Many children seem to learn to talk effortlessly, perhaps because they are treated as meaning-makers from the moment they are born. As Alexander writes, talk plays a powerful role in a child’s learning and yet, sometimes once a child can talk, we pay little attention to the ongoing development of speaking and active listening. This chapter begins by focusing on how children become competent oral communicators in the home, in early childhood contexts and at school. The central role of storying and storytelling in learning both language and culture, including the role of oral narrative in Australia’s First Nations cultures, is also considered in helping us understand why oracy underpins learning to read and write. This chapter documents how speaking and listening are represented in both the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) and the Australian Curriculum: English. Finally, a range of teaching and learning instructional strategies that foster the ongoing development of children’s speaking and listening are explored.

In this chapter the focus is on literacy and oral language development for bilingual learners, but all semiotic systems, including Auslan, the language of the deaf community, should be recognised and respected as a first language, the language which is the basis for developing literacy in any language.

This chapter builds on Chapters 6 and 7 by exploring in more detail a range of concrete strategies and activities that teachers can introduce in the classroom to facilitate the deepening of learners’ understanding of different kinds of spoken, written, digital, multimodal and visual texts. In this chapter, we again refer to all kinds of texts (oral, written, digital and multimodal), so text is used here in its broadest sense. This chapter begins with a case study that illustrates how learners can respond to texts in creative ways facilitated by the class teacher. It moves to briefly examine reader response theory before exploring the importance of building learners’ understandings through talk and teacher modelling to ensure learners have both context and field knowledge. A range of classroom strategies and approaches are then considered that can facilitate different ways learners can respond to texts. Through such responses, learners can build critical understandings of texts that go beyond literal or surface comprehension. A particular emphasis is placed on metacognitive and creative arts-rich strategies that can be adapted for imaginative, instructional and information texts.

This chapter stresses the importance of both teachers and learners as writers (Graves, 1983) as they create, either together or individually, a range of different texts for different purposes and become a community of writers. After considering a parent’s account of her daughter’s experience in learning to write, we look at how substantial dialogue always needs to underpin the development of writing. The interrelationship between speaking and writing is then considered using the mode continuum. We then explore the different aspects of learning to write within the teaching and learning framework, including the importance of building learners’ field knowledge, teacher modelling to break down the features of different kinds of texts, joint construction and independent writing. We use a range of examples of children’s writing to illustrate different kinds of texts and emphasise that creating texts can and should be enjoyable.

During the day, the input of energy from the sun drives the uptake of carbon by photosynthesis and the water-vapor losses by evapotranspiration from the vegetated land surface; the latent heat from the land to the atmosphere, related to the evapotranspiration, is coupled to the sensible heat flux, which typically is also positive because of surface warming by solar radiation (e.g., Fig. 5.1).

Human societies are increasingly altering the water and biogeochemical cycles to improve ecosystem productivity and food security while reducing the risks associated with the unpredictable variability of climatic drivers. Agroecosystems are the main stage in this acceleration, comprising 12% of the global land, an area of 16 million square kilometers, equivalent to Brazil and Australia combined. The alterations to ecohydrological processes have the potential to cause dramatic environmental consequences, raising the question how societies can achieve a sustainable use of natural resources for the future while ensuring food security for a growing population. In this chapter, we discuss how ecohydrological modeling may help us to better understand and address some of these broad questions; we follow in part Porporato et al. (2015).

Most quantities of interest in ecohydrology vary so erratically in time and space that they may be considered as random variables. Because of the unpredictable forcing by rainfall and other meteorological and climatic variables, ecohydrological phenomena thus require a probabilistic description. As a result, the dynamical laws for their physical, chemical, and biological behavior take the form of stochastic dynamical systems.

The soil is the store of water and nutrients for most plants and living organisms on land (Noy-Meir, 1973), and acts as an important hydrologic “valve” for the partitioning of the land-surface water and energy fluxes. While soil is often idealized as a mixture of mineral, liquid, and gaseous components, it is in reality a very complex biomaterial (Brady and Weil, 1996; Richter and Markewitz, 2001; Paul, 2006), which provides different environments for plants and microbial life. Owing to this complexity, there are several ways in which soils have been classified and analyzed.

In this section, we review some concepts needed to define water potential and describe water status within the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum, which will be important in Chapters 3–5. More in-depth descriptions of thermodynamics can be found in the following excellent books: Kestin (1979), Zemansky and Dittman (1997). Kondepudi and Prigogine (2005), Bejan (2006), and Callen (2006).

Thermodynamics is founded on two main laws, which are complementary to the mass and momentum conservation equations. They describe how energy is distributed among its different forms, transferred, and degraded during thermodynamic transformations. These laws may be applied to systems that are isolated, i.e., in which there is no exchange of energy or matter, or closed, i.e., which do not allow mass exchange but do allow energy exchange, or open, i.e., where both mass and energy exchange with the surroundings are possible.

Ecohydrology is the study of the two-way interaction between the hydrological cycle and ecosystems. More broadly, it is the science of the linkages between life and water on Earth. On the one hand, the space and time variability of the hydrological cycle controls the water availability for ecosystems; on the other hand, ecosystems, especially through transpiration by vegetation, control the main pathway by which water returns to the atmosphere from land. The terrestrial water cycle also drives some of the dynamics of soil organic matter (SOM), microbial biomass, and the related nutrient cycling. These in turn not only affect the vegetation dynamics but also impact the hydraulic and thermodynamic properties of soil, thereby directly acting on the partitioning of water and energy fluxes at the land–atmosphere interface.

In water-controlled ecosystems, water demand by plants is generally higher than water availability, leading to plant water stress. To cope efficiently with water stress, plants have developed different strategies, which become more sophisticated the more intense and unpredictable the water deficit is. Many species combine a number of complementary measures to develop such strategies, the most extreme of which include permanent forms of adaptation, such as changes in resource allocation, specialized root growth (e.g., cacti build a dense network of roots to capture light rainfall events, while some desert shrubs - the so- called phreatophytes – develop deep roots to tap the water table when present), specialized photosynthetic pathways (e.g., the CAM pathway), short and intense life cycles during favorable periods, dormancy, drought deciduousness, specialized metabolism and leaf structure to reduce water losses (high cuticular resistance, protection and changes in dimension and density of the stomata), etc.

Plant physiologists usually distinguish two kinds of water in vascular plants: apoplastic water, located outside the plasma membranes and relatively free to move from roots to leaves through the xylem conduits, and symplastic water, which is contained in the protoplast of the living cells (see Fig. 4.1). We discuss here only the main issues related to modeling water transport and refer to specialized books for more details on plant physiology and ecology (e.g., Salisbury and Ross, 1969; Jones, 1992; Lambers et al., 1998; Nobel, 1999; Larcher, 2003).