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About Dr Paul Dufficy

I take a broad sociocultural perspective to my work and see action research / learning as the most effective tool for sustained professional development in schools.

My background is in both general primary education and primary English as an additional language education. In addition to my work in Australia, I have taught English in Pakistan, Japan, Thailand and most recently, Indonesia.

The main focus of my work relates to the professional development of teachers in the context of multilingual schools and classrooms. Currently I work with beginning teachers within the Bachelor of Education and Master of Teaching Programs. In addition to beginning teachers, I work with teachers in the field and am currently working with a small team from a major international school in Jakarta. The team is engaged in action research focussed on the integration of EAL pedagogy into the mainstream classroom. The philosophy behind my work is one of additive bilingualism.Under this broad professional development umbrella, I am also interested in how teachers might best go about the teaching of children who are in the process of learning English as an additional language by engaging them in challenging academic tasks. This involves a wide range of specific interventions which include such things as classroom communication; task design (vocabulary, listening, speaking, reading, writing, viewing and grammar); and assessment.

Selected publications

  • Dufficy, P. Expanding talk roles in primary and middle classrooms. Paper presented at the IBAP/IBO Global Convention, Singapore, April 8-10th
  • Dufficy, P.  Designing learning for diverse classrooms. Sydney: PETA
  • Dufficy, P.  ‘Becoming’ in a primary classroom. Prospect, 20 (1), pp. 59-81 
  • Dufficy, P. Integrating tasks into learning sequences in a primary multilingual classroom. Workshop presented at the International Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) Conference, Leuven, Belgium. September 21 – 23rd
  • Dufficy, P. Predisposition to choose: the language of an information gap task in a multilingual primary classroom. Language Teaching Research, 8 (3), pp. 241-61   
  • Dufficy, P. Putting passion back into primary History. EQ Australia, Issue 2, Winter. Canberra: Curriculum Corporation
  • Dufficy, P. TESOL Notes. In The Teaching of Reading for a Multiliterate World. Literate Futures Project. Brisbane: QLD department of Education
  • Dufficy, P. Peekaboo as pedagogy. EQ Australia, Issue 3, Summer. Canberra: Curriculum Corporation
  • Dufficy, P.  ‘Conversation’ in a primary classroom: perspectives, practices and dilemmas. Paper presented at the ACSA Conference, October, Adelaide
  • Dufficy, P. CHEAP pedagogy: helping children perform ‘a head taller than themselves. Paper presented at the Learning Difficulties Conference, July, University of Sydney