Chapter 11 looks at how skills and competences necessary for successful language learning can be developed in the language classroom through the use of drama, music and games. Developing an understanding of the culture and literature of countries where the foreign language is spoken and what is appropriate at different ages and stages of learning is also examined in this chapter. The use of music and rhyme helps to embed the foreign language in learners’ minds, promoting pedagogical diversity and consolidating learning, particularly with regards to pronunciation, fluency, listening comprehension, memorisation of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as increasing cultural awareness. Drama and games can motivate learners and create a relaxed atmosphere where language skills can develop, thus promoting learner interaction, improving skills and consolidating knowledge.

Most simply, the words ‘pedagogy and care’ capture and describe the core work that is done in the earliest years of education with very young children. Early childhood education (ECE) shares the same general aims as primary, secondary and tertiary education, with an overarching focus on learning and development. Educators working with infants and toddlers practice in a space where pedagogy and care are inextricably linked. It could thus be argued that ideas about pedagogy in relation to infants and toddlers are hardest to reconcile. This challenge may be due to the particular history of infants and toddlers as the youngest children in society, driven by discourses of maternalism and inherently tied to an image of their place in the home, where they were for many centuries. However, infants and toddlers are attending ECE settings in ever-increasing numbers and upholding their right to quality pedagogy is a professional responsibility of all ECE services, leaders and educators.

From the moment they are born, infants are active and competent learners. Before birth, they perceive and respond to stimuli from the outside world and the people in it. Newborns recognise and respond socially to other people and pay attention to interesting objects and events. Infants are born ‘ready to learn, and during their first three years, they learn, develop and grow at a faster rate than at any other time in their lives. Rapid physical development enables mobility, exploration and physical manipulation; emerging social and emotional skills foster relationships, wellbeing, and belonging; increasing communication and language competence support social interactions, literacy development and learning; and cognitive advancements cultivate critical ways of thinking and understanding. The skills and understandings that infants and toddlers achieve during their first three years form the cornerstone from which all future learning, development and wellbeing is built.

This chapter focuses on the knowledge pre-service and in-service teachers need to develop and evaluate oral communication (oracy) within a student’s first language, and it also explores its application in English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D) contexts. A range of practical teaching strategies, interactive activities and integrated approaches are suggested to promote speaking, interacting and listening capabilities in students. Multimodal integrated strategies are presented that focus on oral communication, but also help develop students’ reading, writing and viewing skills, fostering well-rounded learners capable of critical thinking, effective communication and cultural awareness.

Chapter 3 emphasises the importance of developing skills among pupils progressively throughout language learning and discusses how each skill complements the others to improve overall communicative competence. Practical advice on how to develop each individual skill is given, as well as how to create multi-skill and multi-task activities. Tasks designed to give student teachers practice in developing these individual skills are included. The development of reading skills is given particular attention, as this is an area which can affect the others if not given due care and consideration.

From the moment of birth, infants are immersed in a world of communication. Attentive adults look into their eyes, smile and coo at them, and use touch, eye contact and simple sentences to connect. In return, newborns respond to the human voices that they have been hearing in utero by looking towards the adult’s face and moving their bodies and faces. They also respond neurologically, with parts of their brains associated with auditory language processing activated by human speech more so than by other human sounds such as humming or non-distinct speech. Within the first six months, they not only use cries, coos and facial expressions to communicate feelings and needs, but also engage in rudimental back and forth exchanges with attending caregivers. The desire to connect with others through language and communication is indeed a very strong and uniquely human trait.

Chapter 2 examines historical and current approaches to the learning and teaching of foreign languages and considers the features of each approach. The term ‘post-method’ and whether we are in a period that can be described as such are discussed before a consideration of why foreign languages are learned. A very important aspect of foreign language learning and teaching is how to increase exposure to the target language and how to promote target language use amongst pupils. Through analysis of commonly perceived problems associated with language teaching, advice will be given to help teachers develop strategies to stay in, or increase their use of, the target language.

As children learn to speak, read and write, they not only utilise and draw on the sounds of language, or phonemic and phonological awareness, they also implicitly and explicitly recognise and apply knowledge of how sounds are combined systematically in a language to form meaningful units called morphemes. A morpheme is a meaningful unit of a language that cannot be further divided, such as single word units (e.g. at, the, table) or parts of words that modify meaning (e.g. un-, mis) or grammatical forms (-ed, -ing, -s).

Chapter 6 builds on unit planning and analyses the fundamentals of modern foreign languages lesson planning and the features of a successful lesson. It emphasises the importance of planning learning across a series of lessons and walking through your planning in advance. Successful lesson planning must be based on a sound knowledge of pedagogy and teachers need to know the most effective ways of learning and teaching languages. This in turn needs to be coupled with skilled use of the appropriate modes of teaching used at the appropriate time. This all needs to happen within a planned framework, which allows and supports pupils’ development and progress across a sequence of learning goals. Chapter 6 gathers these factors together and leads student teachers through the essential steps of effective lesson planning.

In Chapter 4, we discussed the two approaches to grammar that have been taught in Australian schools: traditional grammar, and Halliday’s functional grammar. We highlighted some limitations of traditional grammar and outlined the key concepts of functional grammar, which significantly influences English curricula in Australia and globally. While Chapter 4 emphasised explicit grammatical knowledge required by teachers, this chapter focuses on genres, text types, and the teaching of grammar and text types through explicit pedagogical methods.

This chapter outlines essential knowledge for pre-service and in-service teachers regarding the all-encompassing component of language and literacy development: critical literacy. In the current information-saturated world of ‘fake news’ and algorithms that decide the social media content we view, it is important to empower students with the ability to critically engage and knowingly accept or resist what they are reading or viewing. Critical literacy requires text users to approach their consumption of texts with a questioning mindset. It helps them develop an understanding of how texts work – the ability to analyse and identify the visual, linguistic and multimodal features of texts that create meaning implicitly and explicitly. Drawing upon foundational theories and critical literacy models, this chapter demonstrates how to integrate the five macro-skills of reading, writing, listening, speaking and viewing of both textual and multimodal sources to develop students’ critical comprehension and production of various text types.

For many adults, the idea that infants and toddlers are ‘knowers, thinkers and theorisers’ is a strange one. Such concepts are often associated with older children whose abilities to build and express understandings are more evident and align more readily with traditional ideas about learning and teaching. Furthermore, cognitive states and processes such as ‘knowing’, ‘thinking’ and ‘understanding’ are not visible in the same way that physical, social and emotional behaviours. This means that they have to be inferred and interpreted, especially when pre-verbal infants and toddlers cannot tell you what is going on in their heads. Together these challenges may result in a deficit view that, instead of seeing infants and toddlers as active and capable learners, positions very young as waiting to learn. Also, an emphasis on meeting physical and emotional needs may come at the cost of overlooking infants and toddlers cognitive capabilities and potentials.