News – Language on the Move

New Year’s Visit

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 14:48:13 +0000

Professors Piller and Dong

Gong Xi Fa Cai! All good wishes for the Year of the Snake!

The Chinese New Year holiday brought a lovely opportunity to receive a visit by Professor Hongjie Dong from Xi’an University and doctoral candidate Chenbai Luo from Charles University.

Hongjie DONG is a professor at Xi’an University, holding a Ph.D. from Renmin University of China, and was a visiting scholar at the University of York’s Department of Linguistics (2015–2016). His expertise lies in sociolinguistics, language policy, and international Chinese education. In recent years, he has led five research projects funded by the Ministry of Education and the National Language Committee of China. Professor Dong has published over 40 academic papers in leading journals such as the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication. He is the author of the monograph Language Variation and Identity in the Hui Community of Xi’an (in Chinese) and serves as the chief editor for the Silk Road Chinese textbook series.

Chenbai LUO is a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics at Charles University Prague and a former academic staff member at Xi’an Peihua University. With teaching experience at the Confucius Institute in Minsk and Xi’an University, his research focuses on language policy, language economics, and Chinese education. He has co-authored publications such as “Blueprint and Marketing Strategies for Structuring Chinese Courses” and participated in projects on Shaanxi’s linguistic landscape and Chinese education in the Balkans.

References

Bodomo, A., Che, D., & Dong, H. (2022). Calculator communication in the markets of Guangzhou and beyond. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 43(10), 981-992. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2020.1786575
Dong, H. (2020). Language behavior and identity change in the Fangshang Hui community of Xi’an. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 30(1-2), 255-272. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.00051.hon

Language on the Move 2024

Ingrid Piller — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 18:57:53 +0000

The author team of “Life in a New Language”

“This year was average; worse than the year before but better than next year.” I am reminded of this saying each year when I collate the annual Language on the Move Report.

In 2024, two highlights stand out: the publication of Life in a New Language and the establishment o of the Language on the Move Podcast in collaboration with the New Books Network.

Below you’ll find a month-by-month list of our podcast episodes and blog posts, so that you can re-read your favorites or discover new ones.

As always, I want to express my deepest gratitude to all team members, contributors, readers, students, and fans. You make Language on the Move worthwhile – as a research publication and an exercise in community building.

In the hope that 2025 will be better than we dare to anticipate!

Keep in touch!

Make sure to keep in touch by signing up to our updates in the ‘Newsletter subscription’ box in the footer below, by following us on BlueSky, and by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast in the podcast app of your choice.

December

Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge 2025: Check out our monthly recommendations and join us for a year of long reads in linguistic diversity and social life!
Language-on-the-Move Podcast Episode 39: Whiteness, Accents, and Children’s Media: Brynn Quick in conversation with Laura Smith-Khan
Language-on-the-Move Podcast Episode 38: Creaky Voice in Australian English: Brynn Quick in conversation with Hannah White
Laura Smith-Khan, Trust and suspicion at the airport
This blogpost features our latest article in the Border Security series: Smith-Khan, L., Piller, I., & Torsh, H. (2024). Trust at the border: identifying risk and assessing credibility on reality television. Journal of Law and Society, 51(4), 513-538.
Abstract: Every day, officers working at international airports investigate potential risks to state safety and security. But how do they decide who they can trust, and also ensure that the broader public trusts themto conduct this work? This article explores these questions through an examination of the reality television show Border Security: Australia’s Front Line. Through critical discourse analysis of a collection of 108 televised airport encounters, we explore the aspects of communication, behaviour, and identity made salient in officers’ evaluations of passengers’ credibility and critically examine the assumptions underlying them. Further, we consider how power and role divisions are implicated in the construction of passenger and officer credibility, both within border encounters and in discourses about Our analysis makes a novel contribution to the literature on credibility assessments in intercultural communication, demonstrating how an institutional and social ‘culture of disbelief’ is constructed vis-à-vis certain groups through seemingly banal border work.
Loy Lising, Life in a New Language at ALS2024
This blogpost reports on the annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society and the launch of Life in a New Language

November

The 2024 cohort of “Literacies” students in Macquarie University’s Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL

Pia Tenedero, Mindful about multilingualism
This blogpost reports on events related to Buwan ng Wikaor (National) Language Month in the Philippines.
Language-on-the-Move Podcast Episode 37: Supporting multilingual families to engage with schools: Agi Bodis in conversation with Margaret Kettle
Language-on-the-Move Podcast Episode 36: Linguistic diversity as a bureaucratic challenge: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Clara Holzinger
Language-on-the-Move Podcast Episode 35: Judging refugees: Laura Smith-Khan in conversation with Anthea Vogl

Previous annual reports

For an even deeper trip down memory lane, here is the list of our full archives:

Life in a New Language at ALS2024

Loy Lising — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 21:22:36 +0000

Prof Catherine Travis launches “Life in a New Language” at ALS2024

The annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) is a gathering of like-minded academics and presents a wonderful opportunity to see old friends and meet new ones, and to be intellectually encouraged to engage with language in all its forms and context. This year’s conference at the Australian National University was no different and offered an exciting program.

Our new book Life in a New Language featured prominently, including receiving a second launch (to learn more about the first launch, go here). At ALS, our book was launched by Professor Catherine Travis, the Chair of Modern European Languages in the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at the ANU.

Catherine’s reflections on the book were a thoughtful heart-warming invitation to read Life in a New Language. This is part of Catherine’s testimony:

Many of the stories told are very familiar to me, as I’m sure they will be to all of you – many of you are migrants to Australia, and may have had similar experiences yourselves, and all of you will have been made aware of these kinds of experiences from migrants in your own families, close friends and colleagues.

And the message equally rings true to me, as I hope it will to you. I will just highlight three elements here.

Migrants are too often seen through a deficit lens – what is highlighted is their lack of English that adheres to a standardised norm; their lack of appropriate qualifications; their lack of local experience. This is in contrast to what they bring, which is their multilingual repertoire, qualifications in different settings, and their international experience. We need to address this deficit narrative and recognise that migrant families are raising the multilingual communication mediators of the future; and we need to support them in that endeavour, as our future depends on it.

Life in a New Language already has a veritable fan club

The responsibility for communication is too often placed on the migrant. As the authors state, language is viewed as a “cognitive skill, the level of which can be measured through proficiency tests. But it is also a communicative tool that interactants share to collaboratively achieve common goals” (p.124). This perspective shifts the burden of responsibility onto both parties involved in the interaction, and the authors call for more attention to be given to what it means to communicate well in a linguistically diverse society, to be more aware of the importance of inclusive communication.

And, crucially, the conversation needs to be taken out of the academy. This book goes a long way to doing that, as a highly readable and rich account of migrant stories. I hope that it is read widely, that the migrant stories here are heard, and are listened to.

Life in a New Language is an ethnographic data-sharing and re-use project and so it was also appropriate that we engaged strongly with the themed session on The Wealth of Resources on Migrant Languages in Australia organised by Professor Heike Wiese (Chair of German in Multilingual Contexts in the Humboldt University in Berlin), her doctoral researcher Victoria Oliha, and Dr Jaime Hunt (University of Newcastle).

This themed session aimed to provide a centralised forum for researchers on migrant languages in Australia to connect and present their findings as well as spark a conversation around the resources created through their projects. The following central questions were discussed:

What empirical resources on migrant languages in Australia have been created? How can we make these resources accessible to the wider research community?
From what theoretical and conceptual perspectives have migrant languages in Australia been studied? How can such studies inform each other?
What methods have been used to study migrant languages in Australia? What can we learn from each other methodologically? What new methods could we use to gain further insights?

It is wonderful for Life in a New Language to be part of this conversation. As one of our biggest fan says in this unboxing video: “it teaches you how people develop.”

Regulating Muslims: Tazin Abdullah wins 3MT competition

Language on the Move — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:08:26 +0000

Congratulations to Tazin Abdullah, whose entry into the 3-minute-thesis competition won the 3-minute-thesis competition of the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia last week! That success came after taking out the Macquarie University Department of Linguistics People’s Choice Award earlier in the year.

The 3-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition is an opportunity for higher degree research students to present their research in 3 minutes. Normally, symposiums, conferences and seminars are some of the ways research students get to talk about their research. Unlike those presentation formats, the 3MT poses a unique challenge – an entire thesis has to be presented within 3 minutes and not a second over!

This year, the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA) held its 3MT competition on 27^th September, 2024 and Tazin Abdullah won first prize. She presented on her research on the Linguistic Landscape of Australian mosques titled “Observe overall cleanliness and sound mannerisms at all times!” – Regulating Australian Muslims in mosques and Islamic prayer spaces.

Tazin’s study examined regulatory signs from Australian mosques that gave readers instructions and stated prohibitions regarding behaviour in these places. What do these signs say about the communication practices within Australian Muslim prayer spaces? What languages do these signs use to communicate with readers? What linguistic and visual strategies do they employ to present rules and regulations?

Reference

Abdullah, Tazin. 2024. “Observe overall cleanliness and sound mannerisms at all times!” – Regulating Australian Muslims in mosques and Islamic prayer spaces. (MRes), Macquarie University.

Event: How is credibility communicated in intercultural contexts?

Language on the Move — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 06:03:05 +0000

As part of the unit “Languages and Cultures in Contact” we are hosting a public seminar featuring a guest lecture by Dr Laura Smith-Khan (School of Law, University of New England). The guest lecture will be embedded in an overview of the tensions between performed and perceived identities by Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller.

What: Public seminar
When: October 08, 2024, 1-3pm
Where: Macquarie University, Wallumattagal Campus, 01 Central Courtyard 204

Guest lecture abstract:

Communicating credibly in refugee status determination: How beliefs about language can affect decision-making

Dr Laura Smith-Khan, School of Law, University of New England

To gain refugee protection, asylum seekers must pass through demanding interview and application procedures to convince migration officials that they and their claims are credible. Communication is an essential, yet highly complex and demanding, element of these processes.

While asylum authorities highlight the many measures they take to ensure procedural fairness, including accommodating cultural and linguistic diversity, a closer look uncovers ongoing challenges.

This presentation shares research findings on language and credibility in Australian asylum procedures, focusing on a 2020 appeal decision from the Federal Court of Australia (FCA) (Smith-Khan, 2023). It draws on sociolinguistic scholarship to critically compare the original decision-maker’s approach with the approach taken by the FCA judge.

In doing so the presentation identifies and challenges problematic beliefs about language on which credibility-based rejections sometimes rely. It argues that the FCA decision provides an example of better practice, demonstrating that approaches reflecting sociolinguistic understandings of language allow for a fairer assessment of credibility.

Reference

Smith-Khan, L. (2023) Incorporating Sociolinguistic Perspectives in Australian Refugee Credibility Assessments: the Case of CRL18. Journal of International Migration & Integration 24 (Suppl 4), 727–743. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-022-00937-2

AILA 2024 in Kuala Lumpur: Day 5 Highlights

Loy Lising — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 02:23:17 +0000

Some members of the Philippines delegation in the Banquet Hall during lunch

Editor’s note: the 21^st AILA World Conference, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée (AILA; “International Association of Applied Linguistics”), took place in Kuala Lumpur last week, hosted by the Malaysian Association of Applied Linguistics.

With several members of our team in attendance, we were able to bring you daily updates: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4. Due to return travel and catch-up responsibilities, the final day report has been slightly delayed. We hope you find it useful nonetheless.

***

Notable highlights of the final day relate to Enric Llurda’s keynote about native-speakerism, a symposium featuring rising stars in Applied Linguistics, a book prize, multilingual catch-ups, and the changing of the guards.

Debunking native-speakerism in Applied Linguistics

Professor Enric Llurda was the final keynote speaker for this year’s conference with a timely topic on “Native-speakerism and standards in Applied Linguistics.” In this talk, foregrounded by his personal experiences, Professor Llurda explored native-speakerism and its definition and manifestation and the question of how it can be overcome. Llurda’s talk was very interesting in two respects: a timely celebratory reminder and a timely advocacy reminder. While Llurda lamented the ongoing devaluing of Other Englishes particularly in the global north, there is much to celebrate in the global south scholarship in terms of the recognition and validation of emerging varieties of English especially in post-colonial global south countries in Southeast-Asia. There is certainly more room for applied linguists to expand the work and advocate for the legitimacy of more emerging varieties of English.

Rising stars in Applied Linguistics Are Unpacking the Complexity of Multilingual Valorization

The Rising Stars of the Symposium “Unpacking the Complexity of Multilingual Valorization: Insights from Chinese-speaking Communities” with their mentors

One of the last symposiums of the conference, chaired by Professors LI Jia and ZHANG Jie, both key members of the Language-on-the-Move team, showcased diverse works of postgraduate students under their supervision. The symposium was titled “Unpacking the Complexity of Multilingual Valorization: Insights from Chinese-speaking Communities.”

This was one of the most inspiring symposia for me not only because it featured postgraduate research work (for all presenters this was their first presentation at an international conference), but because of the students articulate and incisive presentations. The topics covered in this symposium was quite diverse as can be seen in the list below:

Zhenyao Lu, Zhuang-speaking village doctors as language and cultural brokers in times of crisis
Mengyi Luo, Multilingual healthcare landscapes in the China-Vietnam borderlands
Jinyi Zhou, Between Privilege and Precarity: Unpacking Language Ideologies of Chinese Students Learning Sinhalese
Hongmei Yang, The Valorization of China’s “Grandma Moses”: A Social Semiotic Analysis of Female Farmers’ Paintings in an Ethnic Bai-centered Village
Yifang Sun, A Case Study on Language Practices in the Multilingual Workplace of a Cross-regional Company in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area
Yuanmeng Ma, Gendered Learning Trajectories: A Critical Ethnography of Chinese Muslim Women Learning Arabic
Ziyang Hu, A Corpus-Driven Analysis of the Use and Status of Chinese in Multilingual WHO
Guorong Hao, Making Multilingual Territory in a Video Game: A Social-Semiotic Analysis of Invented Languages in Genshin Impact

The discussant for the symposium was Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller, who had been the PhD supervisor of Professors LI Jia and ZHANG Jie, which means that the presenters were her “academic grandchildren” of sorts. Ingrid congratulated both the presenters and chairs, and praised them for approaching these under-researched multilingual contexts with great conceptual and methodological sophistication, with incisive analyses, and with a lot of passion to apply linguistics research to further the common good.

Winning a good book

Delegates from the Philippines catching up during the conference

Lunch throughout the conference was fabulous and rounded out by lucky draws. I was particularly delighted that an early career researcher from the Philippines, Krizza Mae Balisong (University of Santo Tomas), won Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice on Day 5.

Multilingual catch-ups and local experiences

As has been said in previous reports, there were close to 2,000 attendees at the conference. And it really was impossible to attend all the sessions and meet everybody. As an applied linguist based in Sydney, Australia, one of the rewards I find in attending such a large conference is being able to meet long-standing colleagues and emerging scholars doing great applied linguistics work in the Philippines. Lunch times and coffee breaks were, therefore, organised to ensure one maximises these opportunities. It is in these liminal spaces that one gets to catch up and discuss new collaborations.

In addition, being based in an English-dominant country like Australia, I rarely have a chance to exercise my other linguistic identities of being a Tagalog-, a Cebuano-, and a Hiligaynon-speaker and discuss ideas in these languages. The AILA conference gave me that opportunity, and I managed to practice rarely used expressions. One of these is “buwis buhay” [tax life] (Laying one’s life for someone/something). In this context, this was often used in navigating the busy roads of Kuala Lumpur. In one usage, this was particularly used in reference to crossing the busy road to get to the much-coveted Musang King store.

Changing of the guards

Like every other participant, I am deeply grateful to the conference organizers from the Malaysian Association of Applied Linguistics, whose incredibly hard work over years of preparation made this success possible. In the closing ceremony, they must have been glad to pass the baton on to the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics, who will host the AILA World Congress 2027 in Vancouver.
Missing #AILA2024?
The Language on the Move Day 5 report is now up: native speakerism, rising stars, and multilingual networking

So, #AILA2024 ended on this critique of native-speakerism by Enric Llurda, and then you walk into the nearest bookstore and see this: “How to sound like a native Korean speaker” pic.twitter.com/3nDLCNwIx6

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 16, 2024

AILA 2024 in Kuala Lumpur: Day 4 Highlights

Language on the Move — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 04:40:05 +0000

By Yifang SUN & Ziyang HU
***

The fourth day of the 21st AILA World Conference continued to be a source of insights and inspiration, featuring cutting-edge research in the field of applied linguistics. Among the many notable presentations, two that emphasize the linguistic diversity, equity and inclusion in English language teaching and learning made a significant impact on us.

Educating Teachers for Linguistic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Future Pathways for Sustainability

The first one is the keynote address by Professor Low Ee Ling, titled Educating Teachers for Linguistic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Future Pathways for Sustainability, highlighting the importance of these principles in the ongoing development of language education.

Professor Low Ee Ling investigates the standards and norms that English as an International Language (EIL) teachers and students should follow in an increasingly diverse world characterized by multilingualism, multiculturalism, and multiple Language Learning Motivations (LLMs). Her research, which provides a snapshot of the real-world Eduscape, reveals that EIL communicators often attain varying levels of comprehensible discourse, with a focus on the primacy of intelligibility. This observation underscores the challenge of maintaining sustainable teaching practices that embrace linguistic diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In a case study on Singapore, Professor Low examines the country’s dynamic multilingual environment, where English is used proficiently. This has given rise to “Singlish,” a localized form of English used in Singaporean communities, particularly in familiar and intimate settings. The emergence of Singlish challenges the practicality and inclusivity of international English standards for teaching and learning. However, Singaporeans who employ Singlish exhibit a strong sense of confidence and identity. Similarly, the phenomenon of localized English is not unique to Singapore. The global spread of English has led to not only the rise of English as a hypercentral language in international domains but also the emergence of localized and indigenized varieties of English which took root, evolve and develop in diverse sociolinguistic contexts, becoming practical tools for local English speakers to communicate internally and externally. This fact highlights a broader trend in language communication, where practicality and intercommunity are often prioritized over standardization.

Professor Low Ee Ling contends that sustainable language education should be developed with a focus on diversity, equality, and inclusivity, rather than strictly adhering to so-called standard language norms. This approach recognizes the value of various English varieties in fostering effective communication and community identity.

Epistemic agency of translational teachers and students for knowledge co-construction in English-medium instruction classrooms

The second one is Dr. Yixi QIU (Isabella)’s presentation titled Epistemic agency of translational teachers and students for knowledge co-construction in English-medium instruction classrooms, which explored how transnational teachers and students can use epistemic agency to build knowledge together in English-medium education.

Isabella not only calls for the recognition of the multilingual realities that characterize EMI education, but she also went a step further to challenge the knowledge tradition centered on mainstream European and American culture mediated by standard English. In her talk, she introduced the concept of “epistemic injustice”, pointing out that monolingualism as a standard form of knowledge production and transmission can lead to linguistic injustice and epistemic exclusion. Therefore, we need to rethink the way knowledge is constructed in the English classroom and give more epistemic agency to multilingual teachers and students. Isabella elaborated on the definition and action of epistemic agency. Epistemic agency refers to the actions taken by individuals in the process of knowledge construction. These actions include promoting linguistic flexibility, leveraging transepistemic resources, and cultivating epistemic reflexivity.

Promoting linguistic flexibility is to encourage students to express their opinions in their mother tongue or other languages, and to build an inclusive cognitive space where students with different language abilities can become contributors and disseminators of knowledge. Leveraging trans-epistemic resources refers to the use of students’ diverse socio-cultural knowledge base to build a shared knowledge base beyond the binary opposition between local language and English. Cultivating epistemic reflexivity refers to guiding students to reflect on what they have learned, integrate it with their own experiences, and critically evaluate it, thereby promoting sustainable learning.

The lecture uses practical examples from the course to show how epistemic agency can be applied to English-taught classrooms. The program features multinational students from different countries and regions, with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In class, they allow students to use their native language in class discussions and encourage them to share perspectives from different cultural perspectives. In addition, students’ multicultural backgrounds are used as teaching resources to encourage them to share their cultural knowledge and experience. It also guides students to reflect on what they have learned and combine it with their own experience for critical evaluation. The results were significant, with students being more engaged, more actively involved in the knowledge construction process, and demonstrating stronger critical thinking skills.

This lecture emphasized the importance of epistemic agency of multilingual teachers and students in EMI classrooms for knowledge co-construction. By promoting language flexibility, leveraging trans-epistemic resources, and cultivating epistemic reflexivity, we can build more inclusive and effective EMI classrooms that allow all students to participate in and benefit from the process of knowledge construction.

After listening to these two lectures, combined with this trip to Malaysia, we deeply reflected on two issues:

First: What is the reality of the English-speaking world?

We are English major students in China. In our English education since primary school, we have been told to learn “Standard” English (i.e. standard American or British English). However, when we came to Malaysia to attend AILA 2024, we found that the real English world is actually characterized by diversity. In this conference, scholars from all over the world used English with different accents to conduct academic communication and express their unique identities. We realize that the English education model based on “Standard English” does not give us true intercultural communication competence. Real intercultural communication competence is based on a correct understanding of the diversity of the English-speaking world.

Second: Who is responsible for failed English-mediated intercultural communication?

When we first arrived in Kuala Lumpur, we found that the local English accent is very different from the Anglo-American accent we learn, so many times we could not understand the English spoken by local people, even though they use very common English expressions. Having long been taught in Anglo-American English has led to a gap between us and the real English-speaking world. Our lived experience in Kuala Lumpur made us realize that Malaysian English is a legitimate variety for locals to communicate within their community and with the outside world.

Communication is a two-way activity, and both parties in communication should be equal. As foreign visitors, we should also take the responsibility and prepare ourselves for the linguistic and cultural diversity of the host country. English users and English teachers around the world should shall the responsibility to challenge the “Standard English” norm and Euro-American knowledge tradition in English education to achieve a more diverse, equal and inclusive world.

Bio blurb

Yifang SUN and Ziyang HU are master students at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China. Both SUN and HU have developed an interest in multilingualism and language policy and planning research. SUN investigates the language practice and governance of a cross-regional company in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (the GBA). HU looks at the WHO’s multilingual crisis communication policies and practices during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

AILA 2024 in Kuala Lumpur: Day 3 Highlights

Ingrid Piller — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 01:41:14 +0000

Engaging debate at the “Multilingual Crisis Communication” Symposium organized by Profs LI Jia and ZHANG Jie

Highlights of Day 3 of the 21^st AILA World Conference: Southern epistemologies, real-life catch-ups, and the Korean translation of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice.

Southern Epistemologies

Wednesday’s keynote by Professor Sinfree Makoni engaged with decolonizing linguistics and Southern epistemologies. Drawing our attention to the efforts of the African Virtual Studies Global Forum, Professor Makoni called on the field to embrace pluralistic perspectives on key concepts from “language” to “native speaker.” He showed how literacy-centric views of language have led to the exclusion of oracy-based practices from mainstream linguistics.

Another call for “unbooking” – to create and share knowledge through diverse modalities. Makoni showed a video PhD project about multilingualism in Ghana (we’ll share a link here as soon as we find it). The new Language on the Move Podcast is another example

One symposium that engaged deeply with language and communication in a context in the Global South was led by Professors LI Jia and and ZHANG Jie, both key members of the Language-on-the-Move team.

Their symposium about multilingual crisis communication was devoted to exploring the lived experiences of linguistic minorities in China during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Love the opportunity to catch up with old and new friends. Here with Profs In Chull Jang (Seoul National University) and Guofang Li (University of British Columbia)

The symposium was a new outcome of the Language on the Move Covid-19 Archives, which we have been building since early 2020.

Presenters took a variety of critical sociopolitical approaches to conceptualize multilingual crisis communication from three dimensions, namely identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice. All the speakers are also contributors to the forthcoming book Multilingual Crisis Communication: Insights from China, which will be out from Routledge later this year.

Overall, the tone of the symposium was hopeful about the future of multilingual crisis communication, building as it did on engaged, co-designed, and participatory research with local communities.

Real-life catch-ups

At a conference such as AILA with close to 2,000 delegates a multiplicity of perspectives emerges not only in the academic program but, perhaps even more importantly, in all the informal conversations going on during breaks, in the corridors, and while exploring the amazing city of Kuala Lumpur.

“Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice” has been translated into Korean by Prof In Chull Jang (Seoul National University)

While the many parallel sessions can feel overwhelming, many of the real highlights that shift perspectives and allow us to see things in different ways are happening outside the academic program.

A huge shout-out is due to the conference organizers who have pulled out all the stops to have these meetings, dialogues and conversations take place in a setting with a wow factor – the Petronas Twin Towers overlook the conference venue – and supported by amazing food that keeps body and soul together.

Korean translation of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice

The most amazing present I received during the conference has been the Korean translation of my 2016 book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice, which has just been published by Sahoi Pyoungnon Publishing in Seoul. The translator, In Chull Jang from Seoul National University, brought along an advance copy for me. The book is called Linguistic Diversity and Inequality in Korean and I hope the translation will bring its call to take linguistic diversity seriously as part of the social justice agenda of our time to a new audience.

And a bit of nerdy linguistics conferencing fun:

Just overheard at #AILA2024:
“I’m from @Macquarie_Uni/@MQLinguistics”
“Wow, Halliday.”
“yes, it’s a nice tropical holiday for us.”

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 14, 2024

AILA 2024 in Kuala Lumpur: Day 2 Highlights

Ana Sofia Bruzon — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 05:53:21 +0000

Online and onsite attendees of Ana’s presentation

The 21^st AILA World Conference is in full swing, and Day 2 has brought us some incredibly insightful presentations showcasing the current scholarship of applied linguistics. In this blog post, I share my experience as an online presenter and attendee during day 2.

This year’s conference theme is “Linguistic Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Sustainability,” seeking to understand the pivotal role of applied linguistics in tackling worldwide issues and fostering a more equitable world. The theme could not be a more pertinent topic in the current climate where diverse, inclusive, and sustainable research is becoming increasingly challenging due to the degradation of knowledge stemming from various factors, such as the surge of AI in academic publishing and the loss of the human element in research, as highlighted by Distinguished Professor Piller in her thought-provoking keynote speech “How can we make our research diverse, inclusive, and sustainable?” during the conference’s opening day.

For me, the day kicked off, tuning in to the ‘Language in Society’ track, where several presenters shared their work in a symposium entitled ‘Minority Language Learning for Adult Migrants in Europe’. The symposium shared their findings about the struggles of migrant language learning from Sweden to the Faroe Islands, leading to boundary maintenance among Hungarian diasporic speakers in Catalonia to understand the lived experiences of adult migrants as they pertain to migration and what are considered ‘worthy’ or ‘useful’ languages to learn.

Following, Professor Dr. Catherine Nickerson delivered the third keynote, which delved into the future of applied linguistics in the context of business and professional communication. Dr. Nickerson’s speech was both inspirational and gave an incredible glimpse of where the field is moving and how ‘we can bridge the gap between research and practice’ in ESP.

In the afternoon, it was my turn to present. I was delighted to contribute to a symposium on ‘Language Diversity, Inclusivity and Sustainability’ by sharing my PhD research findings on Family Language Policy and the intersectionality of digital technologies and transnationality in Spanish maintenance. My presentation touched on how private and public language policy domains are interconnected and fed off each other and that technology can be a double-edged sword in heritage language maintenance. However, as voiced by parents, technology also has many positive applications in language learning. I concluded with some suggestions for making heritage languages more visible in schools by using technology and learning from the experiences of the home domain.

My co-presenter during the symposium, Silvia Melo-Pfeifer, a leading member of the Next Generation Literacies Network, presented the findings of her work titled ‘The (pseudo) institutionalisation of language diversity in the internationalisation strategies of universities: a comparative study in Germany and The Netherlands’. Silvia brilliantly discussed new bilingual policies of two universities, one in Germany and one in The Netherlands, explaining the ideologies behind the push for English in the German institution due to internationalisation goals vs the push for Dutch in the latter, which is linked to far-right ideologies. She described this imposition to adopt English in teaching and other university activities at the German institution as ‘academic blackmail’, given that this was imposed from the top down and used as a scholarly success metric.

Thank you, AILA, for this fabulous implementation of a successful hybrid conference. AILA has done a marvellous job of providing live access to streamed symposiums and keynotes while also giving online participants from all corners of the globe access to recorded sessions so AILA delegates can engage with the latest and most innovative research in applied linguistics from any time zone. Spaces like AILA2024 empower us scholars, especially early career researchers like myself, to contemplate how we can strive to produce more ‘diverse, inclusive, and sustainable’ research, as Professor Piller left us reflecting after her keynote speech. The AILA conference, with its focus on these crucial issues, is shaping the future of applied linguistics and inspiring hope for a more equitable world.

AILA 2024 in Kuala Lumpur: Day 1 Highlights

Yixi (Isabella) Qiu — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 02:08:02 +0000

International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) 60th Anniversary World Congress, themed to linguistic diversity, equity, inclusion, and sustainability, has brought over 1,600 delegates from nearly 70 countries together in the vibrant and diverse metropolis of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Members of the Next Generation Literacies Network at AILA 2024

For me, the highlight of Day 1 was the keynote by Ingrid Piller, who spoke about “How can we make our research diverse, inclusive, and sustainable?”

Ingrid shared her thoughts on the following critical issues:

The diversity problem in Applied Linguistics with peripheral multilingual scholars confronting epistemic exclusion in global academic knowledge production
The looming textocalypse, a crisis of reception and degradation of knowledge
The open research lifecycle
The FAIR principles in open data
Life in a New Language as a working model for data-sharing and community building

I was most impressed by two aspects of her speech. First, Ingrid’s discussion of the textpocalypse struck a chord. She illustrated this with a poignant image of a woman collecting a brick from the Berlin Wall—a relic filled with personal meaning, as the Wall once separated her from her brother. Although Ingrid took copious notes on that rainy day, she found it almost impossible to capture and convey the subtle emotions and lived experiences that the scene evoked. This raises profound questions about how we can achieve the embodiment of research and ensure that the depth of human experience is retained in our digital assets.

Ingrid also shared the story behind Life in a New Language, a group ethnography project that explores the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 countries over 20 years. The project underscores the benefits and challenges of data-sharing and reuse, aiming to inspire more collaborative research.

This reminded me of the unbooking project I’m involved in, which uses a collective group name instead of listing individual authors for the book as a whole. Through our relationships with one another as well as with the concepts that shape our scholarship, we hold one another accountable to building interdependent, sustainable relations around data creation and interpretation across our multiple continental locations.

Ingrid concluded with a quote by Alexander von Humboldt:

Ideas can only be useful if they come alive in many minds.

This powerful reminder calls us back to our core as researchers: to make meaningful connections through our work. It’s why we gather at conferences like AILA—to exchange knowledge in ways that are impactful, to carry forward our collective understanding across diverse geographic, linguistic, and epistemic landscapes, to question and reflect on making writing meaningful, and to reimagine knowledge-making by redefining researcher responsibility and productivity in diverse, inclusive, and sustainable academic practices.

“Life in a New Language” now out

Language on the Move — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 00:11:15 +0000

This episode of the Language on the Move Podcast is the 6th and final episode of our series devoted to our new book Life in a New Language, which has finally come out!

To read a FREE chapter about participants’ experiences with finding work head over to the Oxford University Press website.

We celebrated with a big launch party last Friday and there are some photos for absent friends to enjoy on the book page. There you can also find additional resources such as a blog post on the OUP website about data-sharing as community building or this one on the Australian Academy of the Humanities site about being treated as a migrant in Australia. Feel free to bookmark the page as we hope to keep track there of the life of the book.

Don’t forget if you order the book directly from Oxford University Press, the discount code is AAFLYG6.

If you are teaching a course related to language and migration, consider adopting the book. It includes a “How to use this book in teaching” section, which will make it easy to adopt. Contact Oxford University Press for an inspection copy. Book review editors can also request a review copy through the same link.

Transcript of Part 6 of the Life in a New Language podcast series (by Brynn Quick, added 05/08/2024)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick and I’m a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Today’s episode is part of a series devoted to life in a new language.

Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, I’ll chat to each of the co-authors about their perspectives on writing the book.

Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experiences of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity-making in a new context are explored.

The research uncovers significant hardship, but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements. My guest today is Dr. Emily Farrell.

Emily earned her PhD from Macquarie University in 2008 with a thesis entitled Negotiating Identity, Discourses of Migration and Belonging. She completed a DAAD-supported postdoctoral fellowship in 2010, focused on language and the international artist community in Berlin. She began her career in publishing as the acquisitions editor for applied linguistics and sociolinguistics at DeGreuter, and has since worked in sales, business development, and in the commercial side of publishing for the MIT Press, and now as the global commercial director for open research at Taylor & Francis.

She was an early board member at UnLocal, a legal services and educational outreach organization that serves undocumented migrants in the New York City area, and also served on the board of the foundation for the Yonkers Public Library. At Taylor & Francis, she focuses on increasing access to research through support for both open access agreements and open research practices, including data sharing, as well as support for humanities and social sciences in particular.

Welcome to the show, Emily. It’s wonderful to have you with us today.

Dr. Farrell: Thanks so much, Brynn.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself, how you got into linguistics, and how you and your co-authors got the idea for the book, Life in a New Language?

Dr. Farrell: It’s great to think back along the trajectory and also to think about the six of us, and what brought us all together in the end to combine some of our research projects, and to work together, and the work we’ve done together over a lot of years.

For me personally, I, now long ago, left Australia for the US study, and when I came back to Australia after a few years in the US, after an undergraduate degree, I was more in English Literature and Music. I had the experience of living elsewhere, in some ways growing into a young adult in a different country, even though America, obviously the US, is an English speaking nation predominantly, that experience of going there at age 18, growing there, seeing myself in a different light, and in ways creating a new space for myself and identity, and then coming home and sort of drawing all those pieces together.

I’d become interested in language through that, and particularly that idea of how do you kind of create belonging for yourself in a new place as you grow across your lifespan. And when I got back to Australia, I actually started a master’s degree at Sydney with Ingrid Piller. She had not been at Sydney for a long time at that point.

I was teaching courses with a linguistic grounding in cross-cultural communication, and I was completely hooked once I started because it drew together all these things that had sort of been percolating, you know, the idea of identity creation, how language fits into that picture, how people assess each other and the biases people have based on the way that people sound, whether that accent’s within a, you know, whether it’s a Southern US accent versus a, you know, received pronunciation in the US, and all that kind of groundwork in closely linguistics. I think once you start to read all of that literature, really, I found it so captivating. And it sort of started to answer lots of questions for me about all these things that you get a hunch about, but it’s also, in what’s a way, so implicit, right?

Because it’s language, and you sort of take it for granted. And so being able to dive into that sociolinguistics and applied linguistics literature and starting to understand all that from a new perspective was just so captivating. And so, from there, it was at the time that Ingrid had just secured an ARC grant to look at people that had migrated to Australia and become highly proficient in English.

And so, I started on a research assistant with Ingrid and started my PhD on a related topic to that. So particularly looking at the cohort of highly proficient speakers and how they were navigating this sense of belonging and identity and how that connected to language.

Brynn: It’s so true, I think, that nothing radicalises us more than when we have to kind of leave what we know in our home country and, like you said, even if we go to another country where technically we speak the same language, all of a sudden you realise, oh, wait a minute, there is so much more to establishing a home for myself in this new place and to establishing this sense of belonging than just being able to speak the language.

You’re an Australian living in the US., I’m an American living in Australia, and I think we probably have both experienced that, and even before we started this recording, we were talking about how interesting it is that, you know, technically, yeah, we speak the same language, but we’ve both experienced having those cultural moments where just because we can technically understand each other, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy, and I love that that kind of was this through line for you because then when you were looking at this research where you were a research assistant, you were looking at these people who had high levels of proficiency in English.

So, technically, they can speak the language here, and yet there was still this sense of, but I’m not able to establish this sense of belonging maybe in the same way as someone who sounds like someone from this area.

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, and I think that, you know, you do have all this privileging, obviously, depending on the sort of accent you have and obviously how audible you are, how visible you are as other in a place, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier as well, just seeing that again with my son, who’s six, and has a very strong American accent, bringing him back to Australia where he has an Australian passport and an American passport, and, you know, I am audibly Australian or, well, not all Americans, can I identify the accent to be honest?

Brynn: I’m sure many think you are British, yes.\

Dr. Farrell: That’s fine, I forgive them. But it’s also another point that was of interest to me in my research, which is our national boundaries and citizenship also sort of create these categories where people do and don’t fit. So just because you have a passport, does that make you feel like you’re able to sort of create an identity of belonging or how do you find these sort of in-between spaces?

So, you know, so often the people in my research were sort of, they talked quite a lot about accentedness, how they had been in Australia for, you know, 30 years were master’s degree holders, were incredibly accomplished, people who could sort of suddenly have this experience of being other just because someone would say to them, Oh, where do you come from? Because they would hear their accent. And it’s tricky because, you know, there is that weird power in such a banal question.

And you know, sometimes that felt really frustrating for people. But sometimes that also was, you know, I got to hear some of these amazing stories from people who were then able to kind of mobilise a much more powerful in-betweenness or transnational feeling, where they sort of felt, well, yes, you can hear I come from somewhere else, and I do come from somewhere else, but I also come from here. And that it doesn’t necessarily have to be either or in that way.

And that there is a lot more, you sort of can create a bigger space for yourself. But it’s sort of not always quite so easy, because there is kind of that, again, it’s that banal sort of everyday othering that might not seem so consequential for someone else because they’re asking a question that’s just, that seems simple. But for someone that’s asked that, oh, where do you come from?

Or, you know, what accent do I hear? You know, hearing that over and over again can feel really frustrating in your own sort of personal project of, you know, making a life for yourself somewhere else.

Brynn: And I’m sure both you and I have heard that question. I literally had that question asked of me last night. I had an Australian man say to me, and what accent do I detect?

And I wanted to say to him, I hear yours. I hear your Australian accent, you know?

Dr. Farrell: Yeah.

Brynn: You’ve gotten that in America too.

Dr. Farrell: For sure. And I do think you get that much more in English-dominant monolingual environments where people aren’t used to switching between languages. There’s just certain, you know, assumptions about what it is to sound a certain way, what counts as an accent.

That’s quite fascinating. I mean, it also, part of that kind of international, interesting kind of international basis is what drew me to the post-doctoral work that I did in Berlin, because you have this fascinating environment where, at least when I was there in 2009, for three years, it was still a pretty affordable place to live. And it was really, by that stage, you know, the wall had come down quite some time beforehand, I suppose, you know, 20 years before, but there was still this kind of sense of this emerging city and a real kind of very vibrant artistic community that was starting to sort of, people were talking about, like, people in New York, everybody kind of knows about New York or Berlin and sort of another hub for artists.

And so, there’s sort of a real international community there. But English still, there’s a real dominance of English in that environment. And a lot of people that have kind of moved, they’re not thinking about moving to Germany, but thinking about moving to this kind of international art city.

And just the way that language circulates and how people learn languages and which languages they’re speaking, which bits of what in different ways, in different spaces was so interesting to me, because a lot of the ways that people there were doing this sort of identity work and belonging work was much more about being able to be in a space where you could define yourself as an artist, whereas in New York, it’s really hard to balance paying the rent and also work on your artistic practice.

So these sorts of, all of that sort of the way, you know, all these pieces to me connect to this idea of you’re doing all this work of how do you find a job, how do you raise a family, but also how do you do this sort of your own work to feel like this is where you belong and, you know, how do you find your people and how do you make that space for yourself?

Brynn: Yeah, and that is a very central part of the research that you brought into this book, Life in a New Language. Can you tell us a little bit about your participants in the research that you did? You said that they had high levels of English proficiency, which is a little bit different from some of the other participants that we’ve discussed in this series that some of the other authors worked with.

What was that like? What did you see in your participants in having that high level of English, but maybe still seeking to build belonging and build a home?

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, so the people that I spoke with during my research were all, they’d all migrated to Australia as adults. They had a mix of different amounts of English education before arriving in Australia. Most of them had migrated from Europe or South America and were already reasonably highly educated and then a good number of them got higher degrees once they got to Australia.

They were going through that process of learning English but were, and a good number of them were already reasonably proficient once they arrived in Australia. And it was a mix of reasons for migrating, a good number being sort of economic migration or a lot of actually there were a couple that had moved for a partner, they’d met an Australian and moved to see where that would go. And a lot of the people that had been in Australia the longest, I think, had already been here 30 years, I think it was the maximum.

Some had only been in Australia for a few years. But all of them were sort of in that process of setting their lives up or raising their families and were much more in that space of sort of how is it that you continue to kind of find community and belonging in a new language. And also how, you know, where you find ways to use the languages that you arrived with.

So, one of my favourite set of participants or a couple, I really felt very privileged speaking to this couple who had both, they had these fantastic stories of the way that they had met and the romantic story and their language use in Australia and their community building here, where they had both left Poland separately. I think, you know, we did in the space of a year or two of each other. And the man had left first and they’d both ended up in Denmark.

And I don’t think either of them had had much Danish before leaving Poland. She had moved with a daughter, very young daughter. They met because he was visiting a friend that was also in one of these living spaces.

They’d put people up, like early migrant housing. And he tells this fabulous, they sort of tell this story together, where he talks about how he sees her for the first time and he immediately thinks that she’s this incredible woman. And she, at the same time, is sort of telling their meeting story, sort of saying, oh, I thought he was crazy.

He was like, this guy just seen me and he’s trying to give me his phone number. And I was like, what’s this about? Some crazy man’s shown up and he’s just giving me his phone number.

He doesn’t even know. He probably does this for every girl. But then, you know, they sort of go on and then they went on a date and then, you know, end up married with another daughter.

And then ultimately, you know, many years later, they migrated to Australia with both daughters and raised a family here. And the way that they sort of tell that story with lots of humour, sort of teasing each other, like much love, but just kind of how language can weave through that narrative. And that once they got to Australia, you know, they have the elder daughter who is most comfortable in Danish but speaks highly proficient Polish and now English.

The younger daughter who grew up mostly in Danish. So, it’s sort of the way that the family then talks to each other. You know, you have the parents still speak to each other in Polish.

You know, the elder daughter often speaks in Danish. You know, so they have all these different languages that they’re using sort of over the dinner table, you know, in the ways that they kind of craft what it is to be a family in Australia, and then how they’re sort of finding their own seat and sort of continuing to live out their own practices that fit their family in Australia. And it’s just really amazing to hear just how complex, but also how people are able to sort of craft these spaces for themselves and to find ways to use and continue their own language repertoire when they’re here.

Brynn: And that’s something that we’ve heard from some of the other authors, too, is about this negotiation of family over the dinner table. You know, like these languages that get used in just the ways that the family as a unit interacts with each other. And it can be really broad with meaning, the different choices that are made for the languages.

And that’s just in your own house. That’s not even thinking about then what did the parents do when they leave the house to go to work? You know, what language choices are they making then?

Or what do the kids then do now that they’re in Australia and presumably going to an Australian school? What are those language choices? So, it’s really interesting that it can be as small as that nuclear family.

And then you think about the way that language choices branch out from there.

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, absolutely. What’s so beneficial about, I mean, what we’ve done with this book in drawing together these six different studies and covering a large period of time, 20 years, and also a large group of people, 130 people, we get all that really beautiful, sort of rich granularity of the stories you hear from people that do defy the sorts of stereotypes and assumptions that you have about what people actually do in their lives because so often, you know, even those of us who’ve spent a lot of time, you know, thinking critically and studying this specifically, you know, you’re taking in so much media, politics. It’s easy, I think, to sort of get detached from what it is to understand the real detail of lived experience.

And then it’s also incredibly challenging, I think, again, even for those of us who have our heads in this sort of work, to think about how you take that detail and try to bring it out to that more sort of policy level, to that more, the public space where these sorts of issues are politicised and flattened out and simplified in such ways that are really quite detrimental to the actual lives of people. And I think that when Ingrid was discussing the idea of drawing this study together into one book, what was so appealing to me was the fact that so often, when you think about ethnographic work, it is about that detail and that’s the importance of it, right? Is that you are able to sort of take a context for what it is, really listen to the people, the community that you’re working with and in.

But then I think all of us who have done this sort of work get to that point where it’s difficult to know how to try to have a greater impact. And I think that when you think about the real sort of applied part of applied linguistics, I think all of us want to see more of an influence on the broader discourse around language and migration or other sort of language use topics. And I think it’s really quite difficult to see how you make that impact and how you try to connect what you’re doing in that sort of granular way to the broader sort of ways of speaking across society.

And I think, you know, you sort of have things like census data which really just doesn’t give you that qualitative or detailed view. And in bringing together these six different studies, we have the hope that we make a bit of a step towards the ability to be able to say, look, this isn’t just one person’s or this small community’s experience. We can look across these different communities of people or different individual migrant experiences and draw from them together from this group of 130 people, very common threads that show us, I think, some direction for how we could shape policy, how we could shape education, how we could shape even individual interaction with people when you don’t ask where somebody comes from.

You know, there are certain things you can start to think about your own ways of approaching someone as a human in interaction that I think can have both on a small scale and then on a societal level a really big impact for positive change.

Brynn: And that’s why I think Life in a New Language is just such a groundbreaking book because as I’ve said in previous episodes, you do not have to be a linguist to read this book, to understand this book, to get a lot of meaning out of this book because it does show this really human experience that we all have when we are the new kid in a place, you know. And like we said earlier in this episode, it doesn’t even matter if you already speak the language of the place that you’re going to or in the case of your participants, you have a high level of proficiency. There is still so much that goes into being a migrant, and there’s still so much that you have to build into your life as a migrant that doesn’t necessarily come easily.

And that’s why I think bringing these six studies together, just like you said, so well, shows what we can do as individuals on an individual level is just have that human empathy for each other and then also can say, well, hey, look, we’re noticing these trends in finding work, in getting an education for kids. We’re seeing this through line in how we do family and how we negotiate language and family. And I think, like you said, that’s something that could be taken to that policy level so easily.

So that’s why I think the book is so fantastic. And speaking of that coming together with all of those six stories, I would love to hear about your experience in co-authoring with five other people and bringing those things together. And what I think is so interesting about your particular experience is that you were doing all of this from the other side of the world.

You were living in New York. I think it was four of the authors were living in New South Wales and then one was living on the other side of Australia. But you were the furthest away and you had a little baby at the time.

So, what was all of that like for you?

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, so I was the spanner in the time zone works. For me, I had moved into publishing quite a number of years beforehand. So, we, I think, started discussing this book in 2018 when my son was six months old, I think, and around then, six, eight months old.

And so, I’d already been working in publishing for around eight, seven or eight years by then. It was really quite a joyous experience to be able to rejoin and revisit this research that I hadn’t really been working, I hadn’t worked with for quite a long time and to feel like there was still so much in there to draw out and draw together and, you know, and have the opportunity to work with five incredible other women who have done such brilliant work and to sort of see how we could fit our different projects together. Obviously, you know, we had Ingrid as the consistent, you know, the supervisor across all these projects, which I think gave us a huge benefit in already having a certain shared framework and viewpoint.

But even then, I mean, there was still so much to do for all of us to sort of go back to the research we’ve done, you know, some more recent and some older, and sort of go back right from the beginning, back to the transcripts, really read back through, you know, and I haven’t done that in quite a long time, and to really kind of view it again from this perspective of how are we drawing these together, what are the shared, you know, themes that we can bring out, how can we sort of make this most powerful and also most accessible, I would say, so to a broader readership. And, you know, I mean, certainly with six people, everybody works at a different pace, everybody’s juggling different commitments. No, I think that were it to have just been a single author, the book probably would have moved at a different pace, but we also managed to do it through a number of years of a pandemic and, you know, where I wasn’t able to come home, I hadn’t been able to get back to Australia for about three years.

So, you know, there was certainly not the same as sort of working on something on your own, but I think the benefits that you gain from bringing these projects together and the things that you can learn from, you know, the viewpoint of different co-authors, it’s been an incredible experience, at least from my perspective. I feel very lucky to have been part of it. And I think that what we have at the other end of these years of drawing it together is, you know, something greater than the separate parts, which is really, truly fabulous.

Brynn: And I think what’s very cool is that because your son was, you said, six, eight months old, at the time that you started, he’s now six years old, right? So, we have like this child that grew with the book, which is so cool. And also, you know, many of us in the research group that we have, Language on the Move, many of us are mums, and many of us are doing the juggle of the academic work and the raising of the family and trying to figure all of that out.

What was that like for you, especially being in that other time zone and juggling this new motherhood as well?

Dr. Farrell: You know, I think what’s so eye-opening about it is that you just sort of are able to, there’s obviously a lot to juggle, but at the same time, I think it helps you prioritize, it helps you sort of see what’s important. And for me, where I was often kind of working late into the evening and you have to turn the laptop off or at least shut it, shut it down, close the lid, you have to go and help with your nod, do your story time. You know, I think that that’s, it’s a really important kind of chance to look at what matters and also see that you can get a tremendous amount done, you just have to work out the ways to get the schedule right, I suppose.

And I mean, that’s all, again, saying that from a point where I have a very supportive partner and also that working with five other incredible authors who are also juggling their lives and incredible, the huge amount of work that everybody has on their plate, both family commitments and professionally, I think it’s a real, it’s a really good way to see how much you, it’s not a vulnerability to rely on a group and to have a network of support and that it’s so, so important to have that. And I think being able to see that strength in others and look at what people are managing and sort of how everybody supports each other and cheers everyone on. You know, I think it’s been, for me, having seen, I mean, I think we all see this in different ways, the sort of very competitive environment of academia.

I mean, I stepped outside of it, you know, working in publishing, but I’m certainly still very adjacent to it, very much adjacent to it. So, I see how difficult the job market is and, you know, I experienced that to some degree in sort of initially trying to apply for academic jobs, and that hasn’t gotten me better since I left academia. And I think that making sure that you’re able to find a really supportive network, just for mental health, honestly, and also for those moments where you lose belief in your own work or you get a job rejection or you maybe lose direction a little bit to have a supportive group that can remind you that, you know, what you can do and what you can achieve, I think can’t overstate the importance of that.

Brynn: And that really comes through in the book, in reading the book and knowing that the six of you did this together. It’s one of my favourite things about the book is that collaboration and that camaraderie. And as I’ve said to some of the other authors, it sets a great example for the rest of us in the Language on the Move research group who are kind of just starting this process because we have learned how to support each other in this academic field that can be really hard and it can be emotionally hard to get rejected, you know, in papers or publications or things like that.

But I love being able to work with each other. And I think that makes our research better when we’re able to collaborate like this as well. And you mentioned that you stepped outside of academia and went into publishing.

I would be really interested to hear what that’s like and sort of what you do now and what you’re up to these days and sort of the decision that led you into publishing and what it’s like. Because those of us in the beginning of this process, we’re on the other side. We’re trying to get our papers published.

We don’t know what it’s like to work on your side. So, I’d love to hear about it.

Dr. Farrell: Yeah, I mean, that’s one of many fascinating parts that I still remember how much fear and worry I had about publishing as a PhD student. And then, you know, you get a very different perspective of it when you get on to the other side when you work for a publisher. And, you know, I used to do more frequently when I was an editor, I would do how to turn your dissertation into a book workshop and things like that and constantly sort of trying to encourage students or early career researchers.

So really, when you’re at a conference making an effort to talk to publishers, go up and talk to editors, hear what they’re looking for, ask them about what they expect in a book proposal or, you know, what their journals are like and get as much information as you can. Don’t be afraid. I mean, they’re there to try to, especially books acquisitions editors, you know, they’re looking for new projects.

They want to work with people. And so, you know, the more you can kind of mine out of people that work for publishers, the better. I think there’s a lot to learn there, especially because you do find at a lot of academic pressures that you have a lot of former PhDs or people with PhDs working in their field, acquiring books in their field.

So, yeah, I mean, I was drawn into publishing because I finished in 2008, 2009, right, as the job market crashed. And I had sort of been on the fence about a standard academic career. I adore teaching, but I wasn’t entirely sure that I was cut out for a really focused academic career in the ways that I sort of– when I looked around at the people that were really excelling and were really dedicated to their academic careers, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was sort of willing to give up.

It felt like to me when I looked at it, and I know that this isn’t the case for everybody, but I sort of looked and it felt like there were things I would have had to give up. I wasn’t willing to give up. The other thing was, frankly, from a personal point of view, and I know that people think about this, but I don’t know that people sort of voice it very often.

I had a partner who could only really work in a few cities, frankly. He works in the art world. I didn’t want to move to the middle of nowhere just for a job.

And I didn’t want to drag a partner who wouldn’t have any job prospects to a small town somewhere. And I didn’t feel that I was really competitive enough to get a job in a big city where so many people would be competing for jobs. And so I’d considered that maybe publishing might be a path.

And as luck would have it, when I was living in Berlin, I saw this job ad for an acquisition editor in books for applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. And I sort of felt, well, if that’s not my job, I don’t know what is. And was lucky enough to get it and that sort of started my career in publishing.

The other thing that I think is worth keeping in mind, and I have spoken to people that are sort of looking for perhaps non-academic careers after their PhD, is that a lot of people look only at editorial work in publishing. I started out as an editor and it was incredibly rewarding. It ended up that I got the chance to sort of stay connected to the field.

I got to go to a lot of conferences that I couldn’t afford to go to as a student. I got to meet lots of amazing people and speak to academics who I was sort of in awe of, because they’re, you know, knowing their research. But ultimately, I started to get more interested in kind of the bigger picture of publishing and, you know, the scholarly communication ecosystem and knowledge sharing and distribution.

What does that mean? How does it work? And at the core of that too is how does the business side of it work?

I mean, I think when you’re inside the sort of academic space, you can seem a bit, I don’t know, less appealing to sort of think about those sort of more commercial aspects. But I started to get drawn in trying to understand those parts and have moved from editorial into the commercial side and now working particularly with sort of open access business models. And it’s been a really interesting journey to sort of be able to take all of that academic knowledge and the experience in the research side and kind of consider, well, what does that mean for ultimately a sustainable knowledge distribution sharing landscape?

And how do we do as much good in that as we can? How do we make sure information scholarship is accessible to the broadest amount and broadest group of people? You know, what does that mean and how do you do it and all of that?

What does it mean infrastructurally? What does it mean, you know, what are all the gory details of that has become, you know, very interesting? So, I think, you know, I guess all of that to say, you know, it’s worth keeping an open mind and kind of looking across publishing.

That’s something that should be just outside of an academic career. And, you know, I’m always happy to talk to people about it, especially early career or students, early career researchers and students that are considering other pathways.

Brynn: Well, and I’m glad to know that people like you are out there doing that work because I think wanting to bring the research that we do and the knowledge that we in the academic world have to the broader public. That’s something that I feel really passionate about. I’m always advocating putting things into language that lay people can understand.

And I think that that’s really, really important. So, I’m really glad that that’s something that you’re doing.

Dr. Farrell: What was so lovely about ultimately sort of getting to the conclusion of the book was that, no, we knew it from the beginning, but once we’d sort of written the book and we were kind of concluding and thinking about what it meant to have drawn all these studies together, we sort of ended up coming back to this notion of data sharing. And that’s become such a big topic in open access and sort of increasing open research practices. And it’s been such a big topic in hard sciences, where there’s been the sort of crisis of reproducibility and replicability in some of the more quantitative social sciences.

You know, there’s been a lot of discussion about that sort of thing and issues around research fraud and research transparency. It’s really only more recently where there’s been more of a discussion about, well, what does that mean for the humanities and social, more qualitative social scientists? And should we be sharing data?

How on earth can we share data? Do researchers in humanities even call what they have data? Should we be sort of forcing these frameworks on researchers from the outside, either as publishers or, you know, the sorts of mandates from funders to share data?

Obviously, you have funders like the Gates Foundation that have a data sharing policy, and others, you know, more and more of these mandates for sharing research. But, you know, have we done enough of the work in thinking about what that means for ethnographers in particular? Because especially if you haven’t built sharing into what you’ve done from the beginning, there are so many ways that it can feel very complex, not just personally from the point of view of, oh, I don’t know that I feel comfortable sharing all these, you know, field notes and so forth with other people, but also that they’re sort of not written to be read by anyone else, but also that there’s just so much context that’s not there just in the transcript or even in your field notes.

And so, part of what we ended up being able to explore a little bit is that we see the benefit of drawing these studies together, but we also saw the challenge of, you know, how on earth you do that. So, you know, how do you provide the context? How do you make sure that your notes and your transcriptions are read in the right ways and not taken without all of that extra detail?

So, you know, I think in some ways it’s something of a beginning of a journey to think about what data sharing truly means for ethnography and how we can really best draw on the huge benefits, I think, that we all saw this sharing, but also do it with the right amount of caution in kind of considering how we connect these pieces together and what it would mean for somebody else coming from the outside to use it. I mean, I think that’s also come up more and more in the last year with the explosion of large language models and AI and knowing that if we’re making this data available publicly, what does it mean if a ChatGPT, et cetera, is using that data to feed modelling without any broader context? How do we consider what that means and how we’re feeding that?

So I think it’s very topical and I think at least for me being so involved in open research from the publisher side of working very closely with libraries and some funders, considering what it means to actually be part of the research side of it, digging in and understanding in more detail what are the benefits but also the real challenges here and I think there’s a lot more thinking to be done there. So, I’m really hoping that out of this book, you know, we can continue to think about and work on ways that we can buffer and care for our data in the right way and care for the people that are that data when we’re talking about ethnographic work. So yeah, for me, I really hope in my professional life to continue to expand on what that means, even in things like how we talk about our own open data sharing policies for humanities and social sciences at Taylor and Francis. So, there’s so much more that can come out of this.

Brynn: And you’re right, it’s such a huge topic right now – data sharing, doing collaborative work, making sure that your data is available for reuse and reproducibility. And that’s what I think Life in a New Language does so well and is such a good ground breaker for that. Thank you for giving us that food for thought.

And on that note, thank you for being here today. We really appreciate it.

Dr. Farrell: Likewise, thanks Brynn. Thanks for all the fabulous questions and great conversation and yeah, looking forward to talking more.

Brynn: And thank you to everyone for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network to your students, colleagues and friends. Until next time!

Language Rights Defenders Award

Gerald Roche — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 22:30:43 +0000

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (1940-2023)

The Global Coalition for Language Rights is pleased to announce the first annual Language Rights Defenders Award. This award aims to recognize and honor individuals who demonstrate outstanding commitment to language rights.

This year, the award is dedicated to the memory of Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, a world-renowned language rights advocate and scholar who passed away in 2023. Tove’s life demonstrates the sort of attributes, efforts, and passion we are hoping to inspire and recognize through this award. You can read more about Tove’s life and work here.

We have assembled a panel of experts to judge the inaugural Language Rights Defenders Award. Each of them is an outstanding defender of language rights: Robert Phillipson (Denmark), Jakelin Troy (Australia), Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (Nigeria), and Miryam Yataco (Peru). You can read here for background about the judges and their distinct expertise and experience in defending language rights.

Any individual who has demonstrated outstanding commitment to language rights can be nominated for the award, including community activists, translators, advocates, scholars, or anyone else who defends language rights.

Submissions can be made in English, Swahili, Mandarin, Spanish or French, and people may nominate themselves or others. Nominations for the Language Rights Defenders Award close on April 22nd.

Nominations should respond to the following prompt.

In 500 words or less, describe this person’s major contributions to defending language rights.

When answering this question, please keep in mind the criteria that judges will use (see below). In addition to answering the question above, submissions can also include up to five links or attachments as supporting evidence. Please email your submission to: global.language.advocacy@gmail.com

Once all the nominations have been collated after April 22nd, our panel of expert judges, together with the co-chairs of the Global Coalition for Language Rights, will assess each nomination using the criteria below. Each judge will give a score between 1 and 10 for each criteria, and the co-chairs will also collectively score each nomination.

Commitment to defending language rights
Impact of their work
Broader commitment to principles of peace, inclusion, and social justice

If a clear winner emerges from this process, then the award will be given to that person. If not, the judges will meet to discuss a winner, choosing from among the five highest-ranked candidates.

The winner of the first ever Language Rights Defenders Award will be announced on May 22nd, 2024.

Language on the Move – the podcast

Ingrid Piller — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 22:21:59 +0000

Language on the Move has launched a podcast

We are delighted to share an exciting new development: Language on the Move has partnered with the New Books Network (NBN) to launch our very own podcast.

Based on our occasional audio series “Chats in Linguistic Diversity,” the Language on the Move podcast channel on the New Books Network will bring you conversations about linguistic diversity in social life on a regular basis.

Members of our team will be chatting with key thinkers in our field to explore ideas, debates, problems, and innovations. Our aim is to have in-depth and fun conversations about language learning, intercultural communication, multilingualism, applied sociolinguistics, and much more.

Check out our first episode: Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism

Our first episode won’t be new to our regular readers: we’ve gone live with a re-launch of Ingrid Piller’s and Aneta Pavlenko’s conversation about Aneta’s new book Multilingualism and History.

Over the next few days, we’ll be re-publishing our full archive of “Chats in Linguistic Diversity” on the Language on the Move podcast channel and new episodes will start in March.

Feedback, please!

The Language on the Move podcast channel will be edited by Ingrid Piller and Brynn Quick, and many other Language on the Move team members will be pitching in as occasional hosts. To support our new venture and benefit from our efforts, please make sure to find us on the podcast app of your choice and subscribe to our channel!

We are also keen to hear your recommendations about topics or interviewees, or any other suggestions you might have for us as we embark on this new project. Please share feedback and ideas in the comments section below.

In case you are not familiar with the New Books Network (NBN), check out our new partner:

The NBN was founded by Marshall Poe in 2007 and has been in continuous operation since that time.
The NBN’s mission is public education.
The NBN is the largest book-focused podcast network in the world.
The NBN has over 120 subject-specific, author-interview podcasts, such as “New Books in Language.”
The NBN hosts over 25 academic podcasts produced by academic institutes and academics, and the Language on the Move podcast will be one of them.
The NBN has almost 1,000 hosts, all of whom are experts in their fields. Most are professors. We are excited to join this brilliant team.
The NBN publishes between 65 and 80 new episodes a week.
The NBN has published over 23,000 episodes, all of which are available on the NBN website and on the major podcast apps.
The NBN reaches around 750,000 million people a month.
There are NBN listeners in every country in the world except North Korea.
NBN listeners download 1.5 million episodes a month.
The NBN is like a library and episodes continue to be available and download forever
Everyone is free to share NBN episodes using the links in the player at the bottom of every NBN episode. Cool little tip: Add your favorite shows to your syllabus!

And this is the show that first attracted me to the NBN

Language on the Move 2023

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 21:04:17 +0000

The Language on the Move team hosted members of the Next Generation Literacies network in June

Where has 2023 gone?! Unbelievably, it’s time for another annual report.

In terms of research blogging, 2023 has been the leanest year since we started this website. This is because we have brought more of our activities back into the real world as the virtual world is being overwhelmed by the looming textocalypse. One thing that ChatGPT sadly has achieved is to devalue all digital writing.

Without concomitant community and capacity building, writing is quickly becoming meaningless. Therefore, our efforts have been directed at balancing the two.

Thank you for being part of Language-on-the-Move!

I want to express my gratitude to all team members, contributors, readers, students, and fans for supporting our research, teaching, and team efforts. Your commitment to creating and sharing knowledge about language in social life and to striving for a more inclusive world makes it all worthwhile.

As we look back on 2023, we are guided by hope for 2024.

Ways to keep in touch!

If you have not yet done so, start 2024 by subscribing to Language on the Move in the ‘Newsletter subscription’ box in the footer below.

Dr Abdulrahman Alfahad translated “Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice” into Arabic

In previous years, we also used the annual report to encourage readers to join our Twitter followers @lg_on_the_move, but considering the direction in which that platform is headed, we are not sure how much longer we’ll be on the site.

We have already significantly scaled back our Twitter presence, similar to the minimization of our Facebook activities some years ago. We’ve started a BlueSky account, but unsure whether we’ll really hang in there. For now, feel free to follow us on any of these platforms. If you are not yet on BlueSky but would like to be, feel free to ask us for invite codes.

And in case you need a reminder, Language on the Move also hosts a YouTube channel.

January

Ingrid Piller, How do universities decide whose English needs to be tested for admission?

January is summer break in the Southern Hemisphere, but we did get to put out one research blogpost, a general audience version of an academic article in Language in Society that came out just around Christmas 2022:

Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2022). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 1-23. [open access]

February

Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, Vera Williams Tetteh, Scholarly sisterhood: Collaboration is our academic superpower

Much of our summer break was devoted to finalizing the book manuscript for Life in a new language. In 2024, the book will finally be published by Oxford University Press. Watch this space!

March

Vera Williams Tetteh, Triumph over trauma: new migrant memoir
Event: Multilingual students in monolingual universities. A recording of this departmental seminar is available here.

Regular reading group meetings are the lifeblood of the Language-on-the-Move team

In March, team members also made a submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Inquiry into ‘Migration, Pathway to Nation Building.’ Our submission was published on the website of the Parliament of Australia and can be retrieved here.

We argue that the problem of systemic migrant exclusion must be addressed for migration to work as a strategic enabler of vibrant economies and socially sustainable communities.

April

Two new Language-on-the-Move PhDs

Huge congratulations to Dr Agnes Bodis and Dr Liesa Rühlmann, who graduated from their PhDs this year, and Ms Tazin Abdullah, who graduated from her MRes!

Liesa’s PhD thesis was published as a monograph later in the year: Rühlmann, L. (2023). Race, Language, and Subjectivation: A Raciolinguistic Perspective on Schooling Experiences in Germany. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43152-5; and she also won the Karl H. Ditze Prize 2023, an annual award carrying a cash prize of Euro 3,000 and honoring the best postgraduate thesis in the humanities in northern Germany.

Dr Yining Wang, who finished her PhD thesis about heritage language maintenance among Chinese families in Australia in 2020, never got to have a graduation ceremony due to Covid, so we celebrated in April.

Pia Tenedero, Lent, language, and faith work
LI, Jia & HE, Bin, Hallyu and Korean language learning
This was our 2^nd most popular blog post in 2023, testament to the popularity of Korean cultural exports. Interpreting the Korean show Squid Game was also the topic of an article by Jinhyun Cho over in the Conversation: From Squid Game and Physical: 100 to K-pop and BTS, translation is central to tectonic shifts in global cultural consumption.
Tazin Abdullah, New ways to answer old questions about Ramadan

Never miss an opportunity to share cake! Dr Loy Lising’s famed pavlova was the cherry on top of Dr Yining Wang’s PhD

May

Annmaree Watharow, Monika Bednarek, and Amanda Potts, Labelling people with disability in Australian newspapers
Agnes Bodis, Studying abroad is amazing, or is it?

In May, I had the privilege to spend a month as a visiting fellow at the Passau International Centre for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies (PICAIS). During this time, I spoke with the online magazine of Passau University about linguistic diversity and democracy.

Four years after the Persian translation, May also saw the publication of the Arabic translation of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. Translated by Dr Abdulrahman Alfahad, it was published as التنوع اللغوي والعدالة الاجتماعية by King Saud University Press.

June-July

Xingxing Yu, Nashid Nigar, Qi Qian, Translanguaging the English language curriculum in Tibet [Chinese translation]
Event: Linguistic Inclusion and Good Governance in Multilingual Australia. A recording of this talk by Dr Alexandra Grey for the Linguistic Justice Society is available here.

The June highlight was the International Symposium of Bilingualism (ISB 14) hosted at Macquarie University. A recording of Ingrid Piller’s keynote lecture is available here. It was a special pleasure to welcome so many of our international colleagues to Macquarie University, particularly fellow members the Next Generation Literacies Network.

The conference also offered an opportunity to interview key international scholars about their research, which we published as part of our lose series Chats in Linguistic Diversity.

Hanna Torsh, Linguistic diversity in education: Ingrid Gogolin in interview
Loy Lising, Translanguaging: Ofelia García in interview
Laura Smith-Khan, Intercultural communication in migration law practice. A recording of this talk is available here.
Jeffrey Gil, Competing visions for the global promotion of Mandarin

August

Students created some of the content we published in the 2^nd half of the year, including this informative video about the Thai language in the Australian diaspora by China Fukuda, Choltita Mukdahan, and Jankamon Salasuta, a project they undertook for a unit about “Languages and Cultures in Contact” as part of their Macquarie University Masters degree in Applied Linguistics and TESOL.

September-November

Alexandra Grey, Linguistic Inclusion in Public Health Communications
Ingrid Piller, Meet the people behind Life in a new language. This post collates tweets in which we featured each of the 130 research participants behind our forthcoming book Life in a new language.
Laura Smith-Khan, Refugee credibility assessment and the vanishing interpreter
Emily Bailey, The Complexities of Simplifying Language
CfP: Conceptual and methodological challenges in linguistic inclusion
Linguistic Inclusion Today

Throughout the year, our main activity is our fortnightly reading group, which brings together researchers based at Macquarie and other Sydney universities, Higher Degree Research students, and visitors. This year, we welcomed three international visitors for periods of 6-12 months, namely Professor Yuanbing Duan (Yunnan Normal University, Kunming), Professor ZHANG Jie (Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan), and Ms Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, a joint PhD student at Fudan University and UNSW.

A topic that regularly comes up during our meetings is the effects of English hegemony on education, employment, health, and all facets of life in a linguistically diverse society. How English hegemony plays out in new technologies was the topic of this piece over in the Conversation: ‘Your United States was normal’: has translation tech really made language learning redundant?

December

Sarah Hopkyns, Seeing the linguistic landscape through the eyes of Barbie and Ken
Rizwan Ahmad, Is Arabic under threat on the Arabian peninsula?
Undarmaa Munkhbayar, How to maintain Mongolian in Australia?
Natalie Davis, Auslan in Australia: Fighting for a voice
Ingrid Piller, Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2024
Jasna Novak Milić, Why Australia needs Croatian Studies. Recording of one of the keynotes at the Linguistic Inclusion Today

This stimulating and engaging day with 50 attendees allowed us to close the year on a high note

Happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year!

Previous annual reports

For an even deeper trip down memory lane, here is the list of our full archives:

Linguistic Inclusion Today

Language on the Move — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 06:12:08 +0000

***This page was updated on Dec 05, 2023. Presentation abstracts are now available at the bottom of this page.***

Join us on Thursday, December 14, at Macquarie University for a workshop to explore Linguistic Inclusion Today.

The aim of the workshop is to take stock of the state of linguistic inclusion in Australia, as we see ever-increasing linguistic diversity clashing with the continued monolingual hegemony of English. Following our CfP, we have put together an exciting program of keynote lectures and panels focusing on multilingual practices and policies in families, schools, healthcare settings, and government.

The workshop includes a special symposium focusing on the situation of languages in Australian Higher Education. Languages programs at Australian universities operate under the ever-looming threat of cuts to small programs, a threat that has gained new currency due to the rise of automated translation and generative AI.

The symposium “Languages in Australian Higher Education” can be attended as part of the full-day workshop or as a standalone option. For background reading on declining language learning opportunities in Australian higher education, see this new article by Svetlana Printcev over at SBS.

Program

9:00-9:15 Welcome
9:15-10:15 Keynote: Alexandra Grey, Linguistic Inclusion and Good Governance in Multilingual Australia (Chair: Yixi Isabella Qiu) (view abstract)
10:15-10:30 Break
10:30-12:00 Panel, Multilingualism in Australian Families (Chair: Hanna Torsh) (view abstracts)

Speaker 1: Priyanka Bose, Conceptualisation of family and language practice in family language policy research on migrants
Speaker 2: Sithembinkosi Dube, Bringing emerging African languages into the social inclusion agenda
Speaker 3: Undarmaa Munkhbayar, Heritage Language Maintenance in the Mongolian Community in Australia
Speaker 4: Emily Pacheco, Sign language maintenance among children of migrant Deaf adults in the diaspora
Speaker 5: Muhammad Iqwan Sanjani, Constructing transnational family language policy through translanguaging

12:00-1:00 Lunch
1:00-2:00 Keynote: Trang Nguyen, Language Policy and Individual Voices: Introducing “Individual Language Policy” (Chair: Jinhyun Cho) (view abstract)
2:00-2:15 Break
2:15-3:45 Panel, Language Polices for Inclusion in the 21^st Century (Chair: Loy Lising) (view abstracts)

Speaker 6: Jie Zhang, Between vulnerability and agency: crisis communication with Deaf communities in Wuhan during the Covid pandemic
Speaker 7: Brynn Quick, How are language barriers bridged in hospitals?
Speaker 8: Natalie Skinner, Cultural and linguistic diversity in children with a disability affecting their communication
Speaker 9: Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, Navigating epistemic injustice
Speaker 10: Tazin Abdullah, Citizen science: inclusive practices in data collection

3:45-4:00 Break
4:00-5:30 Symposium, Languages in Australian Higher Education

Keynote: Jasna Novak Milic, Language Preservation and Identity: The Story of Croatian Studies in Australia (view abstract)
Chair: Ingrid Piller
Discussants: Antonia Rubino, Mark Matic, Jane Hanley
Zoom host: Agnes Bodis

5:30-7:30 Reception

Registration

Attendance is free but spaces are strictly limited so register asap to avoid disappointment.

There are three attendance options:

Full day (register here) [sold out]
Only symposium, Languages in Australian Higher Education, and Reception (register here) [sold out]
Virtual attendance at only symposium, Languages in Australian Higher Education (register here)

Abstracts, Keynotes

Dr Alexandra Grey, UTS, Linguistic Inclusion and Good Governance in Multilingual Australia

This presentation reports on my 2018-2021 investigation into ‘Good Governance in Multilingual Urban Australia’. That project included three studies: an audit of NSW legislation and policy that does (not) provide a framework for decision-making and standards of multilingual government communications (undertaken with A Severin); a case study of such communication outputs from the NSW government, across portfolios (undertaken with A Severin); and a case study of multilingualism in public Covid-19 communications from NSW and Commonwealth governments.

The Covid case study also includes an analytic review of international human rights about language and health, as well as the commentary of international organizations as to how to take a rights-based approach to pandemic communications in order to fulfill certain international law obligations upon Australia (and other nations). That review found new expectations emerging that governments’ multilingual health communications be not merely partially available, but rather produced without (unreasonable) linguistic discrimination; with minority communities’ involvement at preparatory stages; strategic planning; and an eye to effectiveness. In explaining what more effective communication could entail, I advocate assessing government communications’ Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability and Adaptability — that is, the ‘Four As’ recognized by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and crisis communications scholars.

In this keynote at Macquarie University’s Workshop on conceptual and methodological challenges in linguistic inclusion, I will explain my interdisciplinary methodology, present the key findings of each of these three studies, and draw them together by inquiring whether developments in governments’ public communications during the pandemic have given Australia any lasting improvements in the linguistic and social inclusion. The research leads to a novel suggestion for 3 Rs of response to recurrent problems in governments reaching, and including, linguistically diverse publics: (further) Research; Redesigning online communications; and Rights-based Regulation (or Standard Setting). I will end with a reflection on the path ahead for researchers by noting how three studies have each also given rise to an awareness of ‘dead-ends’ and a need for government-partnered research in this space.

Dr Trang Nguyen, Melbourne University, Language Policy and Individual Voices: Introducing “Individual Language Policy”

Language policy often refers to regulations and rules made by governmental or institutional bodies to determine and influence the use of languages in a society or community. Such a common understanding of the term may lead to an impression among the public and authorities that language policy making should be the task of officials and governors rather than ordinary people, thus potentially creating conceptual challenges in incorporating individual voices into the policy making process. Recognising that there is also a language policy at an individual level, which is a critical part of higher-layer language policies and a link of the complex language policy circle, may contribute to addressing these conceptual challenges.

In this talk, I will introduce the concept “individual language policy” which I built in reference to a combination of language policy theories in an attempt to attract attention to such a language policy at an individual level. I suggest that individual language policy is a kind of implicit policy that individuals discursively define and apply to themselves in their daily language behaviours under the influence of external forces and higher-level language policies in the environments where they are living. Individual language policy comprises three main components: practised language policy (guiding language practices), perceived language policy (informing language beliefs), and negotiated language policy (directing language management) (Nguyen, 2022). Individual language policy does not stand independent of other-level language policies, but can be considered as the first step on the path to the outcomes of the top-down policies (Grin, 2003). In our advocacy for policy change towards language inclusion and justice, we should, therefore, emphasise the importance of individual language speakers and their individual language policy, as “it is at the individual level that the success or failure of a language policy is finally revealed” (Spolsky, 2022, p.x).

Dr Jasna Novak Milić, Macquarie University, Language Preservation and Identity: The Story of Croatian Studies in Australia

Among the approximately 200,000 Croats believed to reside in Australia, a significant majority have undergone assimilation, with English often serving as their primary functional language. When the largest wave of Croatian immigrants arrived in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s, the struggle for linguistic identity accompanied them. This struggle led to the recognition of the Croatian language in Australia as early as 1979, well before the declaration of Croatian independence in 1991. Subsequently, ethnic schools were established, and in the 1980s, Croatian language courses were introduced at the high school level. In 1983, Macquarie University launched the study of Croatian language and culture, a program through which several thousand students have passed over its four decades of existence. Initially funded by the Croatian community in Australia, this program began receiving financial support from the government of the Republic of Croatia about two decades ago. This support reflects the recognition of the program’s significance in preserving the language and community identity. However, within the predominantly monolingual mindset, the future of Croatian Studies in Australia faces renewed uncertainty.

Abstracts, Multilingualism in Australian Families

Priyanka Bose, UNSW, Conceptualisation of family and language practice in family language policy research on migrants

Family language policy (FLP) is increasingly recognised as a distinct domain of language policy concerned with the family as an arena of language policy formulation and implementation. While FLP is a relatively new research area, its conceptualisation of family and language practice requires re-examination due to social changes and technological developments, including the expansion of digital communication within families and the rise of globally dispersed families, a product of global migration and transnationalism. In this systematic review of migrant FLP research, we investigate how the notions of family and language practice are conceptualised in research. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, we identified a total of 163 articles for analysis. Our analysis reveals that the majority of studies were conducted in nuclear families, i.e., those consisting of a father, a mother, and one or more children. Studies also tend to conceptualise the family as fixed and physically located in one place. Paradoxically, around half of the studies acknowledge the presence of geographically dispersed family relations, but this does not necessarily affect their conceptualisation of what comprises a family. Language practice was conceptualised as physical and face-to-face communication in 51% of instances, with only 11% incorporating an analysis of digital communications. Based on our review, we recommend that FLP researchers researching migrant families reconceptualise the family as geographically dispersed and language practice as digital and multimodal when necessary. Such a reconceptualisation will help researchers understand the hitherto underexamined contributions of dispersed family members and multimodal digital
communications in migrant FLP.

Sithembinkosi Dube, MQ/UNSW, Bringing emerging African languages into the social inclusion agenda

When compared to other English-speaking nations, Australia is regarded as a leader in the provision of community language services (Edwards, 2004). Since the initial establishment of ethnic language schools, the government understood that community languages are critical for the equitable delivery of major community services (health, justice & social services). However, the current structures and policies for community language schools are blind to the smaller communities with emerging languages, thus undermining the social inclusion agenda (Piller & Takahashi, 2011). This talk will highlight how LangDentity, an online Shona-Ndebele Community school, is overcoming these hurdles to maintain Zimbabwean heritage languages.

Undarmaa Munkhbayar, MQ, Heritage Language Maintenance in the Mongolian Community in Australia

Maintaining heritage languages is of paramount importance to immigrants all over the world as the language is not just a communication tool. It carries our culture, tradition, belief, and identity. Australia is ideologically monolingual, yet factually multilingual and numerous minority languages exist here. Based on a small interview study with Mongolian families in Sydney, it was found that English is the main language of Mongolian children and parents struggle to support the heritage language. Sending children to Mongolian language community schools, opting for Mongolian language in the home, investing in extra tutoring sessions, joint reading, and perusing video contents can facilitate the preservation of Mongolian into the second generation.

Emily Pacheco, MQ, Sign language maintenance among children of migrant Deaf adults in the diaspora

About 90% of Deaf parents’ children are born hearing. Culturally, these individuals identify as Codas: Children of Deaf Adult(s). The linguistic practices of Codas have been minimally explored in sociolinguistics research. An aspect of this research is child language brokering (CLB), from which sign language brokering (SLB) emerged. This project aims to draw from these two concepts to investigate the experiences of children of migrant Deaf adults (Comdas). Through a scoping review and semi-structured interviews, data will be collected and later analysed through thematic analysis. By uncovering the experiences Comdas have towards SLB, this project hopes to highlight an often-overlooked population of sign language users in heritage language maintenance research.

Muhammad Iqwan Sanjani, UNSW, Constructing transnational family language policy through translanguaging

This study investigates the roles of home and school in constructing translanguaging spaces among Indonesian transnational families in Australia using an ecological approach to language policy. Data were collected from recordings of naturally occurring conversations, interviews, and diaries, and also interviews with teachers who teach the children of participant families. Preliminary evidence suggests that translanguaging serves as a means for transnational families to fight for epistemic inclusion in a context where monolingualism is prevalent and where their perspectives are often disregarded.

Abstracts, Language Polices for Inclusion in the 21^st Century

Jie Zhang, ZUEL/MQ, Between vulnerability and agency: crisis communication with Deaf communities in Wuhan during the Covid pandemic

Previous studies have demonstrated that deaf people are an underserved vulnerable community before, during, and after emergencies. At the same time, deaf people can also mobilize their agency to produce linguistically and culturally appropriate information and services to deaf communities in the absence of accessible crisis communication provided by the government, and even participate in crisis management. Adopting a community-based participatory approach to research, the study involves researchers and community members as equal partners in the research process. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this study describes the needs of and barriers faced by deaf people during the 76-day lockdown after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan in 2020 as perceived by a group of deaf volunteers, and how the deaf volunteers collaborated with the Wuhan Deaf Association, other civil groups, community workers, volunteers, medical staff, and psychological consultant to respond to deaf people’s needs. The study shows that challenges faced by deaf people include barriers to accessing information and aids, barriers to communication with stakeholders, as well as compound disadvantages caused by communication barriers. Deaf volunteers, apart from providing emergency services tailored to specific needs of deaf communities, helped empower ‘vulnerable’ deaf people in emergency responses and resilience building, and effectively raised the awareness of accessible communication among stakeholders and the public. The study demonstrates the critical role of deaf volunteers, who are highly motivated, fully aware of the needs of deaf people, well-networked both within the deaf community and with the broader community, in providing a bridge between stakeholders and deaf communities. Therefore, the study calls for a shift from a top-down emergency management approach in which emergency management organizations provide special services for deaf people to a participatory and inclusive approach that actively involves deaf people in designing and implementing plans tailored to specific needs of deaf communities in emergency settings.

Brynn Quick, MQ, How are language barriers bridged in hospitals?

This presentation explores how hospitals communicate multilingually to bridge language barriers experienced by linguistic minority patients by asking how hospital staff assess a linguistic minority patient’s language proficiency and identify the need for a multilingual communication strategy. It also examines the language support strategies that hospitals use to communicate with these patients. This is done through a systematic literature review of 50 studies. The findings show that current literature most often examines spoken language barriers bridged through interpreters. The problems identified with consistent interpreting service provision relate to time constraints and inconsistencies in procedures related to assessing a patient’s linguistic proficiency.

Natalie Skinner, MQ, Cultural and linguistic diversity in children with a disability affecting their communication

Communication disability is not typically included in discussion and research around linguistic inclusion. For children with a disability affecting their communication, there is a significant lack of research on cultural and linguistic diversity that can be used to guide the development and delivery of speech pathology services. Services incorporate language technologies, including Alternative and Augmentative Communication systems, that facilitate social participation. Interviews were conducted with 23 speech pathologists across Australia, exploring provision of appropriate services for children with a communication disability, in families who speak a language other than English. While cultural and linguistic diversity is acknowledged and valued, English is pervasive in services and associated resources.

Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, Fudan U/UNSW, Navigating epistemic injustice

Informed by the perspective of “epistemic (in)justice” and “epistemic agency”, this study explored how multilingual teachers and students negotiate a more epistemologically effective and equal access to knowledge negotiation in an EMI program in a Chinese university. A variety of data were collected in the study, including lesson recordings, multilingual notes, reflective journals, and stimulated recalls, to understand how the transnational teachers and students as epistemic agents negotiate disciplinary concepts and engage in knowledge co-construction to express silenced voices, countering epistemic oppression and enhancing participation.

Tazin Abdullah, MQ, Citizen science: inclusive practices in data collection

The field of sociolinguistics has seen an emerging method of data collection known as Citizen Science (CS), whereby members of the public are enlisted to collect data. The utilization of CS allows for large volumes of data collection and enables researchers to tap into the diverse sociolinguistic knowledge of the participants. This paper discusses the innovative use of CS in a Linguistic Landscape study, in which specific groups of participants were engaged to take photographs of signs that were used for analysis. The study notes how the utilization of CS acknowledges diversity and offers an approach to build inclusivity into sociolinguistc methodologies.

CfP: Conceptual and methodological challenges in linguistic inclusion

Language on the Move — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 01:01:28 +0000

We are looking for contributors to a workshop about “Conceptual and methodological challenges in linguistic inclusion.”

When: Thursday, December 14, 2023, full day
Where: Macquarie University
Keynote speakers:
Dr Alexandra Grey, University of Technology Sydney
Dr Trang Nguyen, University of Melbourne

What: Despite the ever-increasing linguistic diversity of Australian society, our institutions continue to be organized as monolingual spaces. This creates barriers to full and equitable social participation for those who do not speak English, do not speak it well, or have low levels of (English) literacy. At this point in time, research into language barriers to education, work, healthcare, law, and all aspects of social life faces at least three intertwined conceptual and methodological challenges, which this workshop is designed to explore:

Emerging languages: some of the fastest-growing communities in Australia include speakers of under-served, under-resourced, and non-standardized languages. This raises significant challenges for the provision of language services, from translation and interpreting to heritage language maintenance and community schooling.
Language technologies: the past few years have seen an explosion in assistive language technologies from automated translation via multilingual chatbots to digital diasporas. These technologies offer fresh opportunities for linguistic inclusion while also creating new barriers for linguistically minoritized populations.
Epistemic justice: the open science movement challenges us to rethink the research life cycle from design to dissemination. Co-design, data-sharing, multilingual team research, big data, and citizen science are some of the issues reshaping how we approach linguistic diversity and social participation.

The workshop is designed to be highly interactive and we are particularly interested in hearing from HDR candidates and early career researchers working in these areas. We have a small number of short presenter slots (10-15 minutes) on our panels. To have your abstract considered for presentation, submit here by Monday, November 06.

Attendance is free.

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Dr Alexandra Grey, UTS, Linguistic Inclusion and Good Governance in Multilingual Australia

Dr Trang Nguyen, Melbourne University, Language Policy and Individual Voices: Introducing “Individual Language Policy”

Dr Jasna Novak Milić, Macquarie University, Language Preservation and Identity: The Story of Croatian Studies in Australia

Abstracts, Multilingualism in Australian Families

Priyanka Bose, UNSW, Conceptualisation of family and language practice in family language policy research on migrants

Sithembinkosi Dube, MQ/UNSW, Bringing emerging African languages into the social inclusion agenda

Undarmaa Munkhbayar, MQ, Heritage Language Maintenance in the Mongolian Community in Australia

Emily Pacheco, MQ, Sign language maintenance among children of migrant Deaf adults in the diaspora

Muhammad Iqwan Sanjani, UNSW, Constructing transnational family language policy through translanguaging

Abstracts, Language Polices for Inclusion in the 21st Century

Abstracts, Language Polices for Inclusion in the 21^st Century