Dr Amy Farndale is a researcher, course coordinator, lecturer, and tutor in early years language and literacy, working mostly on Kaurna Country. She is an experienced preschool and school teacher, having worked in Australia, the UK, Paris and Kenya for over two decades. Amy is a member of UniSA's RESI - Research in Education and Social Inclusion. Her passions lie in supporting people, both young and mature-aged, to communicate well and in diverse ways.
Research Record
Dr Farndale's PhD expertise lies in supporting bilingual preschoolers' language development and identifying ways educators are aware of power, interactions and emotions that support bilingual language learning. She was awarded a deLissa Scholarship to undertake the... Read more
About me
Dr Amy Farndale is a researcher, course coordinator, lecturer, and tutor in early years language and literacy, working mostly on Kaurna Country. She is an experienced preschool and school teacher, having worked in Australia, the UK, Paris and Kenya for over two decades. Amy is a member of UniSA's RESI - Research in Education and Social Inclusion. Her passions lie in supporting people, both young and mature-aged, to communicate well and in diverse ways.
Research Record
Dr Farndale's PhD expertise lies in supporting bilingual preschoolers' language development and identifying ways educators are aware of power, interactions and emotions that support bilingual language learning. She was awarded a deLissa Scholarship to undertake the research with culturally and linguistically diverse preschoolers, with Professor Pauline Harris. Dr Farndale's case study and action research, inspired by ethnographic techniques (participant observation included), explores conceptual frameworks incorporating Bourdieu's (1991) cultural and linguistic capital, social interactionist theories of Rogoff (2004), Vygotsky's SCT (1978) and Reggio Emilia principles (Rinaldi 2013), as well as culturally responsive pedagogies. Amy additionally draws from Systemic Functional Linguistics' context of culture and situation (Halliday 2004), and diverse preschoolers' communication through multiple modes (Antsey & Bull 2012). Amy has worked for both UniSA and the department for education since 2001.
Amy incorporates theories of emotions in her research on functional language use (Plutchik 2001; MacIntye 2002; Swain 2013)--she argues that:
'emotions impact on people's speech and expression and that emotions should be considered within the context of culture and situation (field, tenor and mode). Emotions act as our amplifier to speak, or not, and if we do speak, emotions impact on what we say and to whom. When educators are aware of this, they can adapt the context to encourage more opportunities for children to communicate with others.'
Balancing bilingualism is another concept explored by Amy who argues that education should not be dominated by English, but rather should incorporate children's community, family and home languages. More recently Amy has been authoring an articles about communicative capital - how children who are bilingual translanguage at preschool with their community, how Aboriginal and all children can be encouraged to express themselves in many ways (moving props for instance), and how children with Autism can express themselves through the 'moving language' to create stories. Her pedagogy highlights inclusion, Aboriginal perspectives, and recognition of children's communicative capital.
Amy's most recently led collaborative project (with an undergrad student, Amelia Lambden, who received a UniSA vacation scholarship, Sue Hill and Celia Couthard - an Adnyamathanha dual language book illustrator) involves studying the power in first nations children's literature and locating from where educators can source dual language Aboriginal texts in South Australia for 3 to 6 year olds.
Acknowledging the power of children's multiple languages and understanding the contexts in which children express themselves and ways children express themselves, through social interactions, with attention to how emotions affect language learning, is Amy's life mission.
Dr Farndale's supervisory interests lie in supporting researchers of translanguaging and literacy in the early years of education.
Her view of literacy draws from the Early Years Learning Framework (2009, p. 46) in that 'literacy incorporates a range of modes of communication including music, movement, dance, storytelling, visual arts, media and drama, as well as talking, listening, viewing, reading and writing' in the many languages of our communities.
Courses I tutor, lecture and coordinate
Amy is a member of the UniSA literacy team and teaches in the Bachelor of Education program where she leads classes in Studies in English Education 1 and 2. Amy also leads classes in the Masters of Education program for curriculum specialisation (literacy focus) and the ECE literacy intensive Birth to 5.
Preparing pre-service teachers for supporting culturally and linguistically diverse learners is Amy's specialty. She continues to consider herself a preschool teacher for life, albeit from a distance now, as she works for UniSA full-time as an academic (drawing attention to the injustice of an English only curriculum). Reducing English language dominance and de-colonizing the curriculum are goals Amy sets herself in her teaching and her research. Amy enjoys making supervision visits to local preschools to liaise with undergraduates on professional experience and educators in the field.
Personal life
Amy shared-care parents a 12 year old daughter who loves musical theatre - dancing, singing, and acting - communicating in multimodal ways expressing her culturally diverse British, German, Kenyan, Australian heritage. Amy has taught some Swahili at the Kenyan ethnic school association, she learned Bahasa Indonesian in her own schooling, and previously self-taught some French during her working travels teaching bilingual children in France. Being curious and demonstrating cultural humility is part of Amy's identity.
About me
Department for Education and Child Development,
TESOL research group UniSA,
de Lissa Research group, UniSA, School of Education UniSA
Translanguaging research group
West Torrens Partnership DECD
About me
Doctor of Philosophy University of South Australia
Master of Education (Early Childhood Education) University of South Australia
Bachelor of Early Childhod Education with Honours University of South Australia
2015-2019
Tutor of Studies in English Education 1, UniSA
2014-2019
Preschool Teacher and Acting-Director at Kurralta Park Community Kindergarten, DECD/DfE
2012-2018
Case Study Researcher - Bilingual preschoolers' social interactions, emotional challenges and functional language use while learning English as an additional language.
2008-2010
New Arrivals Program Teacher / Intensive English Language Classroom Teacher at Richmond Primary, DECD
2002 - 2018
Early Years Teacher in various metropolitan and country locations for the DECD
2007-2008
Volunteer Teacher - library project coordinator in Kenya.
2006
English Tutor/nanny in Paris, France
2001 & 2005
Key stage 1 teacher in England
Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Children, Preschool and Early Years Education, Early Years Literacy
Research
Excludes commercial-in-confidence projects.
Developing a Family Literacy Approach to Promoting English Literacy in the Early Years, Scanlon Foundation, 01/01/2022 - 31/12/2022
Wellbeing in Early Childhood Settings, Salvation Army (SA) Property Trust, 24/02/2021 - 31/07/2022
A PhD case study on bilingual preschoolers social interactions, emotional challenges, functional language use and educators' support.
Research
Research outputs for the last seven years are shown below. To see earlier years visit ORCID or Scopus
Open access indicates that an output is open access.
Year | Output |
---|---|
2016 |
Open access
1
|
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Farndale, A 2020 (in print) 'English Language Learners', chapter 21 in S. Hill Developing Early Literacy: Assessment and Teaching, Eleanor Curtin Publishers
Bilingual preschoolers’ social interactions, emotional challenges, and functional language use while learning English as an additional language2018 | dissertation-thesis https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/234174304?keyword=amy%20farndale%20thesis
de Courcy, M & Farndale, A 2016 'Linguistic and Cultural Diversity', Chapter 3 in Diversity, Inclusion and Engagement, Oxford University Press, Australia, pp. 41-68.
Farndale, A 2009 ‘Volunteer Teaching in Kenya: The inspiring, challenging and foreign experience of a Westerner’, international Journal of Learning, vol.16, no.8, pp. 335-350.
Research
Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Children, Preschool and Early Years Education, Early Years Literacy
External engagement & recognition
Organisation | Country |
---|---|
University of South Australia | AUSTRALIA |
External engagement & recognition
Department for Education and Child Development,TESOL research group UniSA,de Lissa Research group, UniSA,School of Education UniSA, Board member, Ethnic Schools Association - Kenyan Association of South Australia, (Government Board or committee) , 2012 to 2015, Committee member, Playgroup SA - PSP, (Community organisation) , 2012 to 2013, Academic Adviser, DECD - Northern Region EAL hub group, (Government Board or committee) , 2012 to 2013
ENGLISH STUDIES, Supporting English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners, Early Years Literacy
Teaching & student supervision
Teaching & student supervision
Supervisions from 2010 shown
Thesis title | Student status |
---|---|
`Exploring embedded cross cultural NVC/B emotional value among an Australian primary class: raising awareness through a film based project' | Current |
Supporting young children’s multilingual literacies during learning and engagement in early childhood | Current |
The Rise of Graphic Fiction Novels for Primary School Students: Attitudes, Meaning-making and Pedagogical Practice | Current |