Unpack "Multiculturalism" »
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Teachers!

• Ask your students to check if particular words they hear or read are hotwords.
  • Ask them to report their findings and discuss in groups or with the whole class.
• Use hotwords as a resource in your lessons. Examples of lessons that use this facility can be found in Lesson Ideas. Click on the link for an example.

Raising the issue of racism »

Explore these Hotwords...

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Some words and phrases to do with cultural and political topics seem to appear in articles and headlines in the Australian news media every day. We have made a 'hotlist' and called them 'hotwords' because of their frequency of use and abuse;because we would like to see them 'hotlinked' to proper definitions whenever they appear to help people understand them better, and because they are hotly debated.

These include asylum-seeker, citizenship, deportation, detainees, ethnic, human rights, illegal immigrant, people smuggler, political correctness and terrorist.
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Words and phrases like these can mean many things to different people, are often misused, and can be quite confusing not just to students but to all of us. In this section we 'unpack' some of these words so they can be explored in the classroom.

• Hotwords A-Z »
• Hotwords Search »