Susan Feez is a lecturer in English and Literacies Education at the University of New England. Susan has worked as a classroom teacher of language, literacy and TESOL across the primary, secondary and adult education sectors. She holds two diplomas in Montessori education from the Association Montessori Internationale and has worked in a diverse range of Montessori classrooms. Susan’s research interests centre on language and literacy education and Montessori education. Her work in these fields has been informed by three theoretical perspectives: systemic functional linguistic theory, first proposed by Michael Halliday, the developmental theories of Vygotsky, and the educational sociology of Basil Bernstein. Her PhD from the University of Sydney is centred on a multimodal semiotic analysis of the distinctive objects found in Montessori classrooms. In the field of language education she is interested in the early development of reading and writing, and the potential for this development to be supported and enhanced by multimodal representation of relevant linguistic knowledge, as exemplified by the Montessori approach to early literacy. She is also interested in the development of textbooks and teacher handbooks as a means of fast tracking into classrooms educational innovation derived from research.