An effective reading program must balance linguistic, cognitive, and motivational factors to foster sustained engagement and measurable learning outcomes. This talk outlines key research findings and principles of reading program design, including text selection, grading, and progression; the integration of extensive and intensive reading; scaffolding comprehension; and building in opportunities for fluency development. Drawing on evidence-based frameworks such as Nation’s Four Strands, the session will highlight how programs can provide rich input, encourage output, and promote learner autonomy. Case studies from different contexts will be used to demonstrate how these principles can be adapted to varying institutional constraints and learner needs, providing participants with actionable models for their own teaching environments.

Research and classroom experience show that learners engage more deeply when language learning connects with what they already know, feel, and value. Yet in many EFL classrooms, learning remains organised around discrete skills and assessed through text-heavy tasks, leaving limited space for learners’ identities and experiences to shape the process. This raises a central question: how can English teaching create opportunities for learners to use language in ways that are meaningful and connected to their lives? In this presentation, I draw on Halliday’s functional model of language and a genre-based teaching and learning cycle to show how stories can support learners as active meaning-makers in English language and literacy classrooms. Drawing on a range of narratives, including traditional tales and contemporary picture books, I illustrate how learners engage with stories not only to understand them, but to retell, adapt, and share them in English. These opportunities are realised as learners move across stages of the teaching cycle—building knowledge of the story, exploring key language features, and gradually creating their own versions—while developing control over narrative language. Overall, the presentation highlights how carefully designed scaffolding, both in lesson planning and classroom interaction, enables learners to work simultaneously with language, emotion, and meaning. While stories provide a powerful starting point, this presentation argues that the same principles can be extended across genres, enabling learners to draw on their experiences as they move from narrative to other forms of meaning-making, such as explaining, describing, and arguing for wider communication.

Australia hosts thousands of international students (Lowe, 2015; Robinson, 2018) but many are unprepared for postgraduate study, struggling particularly with critical and reflective writing (Ha, 2011; Tran 2013). In response, the subject ‘Postgraduate Critical Scholarship’ was developed at the University Of Wollongong as a discipline-specific support in the School of Education to apprentice students into postgraduate academic culture. It extends beyond the provision of English for Academic Purposes to offer students additional ways of being and acting within the Academy, increasing their agency.

This paper demonstrates how two concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics, individuation (Martin, 2014) and stratification (Doran et al., 2024; Martin, 2009) are recontextualised in the design of the curriculum and pedagogy. With regard to individuation, the subject addresses expectations for a variety of academic activities, including assumed knowledge, interacting with academics, researching, referencing, reading, writing and presenting. It aims to add to students’ repertoire of culturally specific texts and practices, providing access and the opportunity to affiliate with an additional academic sub-culture. It also empowers students to embrace their home countries, supporting them to recontextualise the practices they are learning across the two contexts. Regarding stratification, the subject teaches language use at all levels. While weekly topics sometimes focus on only one language level, stratification is constantly ‘visible’ though links made to strata above and below. Text, discourse and clause structure are consistently linked to meaning making and this approach, which teaches language use as choices of meanings - not rules, is critical. It serves to enable students to have greater control over how and to what extent they choose to affiliate with different academic communities (Matruglio & Baker in press).

This presentation addresses a multi-faceted issue of how to create and sustain a positive climate that can promote active learning in a language classroom. The speaker will share her own narrative enquiry journey on applying Liberal education methodology and Social Emotional Learning to connect with and inspire her students, and gradually foster their self-empowerment. Such theoretical frameworks as UNESCO four pillars of education (Mortimore, 1998), Five minds for the future (Gardner, 2008), the Inner and Outer life balance (Maida, 2020), and the CASEL five (1997, 2020) have been the lenses for the author’s pedagogical practices and reflection. Based on these theories and practices, the author develops an integrated framework that allows for the interplay of emotional intelligence and cultural sensitivity in the language classroom in the new global context. The presenter will also talk through a number of techniques that can help create a psychologically safe environment for learners to be authentic learners, co-create their meaningful learning experiences and therefore, develop self-empowerment.