Editorial.

Rennie, Jennifer ; Doecke, Brenton ; Patterson, Annette 等

This is the first issue of your new editorial team comprising Jennifer Rennie and Brenton Doecke from Monash University and Annette Patterson from the Queensland University of Technology. We would like to sincerely thank the retiring editorial team from the University of New England, Len Unsworth, David Baxter, Corrine Buckland and Beverly Crocker for their supportive role in assisting the transfer of the editorship and for their editorial work on previous issues. Our team looks forward to continuing the work of previous editorial teams and the Australian Literacy Educators Association in making the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy a significant national and international journal for those with an interest in literacy education.

The current political and educational climate presents new opportunities and exciting times for education research. National curriculum, teacher standards, national testing and improving educationally disadvantaged groups are just some of the policy directions that affect the work of literacy educators both nationally and internationally. Meanwhile literacy learning is increasingly shaped by new media and by the ability of young people to engage with and create multimodal texts. Literacy educators and researchers are embracing the many opportunities for expanding our understanding of literacy learning and teaching in an increasingly complex world dominated both by global knowledge economies and local diversity.

In this issue we present contributions that speak to some of the exciting new ideas in literacy education in the twenty-first century. Margaret Somerville raises some important questions related to the ways in which socially marginalised learners move between different modes of literacy. She argues that we need to think about literacy as 'an act of translation' where different literacy learning is about moving between the different modes and 'forms of meaning making and expression'. Work that continues to investigate 'literacies' as opposed to 'literacy' is paramount if we are to keep pace with technology and increased local and global diversity. The two articles that follow provide two different perspectives on pre-service teacher's knowledge about language. Helen Harper and Jennifer Rennie report on a study that investigated pre-service teacher's knowledge about language. Judith Rivalland and Anne Thwaite discuss a unit of work in a teacher education course where pre-service teacher's knowledge about language was developed in order to assist them in reflecting on their own practice. Work in this area will become increasingly important with a focus on the importance of 'grammar' in new curriculum initiatives and teacher education. The final two papers discuss issues dealing with the ways in which schools and teachers engage with digital texts. Diane Hansford and Rachael Adlington discuss the pedagogical challenges faced by teachers as they attempt to engage and support students to become proficient authors of new texts in a 'new literacies' environment and Judine Ladbrook reports on a study which investigated how teachers are engaging with 'new literacies' in their classrooms . Again this is an important body of research in a world where new texts are continually evolving due to technology.

We hope you enjoy reading these papers and we look forward to receiving contributions from teachers and researchers.