ABSTRACTS

Alex Kostogriz and Brenton Doecke At the International English Teachers' Conference in Sydney in 1980, James Britton and Harold Rosen re-affirmed the connection between language and learning, urging their audience to resist drawing 'a sharp distinction between the language of the home and the street and the language of the school' and to move beyond their 'mono-lingual Englishness' in order to embrace the 'linguistic-cultural diversity' that students bring with them into the school yard. The history of English curriculum and pedagogy in Australia since the 1980 conference shows that Australian educators have experienced enormous difficulties in responding to the challenges posed by Britton and Rosen. This paper examines the continuing struggle on the part of English language educators in Australia to address the question of the linguistic-cultural diversity of students in Australian schools. We begin by briefly revisiting the moment of the 1980 conference. We then look beyond this moment, examining the politics of multiculturalism, and reconceptualising the challenge of cultural diversity within an alternative philosophical framework. Drawing on Bakhtin's scholarship, we question cultural monologism in the teaching of English to 'Others' and attempt to conceptualise a dialogical ethics of pedagogical answerability, such as needed in multicultural conditions.