Laraine Goldman is the Head of Special Education Services for English as a Second Language at Sunnybank State High School in Brisbane. She manages an ESL program for migrant and refugee students from extremely diverse language, cultural and socio economic backgrounds.

Laraine had developed a multi faceted ESL Program that comprises content based middle school ESL classes in a number of KLA’s, parallel classes for older ESL learners, team teaching by ESL and mainstream teachers and literacy, numeracy and information technology intervention programs for students with disrupted prior education.

Laraine was a member of the QSA Reference Group and Writing Team for the English for ESL Learners Syllabus. Laraine has a B.A (UQ) and an MA in Applied Linguistics (Griffith University). She has been a member of the QATESOL management committee since 2004 and served as President in 2007 and 2008. She is currently Vice President of QATESOL and a represents Queensland on the Australian Council of TESOL Associations.

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Dr Donna Tangen is a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), teaching post-graduate students in “Engaging Diverse Learners”. 

She is an Associate Coordinator of a twinning program between QUT and a Malaysian University in which Malaysian students spend half their undergraduate program in Malaysia and half at QUT.  

Donna began her career teaching the Montessori method of education in an international school, which lead to her interest in ESL. She has an MEd TESOL.

Donna’s research areas include preparing international pre-service teachers for field experience in Australian schools, supporting students transitioning from university to the ‘real world’ of teaching, and working with classroom teachers to develop differentiated instruction/strategies to support mainstream students who are culturally and linguistically diverse.

Donna has edited a textbook for Graduate Diploma Education students on Engaging Diverse Learners and has produced a DVD that supports international students preparing for field experience.

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Jennifer Alford is a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. For the past ten years, she has taught and coordinated the ESL Curriculum Studies area for secondary school pre-service teachers, and has taught on the Master of Education TESOL program. For two years she also coordinated short immersion programs for pre-service and in-service teachers from Hong Kong and China. In 2008, she was involved in the production of a DVD to support international teachers on field experience in Australian classrooms.

In 2009, she helped establish a successful tutoring scheme in a local high school with a high proportion of learners from diverse language and culture backgrounds. Students from QUT go to the school weekly to observe ESL teachers and assist the students. Before joining staff at QUT, Jennifer taught ESL in high schools, in adult migrant education programs as well as in ELICOS centres for 12 years.

She has a B.A, Dip. Ed. and an M.Ed TESOL and is currently working towards her PhD in the field of senior high school ESL pedagogy. Her interests are ESL teacher knowledge and pedagogy; critical literacy; critical discourse analysis; and equity in pre-service teacher education.  She is a member of ACTA and the Australian Association of Research in Education (AARE).

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----------------------------------------------------------Mary-Anne Fleming is an Education Officer, Curriculum – English as Second Language, at Brisbane Catholic Education, Brisbane, Australia. She has worked in the TESOL area for many years with the major part of this time involved working with schools and ESL teachers in the Archdiocese of Brisbane, to support the needs of ESL learners in Catholic schools, both Primary and Secondary.

For twelve years, prior to joining Brisbane Catholic Education in 1989, Mary-Anne taught and co-ordinated programs in Adult Migrant Education Services, Melbourne Victoria. In 2001 Mary-Anne moved to Fiji with her family and taught at the University of the South Pacific in the Bachelor of Education Programs, Primary and Secondary Language and Literacy.

In 2003 she moved to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where she taught in the Bachelor of Education program at Dubai Women’s College. On her return to Australia in 2005, she took up a position as Lecturer in Education: Literacy and Language, with the University of Southern Queensland, lecturing at both the Toowoomba and Springfield campuses, before returning to BCE in 2007. Mary-Anne holds a Dip. Ed., Grad. Dip in TESOL and an M.Ed.

Her interests are ESL teacher knowledge and pedagogy, sustainable models of professional development and teacher education. Mary-Anne is a member of the Queensland Association of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages; the Primary English Teaching Association and also the Australian Literacy Educators Association.