Dr Jenny Barnett

 As a long-standing teacher educator and consultant in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) including English as an Additional Language (EAL) and English as a Medium of Education (EME), Jenny has familiarity with a wide range of learning and teaching contexts where students and teachers grapple with developing the English language and literacy competencies needed for social and academic purposes. While she has now retired from teaching, she continues to mentor individual doctoral students and early career researchers. Her strengths lie in her capacity to support others in their research thinking, such as designing an investigation, strengthening data analysis, and progressively developing an evidence-based argument.

Jenny’s initial research and consultancy work focused primarily on the school-based learning and teaching of students for whom English is an additional language or dialect (EALD), both their learning of English and their learning across the curriculum. Over the years, this work included several South Australian evaluations of EALD provisions for migrant and refugee children and also for Indigenous children. This in turn led to close involvement from 2004 with the Australian Council of TESOL Associations (ACTA) in their ongoing task of developing professional standards for teachers working with learners of EALD. With the advent of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers in 2013, ACTA asked Jenny to convene a working group to design an EALD Elaboration of those Standards. The group produced a document intended not only to support teachers’ professional learning but to highlight the needs and strengths of EALD learners. This is now used as a resource in schools and teacher education programs across Australia.

Jenny’s current research is related to English medium education in higher education institutions in the South-East Asian region. She recently co-edited a book entitled English medium instruction practices in Vietnamese universities: Institutional, practitioner and student perspectives, published by Springer Nature. It includes a co-authored chapter focusing on content and language integrated learning (CLIL) and three other co-authored chapters.

Qualifications

• Doctor of Philosophy Edith Cowan University

• Master of Qualifying University of Papua New Guinea

• Master of Arts University of Papua New Guinea

• Graduate Diploma of Teaching English as a Second Language University of Papua New Guinea

• Diploma of Russian Language and Culture University of Paris