Our ESL colleagues in the United Kingdom are facing a similar situation to ours in Australia – that of the reconceptualisation of our field of education.  In Australia ESL is becoming increasingly subsumed into wider issues of ‘literacy’ and the particular learning needs of bilingual learners are becoming increasingly invisible.  This paper sets out to describe the distinctiveness of ESL as a field of education by defining its knowledge base, describing the range of learners, providing a perspective on the tasks that face ESL learners, by setting out teaching strategies that have been established by practitioners and outlining some of the key theoretical perspectives that inform the field.  The information contained in this paper provides a well reasoned rationale for Australian ESL educators’ claims that English as a second language is a field of education in its own right and not merely an aspect of the teaching and learning of literacy.

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ACTA Background Paper No 2. 

Literacy ESL Broadbanding Benchmarking

A summary of the papers follows: 

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The Literacy Benchmarks and ESL
Penny McKay 

McKay examines the impact that the federal government¹s Literacy Benchmarks will have on the ESL profession. She identifies the Benchmarks themselves as a manifestation of the government's desire to foster a managerial culture in our public institutions, whereby financial accountability is the overriding goal. McKay draws attention to the dangers that are inherent in the subsuming of ESL under the general heading of Literacy, and suggests possible ways of avoiding or minimising these dangers. 

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ESL Is it Migrant Literacy? Is it History? 
Joseph Lo Bianco

Prof. Lo Bianco argues that the government policy of broadbanding specifically the focus on literacy as the main issue is effectively talking ESL into subordination. Lo Bianco makes several important points: for example, students whose mother-tongue is English will in effect have been learning the language for eight years by the time they reach year 3, whereas ESL students will probably only have been learning it for three years. Further, Lo Bianco argues, the errors an ESL student makes may be creative errors, which are a natural part of the learning process. The ESL program, Prof Lo Bianco concludes, is becoming lost in a haze of administration politics. 

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Literacy - meeting the needs of all learners
Dorothy Hoddinott 

Like many of her colleagues, Hoddinott fears that broadbanding will lead to a loss of focus on ESL students and their particular needs. Under the government¹s broadbanding policy, ESL students are being subsumed into the general category of under-performing students, whereas they may not be under-performing at all. Hoddinott stresses the importance of recognising the differences between ESL students and ESB students, and argues that new benchmarks should be established that acknowledge and cater for these differences. 

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Discriminatory Features for ESL Learners in the Literacy Benchmarks
Penny McKay 

In this paper McKay draws attention to some specific problems that the Literacy Benchmarks may present to ESL students (and their teachers). McKay discusses these issues, and offers suggestions relating to ESL learners that Benchmark developers may wish to consider.