Editorial.(Editorial)

Welcome to the June edition of AJLL. As teacher educators we are acutely aware of the importance of ensuring and maintaining high quality teaching in schools and in further education. Excellent teaching makes a difference that resonates throughout a child's life. The classroom is a diverse arena including as it does children who are at various stages of engagement with learning, children who have vastly different experiences from one another and who arrive at school with very different understandings of the world. Within this multivariate environment the highly skilled teacher applies her or his knowledge of how best to engage each child within the classroom in meaningful learning experiences. This teacher draws on research to support the many decisions that have to be made each day in relation to each child's learning progress. Quality teaching means that learning takes place in engaging ways and with long terms effects. In this issue we present a number of articles that make significant contributions to our knowledge about the conditions required for effective learning to take place.

In the article 'Education for Biliteracy: Maximising the Linguistic Potential of Diverse Learners in Australia's Primary Schools', Paul Molyneux speaks to the ongoing debate around bilingual education. This is important in a country where over 30% of the student population has English as an additional language. Honglin Chen and Pauline Harris uncover some of the complexities of ESL students' learning by reporting on a study which explored how the parents of ESL children interact with the school system. Their paper 'Becoming school literate parents: An ESL perspective', provides interesting discussion around how parents of these children need to renegotiate and shift their identities in order to work with their children in a foreign school system.

Those who conduct research in the Early Childhood area constantly remind us of the fact that ...