Chapter 4 explores the non-Indigenous community languages which form the single biggest site of language learning and maintenance in Australia. For the communities and families who have established and grown these sites of teaching and learning, the languages represent long-standing investments of commitment, love, identity, and intergenerational transmission of history and culture. The community language school communities which our students attend on weekends (often located in borrowed spaces, such as churches and temples) can be a very large part of students’ emotional and intellectual development. Given the diversity of the field, the chapter provides only a sketch of the extraordinary array of community languages, but it also discusses how mainstream schools provides some students with the opportunity to learn and extend their languages. The chapter explores the options in primary and secondary schools to learn a variety of selected languages within the curriculum and invites the reader to dig into some of the inequities in school provision in different Australian states and territories.

In this chapter, we present an overview of current knowledge about learners’ use and understanding of connectives. In the first part of the chapter, we will see that connectives are notoriously difficult to master for second language learners, because they require an array of complex competences. Learners must know how to use them appropriately in various genres and registers, have a fine-grained understanding of the meaning differences between connectives used to convey similar coherence relations, and also automatize this knowledge so that it is activated automatically during discourse processing, and not only when they consciously elicit usage rules. In the second part of the chapter, we review the important body of studies that have empirically assessed the causes for learners’ difficulties with connectives, and conclude with some recommendations for teaching. We conclude that research on the second language acquisition of connectives contributes to answering important questions, such as what makes connectives difficult to master, and how they are they used across languages.

Over the last two decades, second-language pragmatics brought to the fore commonalities and conventions shared by speakers and hearers, those which create a common ground for communication, as well as culture varieties in language use, and those which cause communication breakdowns in real-life contexts. But, of course, meaning which is to be understood entirely under the influence of social interaction and cognitive change cannot capture the modalities or channels speakers use to convey a certain content of an utterance. Typically, natural behaviors, in the form of emotive effects, are integrated somehow into the interpretation of utterances in everyday life situations, a point generally missed in the literature on how utterances are understood in a second language. In the light of the above observations, an original feature of this chapter is its discussion of cases where "natural," i.e. affective, and linguistic communication interact in the interpretation of utterances. The task of describing and explaining what is conveyed by nonpropositional types of meaning, those "affective aspects of learning," such as feelings, attitudes, or preferences, falls squarely within the domain of L2 pragmatics, and the central aim of this chapter is to redress the balance.

David Little learned French and German in the UK in a monolingual environment. His research quickly focused on the agency of the learners. Having worked with refugees and then with multilingual schools, involving many languages in the classroom, he rejects translanguaging. Rather, he suggests that collaborative learning tasks should be carried out with different languages in mind.

This chapter reports on the status of heritage languages (HLs) in Canada in usage, in research, and in education. It begins with an overview of HLs in Canada and the current ethnolinguistic vitality (demographics, institutional support, and status) of these language varieties. This includes an overview of programs to teach HLs (or to use HLs as the medium of instruction) in primary, secondary, and post-secondary contexts. Census information is provided to profile the distribution of HL speakers across major cities and all the provinces and territories of Canada, and the status of the HLs. The next section surveys publications about HLs in Canada including overviews, studies from the domain of sociolinguistics (language variation and change) that rely on spontaneous speech corpora, acquisition studies employing experimental methodology, and research on pedagogical approaches, noting primary findings from each. Specific information is provided about heritage varieties of Cantonese, German, Greek, Italian, Inuktitut, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Ukrainian.

Chapter 9 is devoted to aspects of general extender use by second language (L2) learners, with discussion of research and examples from first language (L1) speakers of Dutch, French, German, Persian and Swedish, plus data from English L1 speakers learning other languages. The phenomenon of low-frequency use of discourse/pragmatic features among L2 learners is noted. The more limited repertoire of L2 learners results in the complete absence of some forms and a reliance on, and hence overuse of, only a few expressions. Another aspect of L2 learner usage is the creation of novel expressions, some of which can be analyzed as interlanguage forms. Novel forms, and new uses of old forms, are also exemplified in the use of English as a lingua franca. Proposals for the inclusion of general extenders in L2 teaching are based on the explicit presentation and analysis of examples, with a contrastive approach discussed and exemplified. The chapter concludes with four exercises designed to raise awareness of how different English general extenders are typically used.

The Introduction sets the scene by reflecting back on an essay from 2003 in which Mary Louise Pratt, during her Presidency of the Modern Language Association, called for a “New Public Idea about Language.” Though an occasional essay, prompted by “today’s dramatic circumstances” (p. 112), the wisdom of Pratt’s simple proposals has held up sturdily over the ensuing two decades. Little about her depiction of a “linguistically unequipped” country has been revealed inaccurate. The endless War on Terror years, complicated by Trump and Brexit, have only deepened the importance of her, and kindred, interventions since the turn of the millennium. But, like the 2007 MLA Report “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World,” Pratt’s 2003 essay was an intervention in a particular, now historical, moment. Twenty years is ample time to warrant new clarity and purpose around such a “new public idea” about multilingualism.

Chapter 5 draws together the different aspects of language, grammar and acquisition to explore applications to language education and teaching. We first address the question of the purposes of language education and based on these, we explore dichotomies of nativeness versus foreignness; awareness versus ability; and grammar acquisition versus grammar skills. This permits a reconsideration of familiar problems in language teaching, such as the use of the L1 in foreign language teaching, or the development of meta-linguistic knowledge compared to communicative competence. The use of Virtual Grammar and grammatical concepts as a way to enhance and develop language awareness to address educational goals of language teaching is outlined. The chapter concludes by considering, in general terms, the role of descriptive and theoretical linguistics in applied linguistics.

This chapter explores the relationships between grammar and intercultural communicative competence. It discusses what we mean by ‘grammar,’ the nature of L2 grammatical development, and key concepts in teaching L2 grammar. This discussion is followed by a re-evaluation of the native-speaker ideal, morphosyntactic language variation, the local situatedness of grammar, and deploying grammar for creating social meaning. The chapter concludes with practical suggestions for teaching L2/Lx grammar with an intercultural communication orientation, as well as sample language teaching tasks and activities.

Language teaching changed significantly over the past century, shifting from the grammar translation method to the communicative approach and beyond. These changes reflected our evolving understanding of how languages are learned, influenced by behavioral, cognitive, sociocutural, and sociocognitive theories. Following this review, the chapter discusses in detail the role of communicative competence and intercultural communicative competence in language pedagogy, presenting research by Byram (1997), Kramsch (2009), Liddicoat and Scarino (2013), and Hua (2014). These discussions outline key components of intercultural communicative competence – such as knowledge, skills, attitudes, and linguistic knowledge - that lay the foundation for the pedagogical chapters in this volume.