concepts of teacher...

While previous studies have highlighted the significance of metaphors in studying teacher identities and values, little is known about metaphorical representation of teaching as given by casual relief teachers (CRTs). This study examines metaphors from participants who teach or have taught on a casual basis in Australian primary schools. Responses...

This paper reports a pilot study to investigate four preservice teachers' reports of their impact on student learning while they completed a four-week professional experience block. We used Hiebert, Morris, Berk, and Jansen's (2007) framework for teacher preparation to analyse the how the participants planned, assessed and reflected on a lesson seq...

The Inland Xinjiang Senior Secondary School Class Policy (Neidi Xinjiang gaozhongban zhengce, hereafter the Xinjiang Class Policy) was implemented by China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) in September 2000. It allows and funds middle school-aged students, mostly ethnic minorities from southern Xinjiang’s impoverished rural and nomadic regions to atte...

This chapter offers a synthesis of what we can take from the project’s case studies and apply it in Chinese classrooms to enhance teacher practice and student learning. The chapter details how the dimensions and elements of the Quality Teaching Framework are reflected in the teachers’ practices and their impact on the learners. The focus is widened...

In the last decade, primary school Chinese programmes have been an important site of growth in Australia, but there has been limited attention to pedagogy, resources, and teacher professional development for this sector. The chapter includes a brief background to the rationale of teaching languages to young children, and the learning needs in this...

This chapter features the application of digital technologies from our case study secondary teachers’ practice, to illustrate the changes occurring in the learning and teaching of Chinese. New technologies can greatly facilitate students’ own initiative, providing them with personalised learning opportunities to make choices, to create tasks, to us...

This chapter examines the background issues of the book, providing the rationale for conducting and analysing the school case studies. The aim of the book is to provide examples of quality Chinese teaching, as a resource for professional development of teachers of Chinese, to impact practice in Australia and globally. The challenges of teaching Chi...

In the quality teaching of Chinese showcased in the two school case studies in this chapter, teachers’ lesson design and differentiation are tuned to adolescent learners’ linguistic, cognitive, and personal needs. The chapter is framed by an understanding of the latest research in motivation in language learning. The first case study focuses on mot...

This chapter reports a case study project which examined tertiary heritage language learners’ perceptions of a pedagogical intervention, which embedded autonomous and intercultural learning in their Chinese language program. The goal of the study was to enhance heritage learners’ engagement motivation and performance in their Chinese language studi...

‘Using real-life examples of practice in classrooms, the authors provided many great ideas and practical strategies to improve students' achievement in Chinese language study.’ —Maria Xu, President of the Chinese Language Teachers’ Association, Australia. ‘This book offers teachers’ solutions to all the current challenges in Languages education: c...

Schools and universities frequently struggle to nourish sustained language learning in their advanced students. There is limited research investigating the elements of effective teaching, which particularly support advanced language learning performance. This article investigates the apparent effect of language teacher beliefs in shaping developmen...

The purpose of this study is to explore Lebanese teachers' perceptions of the factors determining their integration of technology into literacy classrooms. A quantitative survey examining literacy teachers' individual characteristics and their perceptions of contextual factors was conducted at Lebanese schools. The survey collected data on the leve...

In our responsibilities for language teacher education, we have critiqued in recent years the sometimes limited success of intercultural learning activities, and become dissatisfied that the intercultural concept has been diminished to static and essentialized comparisons of culture, in some language classrooms. This has led us to explore an experi...

p>In order to better prepare pre-service teachers to teach with technology, the purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the current practices and barriers in technology preparation at seven Lebanese education programs. The study used in-depth interviews, document analysis and examination of artifacts to investigate the conditions met,...

The population movement of globalization brings greater cultural and linguistic diversity (CALD) to communities and education systems. To address the growing diversity in school classrooms, beginning teachers need an expanded set of skills and attitudes to support effective learning. It is an expectation today that teachers know their students and...

IntroductionThe globally expanding community of educators involved in the teaching of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) is being pushed to adapt to diverse educational contexts, engendering tension and dislocation. There has been limited success in efforts to modernise practice in the teaching of Chinese, with subsequent urgent calls for both a f...

The search for CFL pedagogies which are effective in diverse countries, and with diverse age groups, is in the process of development. Scholars are divided as to whether a generic model for CFL is possible, or a diversified adaptation to each context is more effective. Key input to this debate however is the knowledge evident in the experiences of...

This chapter frames the history and rationale for a research-based examination of new modes of teaching and learning within Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL). The chapter investigates the nature of innovative pedagogies, offers a brief overview of the history of the teaching of CFL, identifies the current challenges in CFL, and observes new devel...

This chapter presents the findings of a project designed to support development of student intercultural competence and critical thinking, innovative in the context of undergraduate Chinese language study. An ‘intercultural’ approach to language learning has been widely encouraged in contemporary foreign language learning in Australian, North Ameri...

This chapter reports a case study project which examined tertiary heritage language learners’ perceptions of a pedagogical intervention, which embedded autonomous and intercultural learning in their Chinese language program. The goal of the study was to enhance heritage learners’ engagement motivation and performance in their Chinese language studi...

Teachers of Chinese as a foreign language in many international contexts are searching for pedagogic solutions to promote effective learning. Models of innovative and successful approaches are urgently needed. This volume presents a collection of compelling and empirically rich research studies that showcases innovative developments in the practice...

With the economic rise of China, there is global demand for effective teaching and learning of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). There has been limited sustained success in Chinese language learning in Australian schools, however, and this has been attributed, amongst other factors, to pedagogy employed by teachers. Today, it is commonplace to u...

Teachers’ development of critical cultural skills is integral to their awareness of what and how they teach as well as how they communicate with students in the multilingual, multicultural classrooms of today. This research reports the analysis of 33 pre-service teachers’ written narrative reflections. The reflective writing task was designed to el...

In view of the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in school classrooms in many English-majority countries, the profile of the pre-service teachers being trained to teach in those classrooms has become of research interest. It was found in a cohort of Australian pre-service teachers that one third of the cohort was plurilingual. This artic...

There is increasing enrolment of Chinese heritage language learners in tertiary Chinese language classrooms across Australia. Educated in English, Chinese heritage learners are of diverse national origins and the Chinese language varieties to which they have been exposed through family or community are also diverse. Recent research in this field ha...

We report the development of preservice teachers' oral presentation performance based on a technology-mediated video reflection system. Participants video-recorded oral presentations and uploaded them to an online blog to view and reflect on their performance and that of their peers. Four presentations by forty-one participants were analysed using...

Recent years have witnessed rapid growth in language learning within online collaborative learning projects constructed between educational institutions in different cultural and pedagogic contexts. This qualitative case study investigated the role of teacher communication in a short online project between language classes in secondary schools in A...

Language pedagogy in Australia, North America and Europe has been influenced in the past 20 years by a sociocultural understanding of language and culture, which has asked teachers to adopt an intercultural approach, integrating critical cultural reflection within language learning. Due to the diversity of backgrounds, however, different groups of...

This paper presents a comparative curricular inquiry of teacher education programs of Chinese as a foreign language in China and Australia. While there is an increasing demand for qualified Chinese language teachers both within China and Western countries, pre-service teacher training is regarded as one of the major factors in impeding success in e...

A research-based understanding of how to develop and assess classroom presentation skills is vital for the effective development of preservice teacher communication capabilities. This paper identifies and compares two different models of assessing pre-service teachers' presentation performance - one based on the Modes of Communication (voice, body...

While heritage language learners are becoming visible in the research literature as a distinct group of language learners with specific needs, existing curriculum structures in secondary schools often focus on programs either for foreign language learners or for first language learners. The study reported here examines the experiences of heritage l...

Our paper explores the learning of pre-service language teachers who have engaged with an examination of classroom questioning techniques. Previous research by Harbon and Moloney (in press) showed that teacher awareness of using variations of Initiation-Response-Evaluation (I-RE) in classroom discourse may result in students becoming intercultural...

In an increasingly globalised world, greater numbers of Japanese citizens live beyond the national borders of Japan. The children of these families typically grow up multilingually, as users of their heritage language (Japanese) and the language of the majority community. The children’s development in the heritage language not only fulfils linguist...

This paper reports on how the cognitive, behavioural and affective communication competencies of undergraduate students were developed using an online Video Reflection system. Pre-service teachers were provided with communication scenarios and asked to record short videos of one another making presentations. Students then uploaded their videos to a...

The widespread use of interactive whiteboards (IWB) in primary and secondary schools has been well documented, yet there is to date only limited attention to use in tertiary institutions. Macquarie University has installed this technology in many of its teaching spaces in the past few years. This paper reports a case study undertaken in the univers...

There have been many positive claims made concerning the benefits of learning through a pedagogy which makes use of an interactive whiteboard (IWB), leading to a rapid acquisition and implementation of the IWB in schools. There is more limited research, however, of the effectiveness of the IWB in language learning and, in particular, in the learnin...

In the development of intercultural language learning, limited research has been conducted on language learners' negotiation of identity and cultural memberships. There is little research in particular on intercultural identity in young (primary school) language learners. With the global growth of languages in the primary school, it is timely to ex...

This article traces my development as both a teacher and researcher of language and culture. It examines the develop-ment of my doctoral thesis through my interaction with notions of language and culture, grounded in professional practitioner experience. My doctoral research, which examined the nature of intercultural competence in young immersion...

The study investigated a range of characteristics of intercult- ural competence in young language learners in one Australian primary school. This paper explores students' expression of identity formation aligned with the act of speaking the target language, which the authors believe to be an expression of students' intercultural competence. Through...