Powerful pedagogies in languages education.

Orton, Jane

ABSTRACT

In recent debates about curriculum, Young (2008, p. 101) has proposed school learning must Involve Initiation Into the 'powerful knowledge' of the disciplines that underpin subject domains, thereby 'giving students the tools to think the unthinkable'. Opponents query whether such knowledge Is available In subjects such as modern languages, or propose that accessing powerful knowledge Is only a potential of subjects, and that its realisation rests on the use of powerful pedagogies (Roberts, 2010; White, 2013). At the espoused level, the powerful concepts to be met in language learning are clearly recognised in the curricula of English speaking countries; yet In practice, modern languages education In these countries Is a falling enterprise, empowering few to approach the hitherto unthinkable. A key factor In this Is the impoverished preparation of language teachers in short, generic programs. The lack of thorough professional education precludes teacher candidates developing the ability to teach powerfully, the product as Schoenfeld (2014, p.405) puts It, of a deep understanding of their specific language and culture and skilled use of personal and material resources so as 'to create procedures, concepts and contexts In the classroom that reflect that understanding, engage students In the Issues, and lead them beyond their current experience'; and in doing this, 'to create and maintain an environment of productive Intellectual challenge that Is conducive to the linguistic development of all the students In the room.' If it Is not to see Its asplratlonal hopes wither, the field of modern languages education needs to unite In modelling In Its own practices and the commercial resources It accepts to employ, the powerful pedagogies It espouses In Its school curricula, and to fight for the conditions In which realising them would be possible.

KEY WORDS

powerful pedagogies, languages Instruction, language teacher education, Intellectually rich resources

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Foreword: Opening remarks

President of the AFMLTA, Kylie Farmer, Members of the AFMLTA Executive, Invited Guests, Colleagues: I would like to thank you for the honour of being invited to give the Keith Horwood Memorial Lecture, the event which allows all of us to acknowledge the contribution of Keith Horwood to the development of modern languages education in Australia, and not least at this, my own, university.

I have studied at the Horwood Language Centre at The University of Melbourne, and I have taught at the Horwood Language Centre, and I have known it as a large, vibrant centre of learning in many languages and also, under the direction of my colleague and friend June Gassin, as the national heart of innovation in technology-assisted language learning. To give the Horwood Memorial lecture is thus a particularly meaningful task for me and one which I accept with considerable pride as it also places me on a list of very distinguished colleagues who have performed the task in prior years.

I would like us to remember Keith Horwood not only as an indefatigable advocate of language learning but, most importantly, as one who, well ahead of his time, recognised language learning from the first lesson as legitimately belonging on a university campus. Years before the emergence of the many findings from Linguistics and Applied Linguistics that are common currency now, he understood the intellectual challenges of the task language teaching and learning creates for teacher and student. We need to be strengthened by this as we struggle still with those who from ignorance believe what they call 'language instruction' is just a set of rules and exercises to be followed, with no intrinsic educational value or intellectual depth at all and hence with no rightful place on campus.

It is a view which has some links with what I am now going to talk about.

Introduction

About a year ago my colleague, Claudia Prescott, drew my attention to a renewed debate in the educational discourse about the notion of power. The debate was prompted In curriculum studies in particular by the English educator Michael Young (2008; 2010; 2012; 2013), who proposed that school learning involve initiation into the 'powerful knowledge' of the disciplines that underpin subject domains. Young argued his case on the grounds that this knowledge is our heritage and it has served us well in making progress. Drawing particularly on propositions made by Vygotsky as to the purpose of school learning, Young claimed:

The opportunity provided by schools for pupils to move between their everyday concepts and the theoretical concepts that are located in school subjects lies at the heart of the purpose of schools and alms of any curriculum. The crucial difference between the two types of concept is that a pupil's 'everyday concepts' limit them to their experience, whereas the theoretical concepts to which subject teaching gives students access enable them to reflect on and move beyond the particulars of their experience {Young, 2012, p. 102).

Young's position was opposed with vigour in Australia by Bill Green (2010), although Green argued not so much about whether a disciplinary base should be foregrounded or dropped as a form or logic of knowledge, but rather, whether ...

... it is to be mobilised along with various other knowledge logics and forms, in what is arguably a more comprehensive, flexible and appropriate repertoire of possibilities for ascertaining and adjudicating what constitutes and counts as really worthwhile knowledge, now and in the future (Green, 2010, p. 57).

In England, John White and others in the New Visions for Education Group also challenged Young. In similar vein to Green, White (2012, n.p.) concluded that 'the aims of education go wider than acquiring academic concepts and the knowledge that comes with them'. But White's opposition to Young's proposal also went further, querying the actual existence of the purported 'powerful knowledge', finding it very hard to define, especially outside the domains of mathematics and science. Indeed, in the humanities domains of history, English literature and modern foreign languages, White had difficulty accepting the existence of powerful knowledge. Elaborating his point, he had this to say about our field:

Modern foreign languages may do something to deepen a learner's understanding of the notion of language in general (although Modern Foreign Languages is surely not a necessary vehicle for this purpose); but the great bulk of its work is not about the development of conceptual understanding, but about the use of different words (Katze, blau, etc) to express concepts with which the learner is already familiar, and their understanding of which remains undeepened (White, 2012, n.p.).

Now this is being said by someone with no evident axe to grind with language teachers and it appeared to provoke no argument from anyone in languages education. However, reading it brought me up with a jolt. I found it sobering that in the mind of an experienced educator the anticipated educational affordances of modern language learning are deemed so shallow:

* it might or might not do something to raise awareness of the nature of language

* but, anyway, it is not needed for this to occur

* it is mostly not about development of conceptual understanding

* it does nothing to deepen understanding of conceptual meaning

* it just adds different words for the same old concepts.

Is that all we do?

The aims of language study in schools

At the espoused level, it is easy to say quickly: No. In Australia's new Australian Curriculum: Languages (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2014; Australian Curriculum, 2014), it is made abundantly clear that a central purpose for language study in schools is precisely the raising of students' awareness of the nature of language--how it names and frames those matters the language user groups believe, value and enact in practice and the things they make use of; how it carries the power divisions that exist between the groups; and how it is also open to being re-formed and made to serve new purposes.

Furthermore, as the Languages curriculum Preamble (Australian Curriculum, 2014) states:

Language learning is not a 'one plus one' relationship between two languages and cultures, where each language and culture stays separate and self-contained.

Comparison and referencing between (at least) two languages and cultures build understanding of how languages 'work', how they relate to each other and how language and culture shape and reflect experience; that is, the experience of language using and language learning. The experience of being in two worlds at once involves noticing, questioning and developing awareness of how language and culture shape identity.

On the matter of knowledge, the Australian Curriculum: Languages has a great deal to say:

In addition to being a means through which people engage in communication, language is a means through which knowledge is constructed, developed, represented, negotiated, stored, contested, discussed, communicated, taught and learnt. Furthermore, the knowledge that constitutes the core of languages curriculum involves various dimensions.

First, there is knowledge of the language itself as a linguistic system. Knowledge in the languages curriculum also includes knowledge of culture. Thematic content is included as an integrating device for drawing together key dimensions of content:

* general knowledge

* broader knowledge of the world

* general cultural knowledge

* knowledge drawn from other areas of the curriculum (Australian Curriculum: Languages, Preamble, 2014).

In elaborating these dimensions it goes on:

In some language programs, content is prioritised differently; for example, in content-based programs and in different models of bilingual programs. In programs broadly described as 'bilingual', the knowledge of learning areas such as history, science or mathematics is taught and learnt through the medium of the target language. Students develop both content and language knowledge to varying degrees depending on the particular purpose, nature and conditions of the program

While language learning may draw upon knowledge from any learning area, the key focus on communication and intercultural engagement builds particular synergies with some learning areas (Australian Curriculum: Languages, Preamble, 2014).

These links are then spelled out:

The major focus on literacy development and meta-Unguistic awareness, for example, links directly to the English learning area, providing opportunities for comparison, reflection and reinforcement of both the target language and of English as the primary medium for learning across the curriculum.

Concepts, skills and understandings developed in the humanities and social sciences learning area are important in the process of learning specific languages and cultures, and contribute to understanding how languages and cultures change over time and in different contexts, how communities and cultures interact in the world.

The arts learning area represents a body of knowledge related to human expression and interpretation of experience and the world. Language learning draws on concepts, skills and understandings within the arts, as learners represent their linguistic and cultural knowledge through various artistic forms of expression such as dance, drama and music.

Communication is increasingly occurring through multiple and varied forms of technology and through participation in contemporary communication practices. The technologies learning area makes important contributions to the languages area, supporting the development of a range of knowledge, skills and understanding, including the capability to discern the quality of ideas and information encountered by learner (Australian Curriculum: Languages, Preamble, 2014).

In sum:

Language learning expands learners' existing knowledge of language and literacy. Learners develop new and increasingly complex understanding of language, culture and literacy, and of ways in which knowledge is constructed and presented via different modes of communication and different types of texts. This integration of knowledge of language, culture and literacies is a complex but necessary part of an integrated view of language learning that combines learning language and culture, learning through language and culture, and learning about language and culture (Australian Curriculum: Languages, Preamble, 2014).

This comprehensive set of claims is accompanied In each language-specific curriculum by descriptions of possibilities for work on these matters In the particular language, and elaborations of activities and actual language examples to bring such awareness about. As noted, even at the word level, meanings In two languages are seen to be only equivalents, and even minor differences are to become a rich source of insight Into new language culture and home culture. For example, learning to appreciate the cultural base for a language having separate terms for 'younger' and 'older' brother or sister, or different forms of the pronoun 'you'. These phenomena reflect a fundamental orientation, in the one society, to age as the significant social divider, and in the other, that the society using such language likes to make public, formal divisions among people. Learning such matters casts a sharp light on the surface egalitarianism of English with its single forms for these relationships; and because of this difference, mastering the appropriate use of these terms entails a great deal more from an English speaker, cognitively and affectively, than simply remembering 'additional words'.

A glance at The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2003-2009) and the American National Standards for Foreign Language Learning (The National Standards Collaborative Board, 2015) shows similar perspectives on the value and affordances of modern language study there, too.

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Professor White's view quite evidently is not validated by the espoused view of modern languages education across the Western world.

POWERFUL PEDAGOGY

When Michael Young, the original proponent of powerful knowledge, responded to White's criticisms, he attended mostly to the central argument about curriculum divisions, but he also asserted his view that powerful knowledge does reside in the Humanities. Thus, 'acquiring the ability to speak and read a foreign language', he said, like history and literature, has the potential for 'giving students the tools to "think the unthinkable"' (Young, 2012, n.p.).

It was comforting to read this response, but Young's assertion also caused me to pause and wonder: if in practice learning a second language leads along a path to discovering the hitherto unthinkable, providing insight into the nature of language and how it reflects and influences social life and interaction, and does so in same and different ways across cultures, why are only 12 per cent of our students left still taking a language in their final year of secondary schooling, a dismal situation that is matched in the USA and the UK (Forbes, 2012; Ratcliffe, 2013).

Part of the answer to this also lies in Vygotsky's work. While he certainly did advocate the development of abstract thinking as a prime purpose for schooling, Vygotsky was also aware that there is more to success in the endeavour than just providing good content:

If teaching is to be effective, the activity to which it is addressed should be perceived as meaningful, satisfying an intrinsic need in the learner and 'incorporated into a task that is necessary and relevant for life' as perceived by the learner (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 118).

In her examination of Young's powerful knowledge proposal, another English educator, Margaret Roberts echoed this Vygotskian proposition, claiming that school knowledge is only 'potentially powerful', that it remains inert if students are not motivated to learn it and if they cannot make sense of it in some way for themselves. In her view the critical point is that, 'We need to know much more about the pedagogies that would make such knowledge accessible and meaningful for all students' (2014, p. 205).

Acknowledging the truth of this extends the locus of power from the organisation of learning content in a curriculum to include the pedagogical processes in which it is framed in practice. Other writers who have accepted the proposition that school learning of a subject is about fundamental concepts--in the domain of modern languages, those of the nature of language, human communication and social organisation and interaction--also believe, like Roberts, that these concepts are only potentially powerful for learners. Realising powerful learning--making it real--thus lies in creating what Prescott calls 'powerful pedagogies' (Prescott, 2013) and Schoenfeld (2014) terms 'powerful instruction'.

Vygotsky himself went on to develop a theory of learning to underpin a pedagogy that would generate meaningful learning, the three principal tenets of which are that:

1. Human beings learn by doing hence the learning needs to involve constructive meaning making through action.

2. Learning occurs in stages--hence the learning needs to be scaffolded, monitored--and assisted in a particular way.

3. Student development occurs by others helping to shorten 'the distance between the [learner's] actual developmental level as determined by [his/her] independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86).

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Vygotsky later elaborated on the importance of play in the learning process: 'It is the essence of play that a new relationship is created between the field of meaning and the visual field, that is, between situations in thought and real situations' (1986, p. 104).

Years before Vygostky's work was available in the West, Dewey (1938) had articulated a view of learning very similar to Vygotsky's, with some interesting additions of his own. In sum he had asserted:

* Human beings learn by doing, but not all experiences are beneficially educative, hence ...

* ... the central challenge for teachers is to create fruitful experiences, and organize them in progression to guide students' learning

* Fruitful experiences will be enjoyable at the time and have a positive impact on later experiences (Dewey, 1938, pp. 25-31).

Dewey developed these principles further by identifying the departure point for the journey to be, from the learner's experience to the abstract theoretical concepts beyond. He said:

Unfamiliar concepts and ideas need to be grounded within the scope of ordinary life-experience if students are to be able to grasp them (1938, p. 73).

This point of departure--which requires the teacher to find the student, not the other way round--is a key point in this kind of powerful instruction. As others later have expressed it:

* If real success is to attend the effort to bring a person to a definite position, one must first of all take pains to find him where he is and begin there ... so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it (Kierkegaard, 1959).

* You must be with them where they are. Teaching must be subordinated to learning (Gattegno, 1972).

* Powerful instruction 'meets students where they are' and gives them opportunities to move forward (Black & Wiliam, 1998).

Schaffer (1996) defined the effective teacher scaffolding activity that takes the student forward from where they are, beyond personal experience, in this way:

* It mostly takes the form of supporting or challenging, in 'joint involvement episodes'

* The former serves to maintain the student's current behaviour and to facilitate it

* In the latter, the adult gears demands to those aspects of the task that lie just beyond the level that the child has currently attained, in order to carry the child forward in a series of carefully graduated steps at a pace appropriate to that individual (Schaffer, 1996, p. 266).

POWERFUL LANGUAGE CLASSROOMS

Uniting and extending all these views, Schoenfeld (2014, p. 407) has proposed a generic framework of 'powerful classrooms'--that is, a framework of what I would like to call 'sites for students' fruitful encounters with the unthinkable'. His framework contains five dimensions:

4. Content

5. Cognitive demand

6. Access to new content

7. Agency, authority and identity

8. Uses of assessment.

Let me present these dimensions of a powerful classroom with their general and language specific measures in practice. They remain in Shoenfeld's terms, but filled in by me for languages education, where our content is two-fold: on the one hand there is the content of the specific language and culture being learned, and on the other, there is more generic linguistic knowledge about the nature and use of language.

1. Content: the Language dimension

Powerful in this dimension concerns the extent to which the content discussed is focused and coherent and connections between procedures, concepts and contexts are addressed and explained.

As a practical measure in this dimension, students should have opportunities to learn important linguistic and specific language content and practices and to develop productive language habits of mind. In our practice this means students would:

* Become aware of what they can now express and comprehend in the new language

* Know what they need to watch out for = how it is expressed differently (if it is)

* Stop to think about the notion of equivalence of phrases, rather than direct correspondence. 'This is how the Chinese say Hello', not, 'This means Hello'

* Go about learning new language using imagined scenarios and physical action.

2. Cognitive demand

Powerful here concerns the extent to which classroom interactions create and maintain an environment of productive intellectual challenge that is conducive to student's linguistic development. (Somewhere between spoon-feeding and challenges that are too large.)

* Activities have an expressed purpose and a sought outcome and a consequence = what we are going to do, why, and where that will take us

* The direct language content or reflections about language, cultural practices and knowledge, cause students to pause, to wonder, to ponder, to engage, to be amused or disconcerted.

3. Access to new language content

Powerful here concerns the extent to which classroom activity structures invite and support the active engagement of all of the students in the classroom with the core language study being addressed by the class. No matter how rich the linguistics being discussed, a classroom in which only a small number of students get most of the 'airtime' is not equitable in access.

4. Agency, authority and identity

The powerful in this dimension concerns the extent to which students have opportunities to conjecture, explain, make linguistic arguments, and build on one another's ideas in ways that contribute to their development of agency (the capacity and willingness to engage linguistically) and authority (recognition for being linguistically solid) resulting in positive identities as doers of languages learning.

This, of course, very much echoes Vygotsky and Dewey's proposition that learners need to have a go so as to construct their own learning and have the chance to make the language and the learning of it meaningful, literally and in terms of their life experience.

5. Uses of assessment

Powerful in this dimension concerns the extent to which the teacher solicits student thinking and subsequent instruction responds to those ideas by building on productive beginnings or addressing emerging misunderstanding.

POWERFUL LANGUAGE CLASSROOMS IN PRACTICE

As I have said earlier, inside the field of languages education we have recognised the powerful knowledge embedded in language learning and have elaborated it into curricula. Quite evidently we also have clear and elaborated learning theories to guide and support a powerful pedagogy for the teaching and learning of that content.

So it seems that it is in the transition to practice that the troubles lies, that it is in the move to action that we fail to ignite and hold students' interest. Here again Schoenfeld can be of help. He suggests any failure to develop powerful learning will be due to a teacher's--or the group of teachers'--lack in one or more of these areas:

i. Domain-specific knowledge and resources--a lack in general language knowledge and resources, and language-specific knowledge and resources

j. Access to productive 'heuristic' strategies for making progress on challenging problems--a lack of usable, effective ways of breaking big problems down

k. Monitoring and self regulation (aspects of metacognition)

l. Belief systems regarding language generically and the specific language in particular and our language specific identity--a sense of the self as language user in general and as user of our specific languages in particular (Schoenfeld, 2014, p. 405).

If we look at the first and last points together--the points which involve our generic and specific language knowledge and resources and our beliefs about them--I would say we are failing first and foremost because there is a gap between, on the one hand, the depth of espoused knowledge and understanding about the nature of language, and about any specific language and its relation to cultural beliefs and values, and on the other hand, the degree to which connections between procedures, concepts and contexts in the classroom reflect that knowledge and understanding, and are addressed and explained: and that this is done in ways that start where students are, and attempt to engage them in the issues and lead them beyond their current experience. Too often modern language classroom interactions do not create and maintain an environment of productive intellectual challenge, nor through productive collaboration do they often lead to the development in students of firm identity and authority with respect to language and the specific language. Clearly John White's students learning their 'words' are not experiencing the intellectual challenges we know are there, and that is why their concepts remain 'undeepened'.

POWERFUL TEACHERS

With respect to remediating lacks in the language dimension, Schoenfeld directs us to consider the resources available to the teacher. By 'resources' he is, first of all, referring to the teachers' own personal knowledge and skills, including knowledge of the students' first and additional languages, understanding of the formal linguistic concepts of language and culture that are involved, and the grasp s/he has of what in the whole endeavour merits being called powerful.

Secondly, by 'resources' he is referring to the teaching material available and the degree to which it presents the content as focused and coherent; that it presents connections between procedures, concepts and contexts explicitly; and offers work that develops productive language habits of mind, and activities which help create and maintain an environment of productive Intellectual challenge.

Talking to teachers in professional development sessions, going round the schools observing, investigating teacher education programs and practices, it is not common to find in our personal and material resources and our discussion of published resources, evidence of this integrated, comprehensive and ambitious perspective, or efforts promoting and ensuring this level of teacher education and tools are available. Indeed, the components of the first and last dimensions listed above are not often part of the common discourse on practice.

I would propose three points at which change for the better can be initiated that could develop modern languages education as a path of powerful instruction and powerful learning. The first is constant advocacy within schools and society by those who perceive the power potential of the field. This is an argument that it seems the English, maths and science teachers never have to mount, but it is essential for us. While there are obstacles, we need to remind ourselves that we do have specific Curricula and Standards and they are the result of constant, informed vigilance by bodies such as Australian Federation of Modern Languages Teachers Associations and the State associations, here and overseas; and that to have reached this level of acceptance is evidence of languages being accepted as important by many who are involved in other fields. But such advocacy is also open to taunts about our practice not always meeting our own standards and claims. And that has to be where our main energy is directed.

The second point for change is the insistence that language teacher education itself must be an empowering experience. And thirdly, there needs to be an ongoing, vigorously critical discussion with material resource creators--the textbook, apps and DVD publishers--that sees material of high intellectual and linguistic content being produced. Imagine a textbook where the characters actually had to think, to worry, to ponder, to wonder about something that mattered! Imagine students hardly able to wait to turn the page of their language textbook to find out what happened.

Of the three courses of action, I suggest that of teacher education is the one we need to engage in first. Most often modern languages teacher education consists of a too-short course in generic language teaching taught by someone who does not know all of the languages of those in the course. If the goal is to develop beginning teachers with an articulated standpoint based on knowledge of the domain and the resources, teachers who can do and then reflect and critique their own action and improve on it, only a certain amount of their training can be generic. Practitioners normally learn best by working through experience and so student teachers need to be working in their own language under a guide who can reach them where they are and challenge them on language specific matters; and at the same time, help them to make meaning of the tenets of the powerful modern languages pedagogy that we espouse, and be able to practise them, such as is set out in Figure 1:

With respect to working across the five dimensions of powerful classrooms, Schoenfeld proposes questions to use to frame Teaching for a Robust Understanding of the subject content. They are what we would be asking as we study propositions about language and classroom activities put forward by student teachers, or analyse resources put out by publishers:

* The language--how do language ideas from this unit/course develop in this lesson/lesson sequence?

* Cognitive demand--what opportunities do students have to make their own sense of language ideas?

* Access to language content-who does and does not participate in the language work of the class, and how?

* Agency, authority and identity what opportunities do students have to explain their own and respond to each other's language ideas?

* Uses of assessment--what do we know about each student's current language thinking, and how can we build on it? (Schoenfeld, 2013, p. 408)

The key to success is that this way of working must be reflexive--the teacher education class must create a hall of mirrors that reflects in its own practices enactment of the espousals it presents, because this is what will develop student teacher and in-service teacher learning; and not least, provide them with the experience necessary to learn about learning and how to proceed in their own practice.

We need to be discussing and also advocating for forms of teacher education that support student teachers to develop the classroom instruction practices that develop robust language understanding and habits of mind; and assist and encourage publishers to develop resources congruent with and useful in this endeavour.

We do not need to reinvent the wheel. We know a lot already and there are plenty of pieces of this vision being created right now. What they lack is any articulated, coherent and generally shared theoretical base of what is valuable in language learning, what is required of the learner to access that, and what that learning might look like when it happens in reality. For the most part the resources available rely on traditional grammar-vocabulary exemplars; short, dull texts with little in them to engage about; and a tacit belief that nothing interesting can happen until some years hence, when the student has finally learned the language. We have to persuade publishers, instead, that they <1AIG003H_TB001> must pose for themselves the questions of clear focus and Immediate significance for students, and Interrogate the intellectual and language value of all their ideas and products as they are coming into being.

Among especially powerful Ideas for teacher education is a solid grounding In Blended Learning--not just popping in a bit of Internet or using a DVD now and then--but using ICT to enable rotating small groups of students so they get Individual attention and help, as well as opportunities to work both alone and In a group as they explore the fantastic possibilities technology offers in diminishing the slog of learning vocabulary, structures and spelling by providing mind engaging puzzles that keep students on task for hours; of creating collaboratlvely in the new language; and of escaping the confines of the classroom all together, either In interaction with sister-school buddies in the country of language origin, or In working on sites in the target language.

Decades ago Henry Widdowson (1978) proposed that school subjects would make good content, by which he meant content that would be of interest to students, and could begin where they are. Real activities do seem to offer a chance to get past reluctance to get Involved and there are huge areas of real activity that could be developed for language learning, whether they are exclusive or supplementary to the learning of that content.

CONCLUSION

In his attack on Young's proposed goal of 'powerful knowledge', White (2013) criticised him for using what he called a 'sexy' term like powerful, but then not being clear what It meant, or If It even meant anything real. Looking at our documented espousals, it is clear we believe that learning can be powerful and can leave the learner feeling empowered. It Is also clear we know that language teaching can be and feel powerful. To achieve that, It requires we know what we are doing, what we are aiming for and how to recognise it when we see it in diverse manifestations. Yet, our statistics are clearly showing us that we are not transferring this power to a great many of our students.

There are factors in the situation that are outside our field and beyond our control, that Is for sure. But re-developing a common discourse about powerful pedagogy in modern language teacher education, and getting energised to find ways to realise Schoenfeld's five dimensions in our work with teacher candidates and resource creators, are matters we can begin to engage in at once. I hope we do!

And I hope we do It loudly and clearly enough that John White feels the need to write anew, this time about his growing understanding of the powerful, realisable affordances embedded, often uniquely, in the learning of a language!

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Young, M. 2010. Keynote introductory lecture to a meeting of the Goethe Project. University of Tubingen. In J. Beck, 2013. Powerful knowledge, esoteric knowledge, curriculum knowledge. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43: 2, 177-193.

Young, M. 2012. The Curriculum--'An entitlement to powerful knowledge': A response to John White.

New Visions for Education. Retrieved 31 December 2014 from www.newvisionsforeducation.org. uk/2012/05/03/the-curriculum-%E2%80%98an-entitlement-to-powerful-knowledge%E2%80%99-a-response-to-john-white/

Young, M. 2013, Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: A knowledge-based approach. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 45, 2, 101-118.

Dr Jane Orton Is an Honorary at The University of Melbourne. Her first degree was a BA in French and Philosophy from The University of Melbourne, where she later returned and undertook an honours degree in Chinese language and literature. She was a pioneer user of The Silent Way and worked with Caleb Gattegno in the United States for three years. She also taught two years at the Ecole Active Bilingue in Paris and at Capital Normal University in Beijing. She has been a frequent guest lecturer, conference speaker and researcher in China over the ensuing 30 years, including giving Master's seminars in Chinese to students at Fudan University and Beijing Normal University and in English at Beijing Languages and Culture University and Peking University. Her research interests are the learning demands of Chinese as a Second Language, especially oral skill development, and Chinese teacher education. She is a Board member of the international Chinese as a Second Language Research Association (CASLAR) and a member of the Editorial Board of the CASLAR Journal. In Australia she has recently been a member of the Australian Curriculum for Languages Advisory Panel. Her recent publications include 'Comparing teachers' judgments of learners' speech in Chinese as a foreign language' in Foreign Language Annals, and the Teacher Education chapter for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Culture to be published this September.

Fig. 1 Adapted from the first part of a four-part summary rubric for
The Teaching of Robust Understanding of Mathematics (Schoenfeld,
2014, p. 408)

                                                  Access to
The Language          Cognitive Demand        Language Content

Accurate, coherent   Students supported    Teacher supports access
and well justified   In grappling with     to the content of the
language content     and making sense of   lesson for all students
                     language concepts

                       Agency, Authority
The Language              and Identity          Uses of Assessment

Accurate, coherent   Students are the         Students' language
and well justified   source of ideas and      thinking is surfaced;
language content     discussion of them,      instruction builds on
                     their contributions      student ideas when
                     genuinely contributing   potentially valuable.
                                              + misunderstandings
                                              addressed as they arise