Combining both empirical and theoretical analyses, this insightful book presents a clear, research-informed model for running classroom discussions that are both intellectually rigorous and genuinely inclusive.

Building on feminist analyses of how gendered norms shape who speaks, who is heard, and what counts as “good” reasoning, the book shows why conventional formats often privilege assertive, adversarial styles and marginalise other valuable repertoires of thinking and communicating. Introducing a novel pedagogical tool, Critical Collaborative Dialogue (CCD), it offers a practical framework that specifies a democratic setup, problem-posing questions that matter, open questioning, personal engagement, and teacher facilitation that shares epistemic authority. This model is adaptable across subjects and year levels, and is grounded in dialogic traditions such as exploratory dialogue and philosophy for and with children (P4wC). Readers see how these design choices redistribute talk, deepen reasoning, and lift students’ sense of meaning and belonging, with evidence from student interviews and focus groups.

Written for scholars, researchers, and teacher educators interested in oracy, dialogic pedagogy, and gender equity, it offers ready‑to‑use structures, language moves, and routines that help build classrooms where diverse voices contribute to high‑quality thinking and where all students experience discussion as a place to learn, belong, and lead.

On 8 March 2025, Jeff Siegel lost an eight-month battle with acute myeloid leukaemia. Jeff was a dear friend and colleague for many of us, and a valued member of the broader Creolist community. At the time of his passing, Jeff was a Professor Emeritus in Linguistics at the University of New England (Australia), a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. He was the first to describe three Pacific contact languages — Pidgin Hindustani, Wai (a mixture of Malaitan dialects in Fiji) and Nauru Pidgin — and co-authored the only grammar of Hawai‘i Creole (with Kent Sakoda). He was also well known for his empirical work on Tok Pisin, Bislama, Fiji Hindi, New Caledonia Tayo, Chinese Pidgin English and Fiji English; and for his theoretical work on the emergence of Pidgin and Creole languages. Jeff also undertook extensive language documentation work, most recently in southern New Guinea, a language diversity ‘hotspot’ with around 35 languages belonging to nine families. He held an Australian Research Council grant “Languages of Southern New Guinea” with Nick Evans and Wayan Arka to make inroads into the documentation of these largely undescribed languages. His last great contribution to this field was the Grammar of Nama: A Papuan Language of Southern New Guinea (Mouton de Gruyter, 2023). Even in his last days, Jeff was busy making edits to the Nama dictionary and working on a paper reviewing research on constraints governing substrate influence.¹ In this obituary, we pay respect to his work in the field of contact languages.

Engaging with source texts through reading and writing is fundamental to successful university study, and the development of syntactic competence plays a crucial role in this process, particularly for students using English as a second language (L2). To develop this ability in first-year L2 students in an Australian university, the reading to learn (R2L) pedagogy (Rose & Martin, 2012) was adopted as the core teaching approach in a credit-bearing, blended academic literacy unit. Given that syntactic complexity is a multidimensional construct, this study used the Second Language Syntactic Complexity Analyser (L2SCA) to compare pretest and posttest writing samples and to identify which dimensions of syntactic complexity first-year L2 students developed through R2L instruction. To the best of my knowledge, this combined instructional and analytical approach has been relatively underexplored in research on R2L pedagogy and L2 syntactic development. As a result, the study finds that the students as a whole significantly improved their length of clauses. Further analyses show that both high-intermediate and low-intermediate students increased their clause length, with the gains approaching statistical significances. These findings suggest that R2L pedagogy can support the development of advanced academic writing by exposing learners to texts rich in phrasal complexity.

Two large bells from the Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki lay where they fell until late 1945, after the American atomic bombing of 9 August. At last, on Christmas Eve, the congregants worked together to erect a fallen bell and ring it out on their holy day. Later, a smaller bell was hung alongside the ruins of the cathedral. The rehanging of that single bell in the ruins of the suburb of Urakami exhorted the people to continue to show their love for God and to resume their routines by its call to the people to prayer three times per day.