While advantages of literacy in the home language have been widely documented, the Australian education system has not been proactive in providing institutional support for its development. This paper investigates the impact of (il)literacy in the home language on the academic, affective, and social development of bilingual/multilingual children and proposes principles that home-language-literacy programs should meet to be effective. It discusses programs that, although designed to develop literacy or second-language proficiency mainly in classroom contexts, could be easily adapted to address the needs of the linguistically and culturally diverse Australian context. We argue that the cost of not investing in successful homelanguage-literacy programs will be higher in the long run than their implementation costs and recommend that Australia should consider supporting grassroots home-language-literacy programs in a push to improve overall literacy outcomes for Australian home-language speakers.

Australia is a country of high linguistic diversity, with more than 300 languages spoken. Today 19 percent of the population aged over five years speak a language other than English at home. Against this background, we examine government policies and prominent initiatives developed at national level in the past 30 years to address the challenge of offering 'Literacy for all', in particular focusing on minority language speaking children. Across the examined policies and initiatives, a distinct negative correlation can be observed: the more multilingual Australia has become, the more assimilationist the policies, and the more monolingual the orientation of the society that governments have sought to establish through policy. We argue that to enhance literacy outcomes more generally, this orientation needs to be reversed. We explain why policy understanding and approach need to instead promote the maintenance of home languages and support literacy acquisition in these languages.

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Definiteness and Specificity are assumed to be universal semantic categories, but they are not marked in all languages. Languages with only two articles mark either Definiteness or Specificity, not both (Ionin 2003). I apply Chomsky’s theory of Derivation by Phase (2001a, 2001b) to the analysis of the specificity marker la in Mauritian Creole to argue that this morpheme must surface as a “last resort” to license the null definite article in some syntactic environments. Building on Chierchia’s (1998) Nominal Mapping Parameter – according to which nouns vary with respect to the features “argumental” or “predicative” – I propose that languages whose nouns are argumental lack a definite article and mark the specific vs. non-specific contrast. Languages whose nouns are predicative require an overt definite article and mark the definite vs. indefinite contrast.