Dear recipients of ATEG, I was glad to read a note from an Australian, Donald Hocking, because i am interested in knowing the current situation there. I was in Sydney last July for an international linguistics congress and a conference on Working with Functional Grammar in the School Curriculum. I heard teachers, administrators, and university faculty bragging that they had the best English language and literacy programs in the world. That was refreshing. I was impressed with the theory and have been trying to apply it here. However, there were two problems: training teachers and some politically-based official antagonism because the program had come in under the previous political power. What is the current political attitude there now? Welcome to Donald. Carolyn Hartnett [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]