Increasingly recognised as the key to promoting educational equity and diversity, plurilingual pedagogies are classroom approaches that engage students' linguistic, cultural, and multimodal resources as diverse ways of knowing and making meaning. Within English as an Additional Language (EAL) education, a considerable body of literature explores how digital technologies can be leveraged to support plurilingual pedagogies. However, many studies are interventionist, focusing on externally initiated innovations, rather than on how plurilingual pedagogies are enacted within teachers' day-to-day engagement with technology. In this article, we adopt an understanding of everyday technology practices as emergent, productive, and tactical, and examine how teachers enact plurilingual pedagogies within these practices. We bring this conceptualisation to an analysis of interviews with ten teachers across different school sectors in Victoria, Australia. Through reflexive thematic analysis, three interrelated plurilingual pedagogies were identified: engaging students' diverse semiotic resources; connecting with students' lived experiences and life-worlds; and leveraging students' use of home languages. These pedagogies were analysed in relation to the participants' temporal and structural constraints, such as workload, time pressures, and institutional and systemic monolingual ideologies that persist in Australian schooling contexts. The everyday lens brought to light the synergies between the plurilingual pedagogies evidenced in the data analysis and the teachers' creative, relational, and purposeful engagement with digital tools in ways that allowed them to support students' needs while navigating conflicting demands in their professional contexts. The paper concludes with considerations for educators and researchers in Australia and internationally.

Australia's cultural and linguistic diversity highlights a pressing need for teacher education programs to prepare educators who can effectively support plurilingual learners. At the same time, existing programs often fall short in building the pedagogic and linguistic knowledge required to counter dominant English-only norms. This study draws on the framework of culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogies (CLSP) to explicitly centre plurilingual practices. CLSP is particularly relevant in the Australian context, where English-centric policies continue to marginalise First Nations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) knowledges and perspectives and plurilingual ways of knowing and being. We present findings from a national study examining teacher educators' perspectives toward CLSP within initial teacher education units across Australia. A reflective survey instrument was developed from the literature to capture CLSP perspectives from 209 teacher educators. Designed not only as a data gathering instrument, the survey also serves as a reflective tool to prompt critical self-examination and highlight areas where further development or pedagogical transformation may be needed. The results reveal variable engagement with pedagogical practices aligned with CLSP, with fluctuating levels of provision for embedding plurilingual pedagogies and English as an additional language strategies. The findings also point to tensions within teacher preparation where the need to meet standardised curriculum expectations may constrain efforts to sustain linguistic diversity. This research advances debates on situating plurilingual, justice-oriented approaches in teacher education by exploring how teacher educators can challenge linguistic hierarchies and reimagine teacher education in Australia and similar post-colonial contexts.

Roald Dahl's books have long captivated readers through imaginative stories and memorable characters, securing a persistent and prominent place in primary classrooms. The enduring popularity of Dahl's works, however, raises pressing professional questions concerning the diversity, appropriateness, and alignment of children's literature used to enact the primary years English curriculum. This article contributes to scholarship on text selection practices in primary English by addressing the documented dilemma of Dahl dominance, and the tensions it produces for curriculum enactment. Focusing on The Twits (Dahl & Blake, 1981) , this article presents a critical literary analysis to examine how the text aligns with contemporary curricular and pedagogical responsibilities. To situate this analysis, the article draws primarily on scholarship examining Roald Dahl's work within children's literature studies, as well as research on inherited classroom canons and teachers' reading repertoires. Specifically, it attends to patterns of characterisation, language use, and representation across the text, bringing into view contentions that arise when familiar classroom favourites are read against current curriculum expectations. The discussion is presented using a palimpsestuous representational form. In doing so, it draws on Nick Bland's (2009) The wrong book as an interpretive device to create dialogic interplay and to sustain attention on the tensions and discomforts produced through scrutiny of Dahl's familiar classroom text. In light of curricular and pedagogical tensions, the article concludes by arguing for deliberate circuit breaking in text selection. It offers curriculumaligned examples of contemporary children's literature that more effectively support inclusive, critically engaged English teaching in the primary years.

Phonics instruction has been re-emphasised in contemporary literacy policy as the foundation of early reading, reinforced through major reports and curriculum reforms. Grounded in the alphabetic principle, phonics teaches grapheme-phoneme correspondences to support decoding. Yet despite its prominence, limited attention has been paid to assumptions about spoken English that shape how phonics is taught and assessed. Many phonics practices, particularly synthetic phonics and oral phonics screening checks, rely on a single, standardised pronunciation model, overlooking the pluricentric and evolving nature of English. In classrooms where learners and teachers speak diverse varieties of English, such assumptions may risk narrowing what counts as accurate decoding. The paper outlines the historical development of phonics and the debates that shaped its implementation, before proceeding to draw on the Oxford English Dictionary's coverage of world Englishes to show that English phonemes are realised in multiple systematic ways. Due to systematic variation in spoken language across accents and linguistic backgrounds, oral decoding responses may be evaluated not only in relation to grapheme-phoneme knowledge but also according to how closely they align with assessors' expectations of a socially familiar pronunciation norm. In such contexts, judgements about decoding accuracy may therefore be shaped not only by phonological knowledge underlying decoding but also by social expectations about which pronunciations are recognised as legitimate forms of English. The paper argues for a linguistically responsive approach to phonics instruction and assessment that recognises phonetic variation across Englishes and avoids the risk of treating accent-related pronunciation variation as evidence of decoding difficulty. It concludes by identifying implications for multilingual learners, speakers of diverse English varieties, and teachers, along with key gaps in research on teacher knowledge and judgement in linguistically diverse classrooms.

Abstract Nearly one quarter of students in Australian schools are learning English as an additional language (EAL). However, despite international research, and one Australian study, there is limited direct evidence of the length of time required for EAL students in Australia to develop the English necessary to access the curriculum in the same ways as their non-EAL peers. This article reports on outcomes from a large-scale project that investigated this issue. The project involved analysis of NAPLAN results in reading and writing from EAL students in NSW public schools from 2014 to 2022, and was supported by NSW Department of Education. The article outlines the challenges and methodological decisions involved in undertaking research of this nature, including the use of propensity score matching to control for the possibility of confounding factors. Results from the research confirm the overall length of time required for EAL students to develop high levels of academic English; they provide evidence of students’ progress in academic writing in comparison to reading; and they show the impact of students’ different starting levels on their overall progression in academic English. The results are significant and enable conclusions to be drawn regarding the length and continuity of language and literacy support needed by EAL students; allocation of resources across schools in response to students’ needs; and the professional support needed by teachers who are working with EAL students in their mainstream classes.