In his long career Dr Rapatahana has taught English as a foreign language (EFL) in countries in the Pacific, Southeast, East and West Asia, where he noticed that sexual exploitation was common practice by former colleagues. This prompted him in his retirement to write a book about this difficult and important topic, where he draws on a wide range of sources, from academic papers to media reports, and from blogs to organisations which report on sexual violence against children, to assemble a compelling case for the widespread occurrence of sexual predation in the EFL sector.

The conversation addresses his new book, Sexual Predation and TEFL: The teaching of English as a Foreign Language Enables Sexual Predation (Brill, 2024) which explores how teaching English overseas intersects with and enables widespread sexual exploitation.

Trigger warning: this interview discusses sexual exploitation and related content that listeners/readers may find distressing.

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For more Language on the Move resources related to this topic, see The dark side of intercultural communication, Orientalism and tourism, The dark side of TESOL and Child pornography and English language learning.

Transcript

Hanna: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hanna Torsh, and I ‘m a lecturer in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University. My guest today is Dr. Vaughn Rapatahana, Te Ātiawa. Dr. Rapatahana is an author, poet, and editor who commutes between homes in Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Aotearoa, New Zealand. He is widely published across several genres in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English, and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, and Spanish. He earned a PhD from the University of Auckland, and is a co-editor of two books, one called English Language as Hydra, and the other called Why English? Confronting the Hydra, published by Multilingual Matters in 2012 and 2016.

Today, we are going to talk about his new monograph, which was published in December 2024, entitled, Sexual Predation and TEFL: The teaching of English as a Foreign Language Enables Sexual Predation, published by Brill.

Welcome to the show, Vaughan!

Vaughan Rapatahana: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Hanna: I’d like to start by asking you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book.

Vaughan: I first started teaching English overseas, I put teaching in quotation marks, because I’m not sure if it’s actually teaching which we’ll talk about later, in the Republic of Nauru in 1979, so I’ve been doing that on and off over the years, ever since, until I retired completely from working in 2019 because I ‘m an old man now. But I’ve taught English overseas which I would equate to teaching English as a foreign language in many overseas locales, including the Middle East, Brunei, Jerusalem, Xi’an in China, Hong Kong, Philippines, where have I missed? Probably other places. And of course, in Aotearoa itself, because as you pointed out my first language is te reo Māori, so I’ve taught English as a second language in schools, Kaupapa, where Māori is the first language, so that’s here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I’ve always been interested in this topic.

Because I have met up with people who are sexual predators during my sojourn overseas. I’ve read lots of news reports, and I guess, like the proverbial rolling stone, the more I read and experience, the more I became interested, and wrote about it, and researched about it, and collated notes, and added to them all the time. It got to the stage I wanted to write a book about it, which I managed to do successfully.

Hanna Torsh: For those who haven’t read the book, one of the things you do at the beginning is you define some of these key terms. So, how do we define sexual predation, and then how do we define TEFL?

Vaughan: I’ve defined them in the book more widely than people probably accept them. Sexual predation, as I’ve noted here, is a control or power-based, exploitative, predatory, abusive form of behaviour, deliberate, often pre-planned. It’s all too often, sadly, by males. whether they be teachers or members of the public in countries where students have gone to learn the subject, or to learn English. It includes all forms of sexual harassment, so I’ve equated harassment and predation together. Doesn’t necessarily have to be physical, can be verbal, can be just the gaze. the sexualized gaze. So that’s sexual predation. And it’s generally male preying on female, whether they’re students, fellow teachers. socio-economically deprived women in countries where male teachers have gone to teach the language. And LGBTQ teachers and students as well are often other victims. So that’s predation. TEFL stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

But it’s not merely teachers, male or female, going overseas, to teach English. or students from countries where English is not a first language going to countries where it is, it’s also not just in schools, it’s in tuition centres, it’s, in aid programs, like Peace Corps, and volunteerism, the whole industry of volunteerism, which are advertised, especially online, where young people especially go overseas. sort of like a white saviour complex to go over and help the poor local indigenous person learn English. They think they need it, they think they need to do it, they think they are the white saviour. It’s in orphanages, orphanages, so there’s a big, huge orphanage tourism aspect. to things like the Peace Corps. Also, what Haley Stanton so cogently has written about recently, TEFL tourism, where people go overseas to teach English, but at the same time have a fun time in places like Thailand, going to the beach partying. dropping drugs, having indiscriminate sex. So, TEFL is much wider than just one person going to another country in a school. It’s huge, in volunteerism, TEFL tourism, orphanage tourism, Peace Corps, teaching English, or trying to teach English, or pretending to teach English, often by totally unqualified people. who only are there because they can speak English, is also TEFL.

Hanna: I think that’s really valuable, that definition, because it reminds us that we’re not just talking about classrooms and teachers and students, we’re talking about a whole industry and all the associated practices, many of which, as you say, take place in spaces that are less formal, that are less regulated, and often are associated with cultural practices that are nothing to do with teaching and learning. And how do you think that the way you’ve examined it is different from the kinds of stereotypes and common beliefs that people might have about this issue?

Vaughan: Because I think, as I’m trying to point out, it’s a much wider issue than dirty old men going overseas, traveling child sex offenders deliberately saying they’re going to teach English so they can go and pray on children. That is many people ‘s perception of sexual predation and TEFL. And it’s a key one, and it’s a very sad, unfortunate one, and it’s statistically not stopping, and there’s so many news reports about such people. The preferential sex offender, but it’s also all the other areas I ‘m talking about, it’s the TEFL tourists going overseas and smoking dope, and going to a brothel, and engaging in underage sex with the local prostitutes. That’s just one example of sexual predation in TEFL.

So, it’s much wider than the dirty old men. It includes, as I said before, often Asian girls, teenagers, young women, going overseas, thinking they need to learn English, and being molested or raped or in severe cases, murdered by males in the local population. It also includes what I call Charisma Man, that’s NET ‘s (native-speaking English teachers) who’ve got this  wonderful aura about them because they’re  in another country, and they ‘ve suddenly become charisma men, getting accolades from the local populace women and girls they wouldn’t get in their own countries, and taking advantage of it, and sort of boasting about their accolades and their sexual prowess in those new countries. So, these are just some of the things sexual predation and TEFL involve. It’s a much wider, much more complicated, with many aspects to it, and that’s why the book is so thick, well over 400 pages, because there’s so much in it.

Hanna: And unfortunately, we’re only able to talk about a few of those issues today, but I hope that readers do go and engage with the much wider scope that you’ve explored in your very thorough book. One of the things that struck me while reading your book is that this is an important conversation to be having, but this is one of the few publications that I’ve certainly, in my career in applied linguistics and TESOL, ever come across, so it’s a very under-researched context. And the second point is it draws an important connection between the kinds of, exploitation that you’re talking about. and this phenomenon that many of our audience might know, called linguistic imperialism. Could you expand on those two aspects for the audience? So, the first one is, you know, why is this one of the few books I ‘m seeing on this topic? And the second one is, what is this connection between sexual predation and linguistic imperialism?

Vaughan: There’s a blind spot, especially amongst practitioners of the tongue. That’s English as first language speakers and writers and authors and teachers. They don’t want to hear about this sort of aspect, sexual predation, in their industry. They want to go overseas and earn big money and have a good time, or have a stable career, because they’re not all TEFL tourists, of course. Many are stable, middle-class individuals who are having lucrative overseas careers. The last thing they want to hear about is, bad guys in their profession. And the legal aspects, publishers are wary as well, they don’t want to get too involved, especially if names are concerned, or news reports. There’s a certain amount of embarrassment, but mainly I think it’s just pushing it under the table, ignorance, and denial.

As NET myself in some of those countries, or all those countries I mentioned, I often used to write to the South China Morning Post when I lived in Hong Kong, and still return there all the time, saying, why have you got these NET teachers in your country earning such huge money with huge, gratuities and airfares every two years. What are they actually doing? Do the local population really need English? Of course, my answer was always no. Those letters were published in the South China Morning Post, and of course a huge barrage of letters coming in from other native English-speaking teachers who are then saying, of course we’re needed here, and of course the Hong Kong Chinese need to learn English. So, there’s that denial and defiance and sweeping under the table. But I know what I was talking about, because my family is Hong Kong Chinese. They can speak English; their first language is Cantonese. They had no need for native-speaking English teachers in their schools, absolutely no need at such huge expense. So, there’s the first part of the question. That’s why there’s very little written about it. It’s about time there was, and this is the book which I ‘m very proud of, because I think it’s my most important work, and I’ve written well over 50 books. This is my key one.

Hanna: Over 50 books, and this is the most important one. So, there’s a real vested interest there in people not exploring and uncovering these practices?

Vaughan: And the employing countries who think they need to have English to become wonderful countries turn a blind eye as well, because they think they need to have English, so they don’t have good hiring practices. This is a huge generalization. There are so many loopholes. People can get rehired, a traveling child sex offender who ‘s teaching English can go from one country to another, and there’s no overall global mechanism to even know that they’re moving from one country to another. So, the actual employing countries are just as bad as the employer countries. There’re so many loopholes involved. One example about such sinister predators, the preferential sex offenders, they can change their names, get new passports, and travel overseas again and escape the sexual offender registers in their own countries, like the UK, which is still ineffective in that area.

It’s an exploitative industry, summarized by my other two books published by Multilingual Matters, The [English] Hydra, this huge mechanism, earning huge amounts of money for certain vested interests, basically white, middle-class, Western, concerns, the Hydra is spreading linguistic imperialism, native-speaking English teachers, huge testing industry, textbooks, and they’re  going to turn a blind eye because of the money. Yes? And then, at the same time, the local people, the local countries, the cultures were not gifted English as a first language and never historically have been them, are being lulled into the sense that they need to have English. It’s pushed onto them. And a white face will always get a job, even if they have no qualifications. So, it’s exploitation, imperialism continuing. Robert Phillipson must take a lot of accolades there, and he was one of my co-authors in the first book, English Language Hydra. I’ve worked together with Robert and the late and lamented Tove Skutnubb-Kangas, his wife, we all worked together on those two early hydra books.

So going back to your second part of your question. I mentioned a term English language sexual imperialism, which, to me, is part and parcel of the hydra, part and parcel of linguistic imperialism. They go together. So, when English language is spread and forced and sold to places that think they need to have English. Sexual imperialism happens at the same time. through some of the channels I’ve already mentioned before, they go hand in hand in hand. I ‘ll read you a quote, if you don’t mind, from Joanne Nagel in 2003, “the history of European colonialism is not only a history of language dominance, it is also a history of sexual dominance.” I agree completely. So, they’re hand in glove via all the different ways I’ve mentioned in this book. So, in my own quote: “When the language is presented in English as a foreign language situation, at least potentially, so are patriarchal, sexist, chauvinist tropes and the correlated behaviours.”

Linguistic imperialism and sexual imperialism go together. And it’s been going on for hundreds of years, from the white man going to Africa and bringing his own sexual tropes there. That’s still going on. The male preoccupation with the exotic Asian female, for example. This is 2025, but nothing ‘s changed.

Hanna Torsh: In your book, you give us concrete examples of the kind of link that you’re talking about between English language teaching and sexual imperialism. In your book, you talk about the ways in which, the career of teaching English overseas is sexualized, even before potential teachers begin teaching. Can you tell our audience what you found that out about that?

Vaughan: It comes from just lots of experience, lots of reading, lots of research, and just the sheer obvious facts. For example, English itself is a sexualized language, just given the components, structures of the tongue itself are sexualized. If you want to read Lewis and Lupyan in 2020, a very good article about that, just how pronouncedly sexist English language as a language is, in terms of its words and the word use. Many TEFL textbooks, even in 2025, are still predominantly sexed or gender biased. That’s even if some of those countries receiving English as a supposed gift, even have textbooks. And if they do, they’re usually old ones, and there might be one shared between 50 students.

The gender bias is apparent and still obvious. Males still continue to dominate in management, and TEFL conferences. Varinder Unlu, came up with the website ELTToo, and about the sexist basis of the English language teaching industry, the EFL, TEFL conferences and management structures. And she got repudiated and reprimanded by too many males for doing so, which goes back to that vested interest, not wanting to know and hiding it away.

English is taught in a sexualized fashion. For example, as in Spanish TV, a woman strips as she’s teaching English. Bizarre, but true. And it’s advertised, especially tuition centres, for example, in Japan, some of the advertisements are so blatantly sexualized and sexist. Dozens of examples are shown in the book. Another key point is the sex tourism. There’s a huge global trend, and it’s not just English teachers going overseas to partake in sex tourism, but the fact that so many people from Western countries and local countries might go to Southeast Asia for sex tourism encourages the teaching of English to cater for those tourists. The “sex pats”, another term, who just goes overseas to partake in sexualized adventures with the young, people who have no money, who are in the sex trade, because they have to be to survive, people like that. And the statistics shown by concerns that are trying to combat sexual predation in TEFL, like ECPAT and APLE Cambodia. There’re so many examples that they publish on their website and in their reports, shows the problem isn’t going away, it’s probably escalating. Despite the best efforts of places like EPAC and Apple to do something about it, and the poor efforts by local governments and countries sending the offenders overseas.

Hanna Torsh: And can you just, for the audience, explain what those acronyms are?

Vaughan: Good question. ECPAT is not just one organization, it’s an overall name for organizations that fight child exploitation, and protecting children being exploited. And APLE Cambodia is a specific example that works under EPAC, but it’s its own separate body in Cambodia, fighting child exploitation and protecting children over there. Many cases are of English-speaking teachers, tutors, or people going over and opening orphanages, or pretending to do aid out in rural communities, but actually are there as sexual predators, preying on youth. Often some of them are so cheeky as to marry a local say, Cambodian woman, and then exploit the woman ‘s children. So that’s APLE, Preda in the Philippines is another organization doing the same thing, preventing child exploitation, including by white men going there and running sex rings, paedophile rings, which is all in the book.

Hanna Torsh: Yeah, great, thank you. We are running out of time, Vaughan, and it’s such a big topic, but I ‘d like to end by asking, you’ve talked about the issue being bigger than the kinds of extreme, horrific crimes you’ve just talked about, that it’s actually permeating the whole industry, and that there’s this close relationship between English language teaching and sexual predation. What would you like our audience to go away with, in terms of the key message of your book, bearing in mind that a lot of our audience are emerging and established researchers in Applied Linguistics and TESOL.

Vaughan: Be aware of the problem, be far more aware. Report any incidents of sexual predation, even if they seem minor. If you think a student’s being harassed by a male teacher, or you think of fellow female teachers being harassed by a male teacher, or by local members of the community, report it. Get your own professional bodies to be far more proactive. They’re not proactive in fighting this massive problem across the board, all the different types of behaviours of sexual predation and TEFL, and it’s all its various guises.  Close loopholes globally, not so easy, but let ‘s get, say, UK government to say, how come sex offenders who are on the sexual offenders list can still go overseas and teach by changing their names through a passport? And be caught years later in another country altogether. And these are all documented cases.

And my final key point has always been, do we really need to teach English in other countries beyond first language countries? And my point is, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we don’t need English even to be taught. There’s no clear requirement for EFL in many places anyway. You can circumvent the hydra by just doing away with it. People can develop their own languages, because as Tove Skutnabb-Kangas said many, many years ago, linguicism comes in when linguistic imperialism comes in, and linguicism is the loss of your own Indigenous tongue, because English is taking over. We don’t need the hydra.

Hanna: You also make the point in your book that local teachers are often underpaid and undervalued relative to, imported teachers. And I thought that was a powerful message too, and linked to the idea of decolonizing, English language.

Vaughan: And it rankles with them. I was earning much more money than most of my fellow teachers in Hong Kong, and I wasn’t working the hours that they were putting into, or were expected to put in, and they weren’t getting the big, huge gratuities. Total exploitation. Totally unnecessary, but as I keep on saying, there’s a vested interest going on there, and they aren’t going to shut up. They want the money. Although in the last two years, finally, maybe they went back and read my letters to the South China Morning Post. the Hong Kong government now has now de-escalated the financial benefits for the NET scheme there and has now thrown open the budget that was formerly there for nets to be hired by schools, to the schools themselves to hire NETs, but at a lower rate. Why? Because fiscally, Hong Kong can ‘t afford what they were spending before, billions and billions of Hong Kong dollars on net teachers. So, ironically, socioeconomically, the net scheme is becoming disempowered because Hong Kong can ‘t afford to pay anymore.

Hanna Torsh: Wow. A good outcome for local teachers, potentially, and for schools, if they’re getting more of that funding. So that’s perhaps a nice place to finish up. Look, thank you so much, Vaughan, for this important work. It certainly got me thinking about my own teaching career as an English language teacher, and the various associations that I ‘m part of, and how particularly how this issue of sexual predation intersects with a lot of the work we talk about on LOM on native speakerism and now this new emerging, body of work on decolonizing English. So, lots of important food for thought. Thanks again. Do you have any final comments you would like to make before we say goodbye?

Vaughan: Tēnā koe. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I guess I ‘m going to have to say, find the book and read it, because it’s new, and it’s important. And it’s not been expressed sufficiently, or powerfully before. It’s telling things that people don’t want to hear, quite frankly.

Hanna Torsh: I couldn’t agree more. And if you’re like me working at a university, request that your library order Vaughan ‘s important book.

So, thanks again, Vaughan, and thanks everyone for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-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.

Till next time.

Hanna and Prash discuss English language in higher education research and practice, in the understudied context of the South Pacific, and Prashneel’s new book, English Language-Mediated Settings and Educational Inequality: Language Policy Agendas in the South Pacific published by Routledge in 2025.

Transcript

Hanna: Welcome to the language on the move, podcast a channel on the new books network. My name is Dr. Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in linguistics and applied linguistics at Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr. Prashneel Ravisan Goundar. Dr. Prashneel is an academic based in the graduate research School in the University of New England. His research interests span applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and educational linguistics. Today we’re going to talk about his new monograph, which will be published next month. English language, Mediated Settings and educational Inequalities published by Routledge. Welcome to the Show Presh.

Prash: Hi, Hanna, thank you for having me.

Hanna: It’s lovely that you could be here, and I really am really excited about introducing your work to our audience, so can you start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book.

Prash: Well, thanks personally to you for inviting me and reaching out. It’s always good to expand on your work and put yourself out of your comfort zone and rethink what you have done. So, the book obviously was part of my PhD. Thesis. But I’ll start just a little bit about myself.

So, I’m originally from Fiji. and I moved to Armidale, which is in the New England region in 2022 to complete my PhD. I’d started working on my PhD in Fiji, but because it was during the Covid period in 2020, and there were restrictions on travel and all of that, so I couldn’t move until mid of 2022, when things got a bit better. Back home back in Fiji I was an academic as well. I taught linguistics and applied linguistics courses for a decade or so. and part of what we had to do was we had to make sure that we upgraded our qualifications. We were given a timeline to do this upgrade, and I started looking at research topics.

Fijian streetscape (Image credit: Felix Colatanavanua via Wikipedia)

The way it kind of worked was the former Prime Minister of Fiji had gone into a function and had spoken at length about the English language problems that he had come across, and he had mentioned some of the civil servants, teachers or professionals who were writing emails. He noticed a lot of spelling mistakes, sentence structure errors, grammatical errors, and things like that. That’s when my my research skills kind of just picked up on this. And I started to think, well, he’s saying that. But does he have any form of data to back up his ideas? Or why have we come to that conclusion? Why is that the case? So that’s when I started to think aloud about this, and I thought this was going to be an interesting topic to investigate.

I sent research proposals over to a few universities, and that landed at UNE and my primary supervisor Finex Ndlovu he picked up on that, and he said, well, this looks like an interesting topic, but there would be other elements that I would like to add on to that. And that’s how I started working on my PhD which I finished in 2023. And that’s when we then started to see how the thesis could then be turned into a monograph and published as a book. So, I sent out the proposal to 2 publication houses and Routledge had sent it out for review, and they got back, and the review was very positive. And I thought, okay, now this is the time to start revising and reworking on how I can reach out to a wider audience who would be interested in this language, planning language policy, medium of instruction book. So that’s how it came about.

Hanna: Fantastic. Well, we’re glad that it did! It makes me feel like very old to think that you were doing this in Covid, because in my mind, Covid was just, you know, last year. But you’ve done so much since then, so I’d like to start in terms of delving into your book to focus on two of the things that I found really innovative and exciting about your research. And that is, of course, that it explores a really under-researched context. So that’s the first thing. And then the second thing is that it’s very participant centred. So, it really allows the participants to have a voice. Could you speak to those two aspects, or expand on them a little bit for our audience?

Prash: Absolutely, so if I did a quantitative study and just looked at a language test to see what the students were doing, or how they were coming into the university with a particular school, I think the study would not have been of merit in the sense that we are just looking at it from the statistics point of view. To just say, this is the level the students have entered the university, this is the level that they are leaving out from the University. What I wanted to go into was why they were at that particular level. What actually happened at the back end of it. And this is where the whole story about the Prime Minister comes into place is that something must have happened along the way for them to have a particular level of English when they entered a university, and that space was under researched.

Other researchers or scholars in Fiji had looked at primary school level of English, they had looked at high school level of English, or they had used interventions in those spaces, but they did not move on to the university and try to investigate. We have students who end up at the 3 main universities in Fiji where they all have English as the medium of instruction. But Fiji is so diverse. The linguistic background spans over 300 islands that we have, and you have students who would come from maritime schools who are very in rural areas. And then you have students who come from urban schools, and they enter the university. But for someone to just say, oh, well, you all come from schools. You should have the same level of English is very unfair. It’s an injustice, because that’s not how it works. So that’s the whole space that I really wanted to tap into and see what we could do to address these issues or what we could do to find out what these issues were, and that’s where the methodology came into place.

So I’ll tell you a funny story about this when I wrote the proposal, and I had sent it out to my supervisors, and I said, This is what I would like to do, and this is what I want to find out, and I remember them writing back to me and saying, Well, have you thought about how you’re going to give voice to the students. and that kind of put me into. Okay, how do I do that? So, I started again, looking at different methodologies. The most suitable one I found was grounded theory, methodology, and why it was suitable was it generates. The findings are centred with the data. So, the data actually generates the themes. The data actually brings about all the information that you could possibly gather. Then I started reading more about grounded theory, and then I noticed it was not used in the South Pacific context. When it came to language testing regimes, it wasn’t in that space. So, I said, okay, this is a new element. That’s coming into the picture and grounded theory, because it is of 3 different coding systems that go into its open coding, selective coding, and theoretical coding, these 3 different stages let the findings shine in their own spaces. Because you have this open coding where we had rural schools’ data. We had data about urban schools. We had data about tertiary institutions. And then we streamlined what we got from there into the selective coding space to look at. Okay, this is from, you know, these 3 streams. Then we grouped it to put rural schools and urban schools together. Whether it’d be primary schools or high schools. We put that information together. Then we moved on to getting the higher education data together as well. So, these were the new elements that kind of came about in the book. The methodology allows the participants to go on and speak about that information that they have.

So, we were able to have the total participants I had in the study which was 120, who did 2 language tests, one at the beginning of the year, and at the end of the year. We had writing interventions that I used to give them feedback on how they were progressing. And then, when we looked at the data at the end again qe showed improvements, but then I still wanted to know what had happened. So, we chose 30 participants to have an interview, and they were all randomly selected. It wasn’t someone who has performed the best was selected, or people who were low. And then I started to talk to them about their background educational background in terms of their primary school and high school level of English. What had happened, and those findings then told us a whole new picture.

Recently, even last year, if Fiji has started looking at examination results, and they have tried to look at what’s happening, and they want to have an educational review. So, I recently wrote a newspaper article. and I explained in that review that it’s not just blaming the students and saying that we need to do this review because the students did not perform well or we need to do the review because the teachers are not doing their job. What are the elements that are contributing to the unsatisfactory level that the Ministry of Education or the Fijian Government is looking at? And so, I put my whole findings forward. And a lot of people sent me an email. And they said, yeah, it was spot on that these are the things that in reviews in previous years people have not considered, and they have just put a blame on somebody in that aspect. So yes, the voices that have come from the grounded theory methodology. Now, I’m trying to look at avenues where I can put this through…

Hanna: Yes, contribute your voice to the debate?

Prash: Yes, exactly.

Hanna: So you looked at a 120 students, you tested them at the beginning, and at the end of their first year at university. And then you interviewed 30 students. So, to kind of understand their experiences with English language, learning in all those diverse contexts.

Prash: Absolutely.

Hanna: It’s so relevant to other contexts in English language teaching all over the world where you do have this diversity of educational spaces, particularly in rural and regional areas, but also with you know, with diverse access to resources in all sorts of different spaces, like, even in the same city, you can have very diverse access to resources in the same educational contexts.

Prash: Yes, that’s so true.

Hanna: It’s important, and, as you say, that you are now introducing this into the political space is also so fascinating, and that it wasn’t there before is shocking. But it’s fantastic when you know your research has an impact or can have an impact. So, I guess for our audience, we’d really like to know a little bit more about what you found. So, my next question is, you talk about these different ways in which students in different parts of Fiji, in the primary system, and the high school system, too, I’m imagining, have this unequal access to essentially quality, English language, learning. Can you tell us a bit more about what your main findings were? What were some of the things that you found, and what were some of the main barriers. preventing equal access for all students to quality. English language learning, and teaching?

Prash: You have already mentioned, coming from same region schools, but they have different kind of access to resources. That’s exactly what we discovered in this particular project. So, I spoke to the students. One of the students told me, he came from a rural school. So, the two main islands in Fiji they have Viti Levu, and Vanua Levu. So, he came from one, and he said to me, he said. when I was in second grade, the library had 10 books. When I left the 8th grade to move to high school the library still had the same 10 books. There was no movement in the in the 6 or 7 years that the student was there, so I said there was no new books? He said, no. Ten books for 300 students who would have studied in that whole period. So if we are saying English should be improved, and it can be improved by reading. Well, do we have the resources to give to the students? You can’t just say read, read, but well, let’s look at our backyard. We don’t have those books to give.

Related to that the students told me, about what they found in their library. This is another student, but it’s related to what I just spoke about. The library only had books for upper primary. They didn’t have any books for lower primary. So, if you have students who are from one to four in those classes. They didn’t have books to look at, and it’s the same with other schools. People had books for lower primary, no books for upper primary students, or vice versa. In the high school context as well.

Students also told me that because they came from maritime schools or they came from rural schools there, what happens is they come from very small communities, and it’s so small that you kind of know everybody in the community. So, the students are also very familiar with the teacher who was teaching, so the teacher would not use English to teach English instead of using, you know, English to teach a reading of English class or a grammar of English class the teacher was using a vernacular. What led on from there was when this particular student she moved to high school. She said “I was in culture shock because all the students were speaking in English, and I’m coming from a rural primary school”, an island primary school, and she was so depressed she told me. She said she spent the first year of high school in isolation. She would sit under the tree and just try, and you know, be herself, or she would go to the library because she had no voice. She didn’t know how to communicate. There was a huge language barrier for her.

She wasn’t able to even have a simple conversation with the teacher to talk to the teacher, and I remember her telling me she said, I tried to go and talk to the teacher. I tried to make time to go into the teacher, but the teacher has so many classes. The teacher has so many students, she said. I couldn’t get through to talk to her on how I could improve my conversation skills, or in general, you know my skills in the English language. That was the other situation. A similar one. Another student said to me, she said, I didn’t care that we had to speak in English. I spoke in iTaukei, which is an indigenous Fijian language, she said. I spoke with people of other languages who would speak in English, but I had no words, so I would speak to them in the iTaukei language and just try and make a conversation. But it was hard. It was very hard. It was depressing, for some of the students. How would you go about solving this kind of issue?

So, what I do recommend in the book is that for the students who are coming from these schools, once we know that yes, they are having this kind of issue, we need to set up basic academic kind of skills training for these students so that we nurture them to then progress gradually into the class, and they don’t feel that isolation. They don’t feel that they cannot talk. And the other aspect about resources was very interesting. So, as I said, it’s always vice versa. You cannot have a balance in this. One of the students from a rural school said. which was, I found it a bit funny the way he explained it, he said “oh, well, we didn’t have a lot of resources.” This is a very rural school in Fiji, he said, “we only had seven laptops”, and I said to him, “seven laptops in a rural school. I think you were well in place”, you know. At the same time I spoke to another student who came from the same region but attended an urban school with no computer access. They didn’t have any Internet; they didn’t have any computer access. So, the distribution of resources is unequal here. So how do we look into that.

Another student told me, she spoke to someone who came from another urban school and she also attended an urban school. Sha said “we did not have the same textbook access, they had more textbooks than us, or they had more teaching and learning resources, such as charts. They had access to those things as well”. So, I noticed that students actually make this comparison when they are there in the same space. They do talk about all of these things. And yeah, these are different barriers that they have in trying to excel in exams, because in high schools as well, the medium instructions is in English. But if we don’t look at it right from the beginning when they come here. And that’s when you know the blame game starts. And in the last examination results that came out for Fiji they were 76% pass rate. And everybody was, why is it so low? Why is it? 76? But yes, you’re not looking at the circumstances that the students go through that the teachers go through. Because yes, you can say to the students, but then the teachers can also be like, well, be didn’t have the books to do this.

Another interesting issue is the shortage of teachers which has two aspects. One is a literal shortage. One student said they didn’t have an English teacher for two terms completely, because the teacher fell ill. Now there was no one to step in to look after these students for two terms, and it was an examination class to prepare for an external exam. So, in the third term they got a substitute teacher. But instead of learning, it was just rushing through to cover whatever they could cover to sit for the exam. Who can you point to in in that space? Well, should we say that the school would have had to make contact with the Ministry of Education to try and look for someone to come into this place should we point to the teacher and say, well, if you were unwell, you should have informed us in advance. Should you point to the head of department and say, why didn’t you have a contingency plan in place to get someone to cover that shift as well? It’s a whole structure, who do you kind of get into that space as well. So yeah, it was fascinating to listen to their stories.

Hanna: It’s so relevant as well, these structural educational issues. And they’re also often interconnected with issues around medium of instruction in lots of contexts. We could, we could talk about that for the whole podcast, but I want to move on to your monograph. You used a language testing tool to assess students at the beginning of the semester, and at the end of the year which hadn’t been used in in fact, I think you said it hadn’t been used in the region outside of Europe and the “global north”. The Common European Framework of Reference. So can you tell us a bit about why you chose that tool, and how you argue it should be used to better meet the needs of learners in the Fijian context, because it was developed in quite a different context, as we know.

Prash: That’s a very interesting question that you have asked, because a lot of people come back to me and say, oh, so how did you choose this or what made you think about this one? So, when we had conversations about this, I needed to have a tool that I could use to measure students at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year to check. So, what could work in that? So, I started to investigate language testing regimes, and the book covers all of these aspects about the history of all of those, and what I found was tests such as TOIC test, TOEFL test or IELTS test, Cambridge examination language tests, they all went back to the CEFR, which is the Common European Framework of Reference for languages. The CEFR was where all these other tests got ideas from, and they built onto that. So, I said, instead of using, let’s say, a TOEFL test to do the testing instead of looking at IELTS test to do the testing, why not look at how the CEFR can be used in this context. And then I understood that the CEFR has got so many different sorts of scales for different aspects.

So, if you’re looking at writing, my study looked at academic writing. It had about six different ways of looking at writing. And because it comes from because it comes from Europe it had gone through about 2,000 different descriptors before it was designed. And that’s when I said, okay, if there’s so many languages in Europe, and they have looked at 2,000 different descriptors to come up with this standard one. This could now be suitable for the Fijian context because of the different languages that are being used in this context. And what I found is you already alluded to is that in the South Pacific context that had not been used. The CEFR was very new in that aspect, and the IELTS test is an ongoing thing. So, in Fiji or in Australia the IELTS test is used generally for migration purposes for scholarship purposes. But that’s not what my target audience was my target audience was looking at higher education students and trying to align their educational needs. And this particular framework, the descriptor. So, there are 6 descriptors to this. A1 and A2 indicate that the students are basic users. And then you have B1 and B2, which say, the students are independent users. And then you have C1 and C2, which say, these students are proficient users. And that’s exactly what we wanted to find out from the student when they entered the university, what kind of user can we classify them into? And this really kind of matched into that. And when we it was so nicely utilized when we looked at it at the end of the year we found improvement they had made on the scales.

So, the 120 students who set the test at the beginning of the year, what I found was that 62 of them were at A1 level. And 49 of them were at A2 level. Both were at basic user levels. So, throughout the year, what we did was we had writing interventions for academic writing to improve this skill, because that’s the lower end of the scale, and we tried to see how we can improve on that. So, they had paragraph writing activities that they did. They had some rewriting activities. They worked on academic writing. There were three interventions, academic writing, essay, writing, that they did, and at the end of the year, when we checked how the cohort had done so from the 120, 12 of them moved from A1 to A2, but the significant change that came was 90 moved to B2. And then that’s becoming an independent user. Interestingly, 8 of them moved from A2 at the beginning of the year to C1 as proficient users. But of course, this is just to do with their writing skills. We’re not looking at anything else, so we can’t say, well, very brilliant. They are very proficient speakers. But no, no, we’re just looking at the writing part, so I don’t want to excite the audience too much.

Just to see it function in in that aspect was really something good that came about. So, I sent the book to the Deputy Prime Minister in Fiji, and he has written a blurb in the book as well, and it was good that it’s getting to people who make decisions to see where I can come in, and how I can contribute to that conversation as well.

Hanna: Congratulations! That is fantastic result, isn’t it, that the Deputy Prime Minister not only has read your book but has endorsed it.

Prash: Yes, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Hanna: So, my last question, which is for those of us who are, you know, interested in researching in this space for emergent researchers, for students, linguistics and applied linguistics, and also language teaching students. What is the kind of key findings that you would like us to take away from your exciting and wonderful new book?

Prash: So, I’m trying to share and not over share, so that readers would want to read the book, and I don’t want to give too much away. What I would say, is like the book has connected three different spaces. That is the higher education, language testing regimes, and the grounded theory methodology. So, it’s an interconnection of these three different things that have come about in this book and I think readers and emerging scholars or established scholars like yourself. The book will give you how grounded theory can be applied into language, education, research. When I started looking at grounded theory methodology, it was mostly used with clinical psychology, or it was used in the sciences to get their data. And I read through Urquhart’s book, Cathy Urquhart. She has got a fantastic book that looks at grounded theory methodology. And the book was my bible, because it showed you the steps that you need to do to arrive at the data, how you collect information, and then how you analyse and interpret the data.

One of the [thesis] examiners praised the methodology of the research and said that he didn’t think that theory could be utilized in this way in a language testing or language education, research, so to say, so that that I thought was a very good compliment. I think leaders will then be able to use that space as well, coming towards higher education because they have been findings of different spaces in that language, medium of instruction, language policy. And this here, this is trying to get the student to say, well, what do you think we can do to improve? Or what is the problem that you are facing at this particular juncture. and what I found with the the university students, the way they talked about coming into lectures, and not being able to understand the delivery of the lectures. They said we wanted to just leave everything and go out. We couldn’t process the kind of language that was coming through to us, and then to start writing that seemed a bit challenging for them.

However, one of the things that I think scholars will be happy to hear, I asked the students. I said, what did you think the language test that you did, what did you think about the academic writing interventions which I monitored throughout there. The students gave very honest feedback in that aspect. Some of them said it was very challenging, which is fine, because you want to know what they felt. Some of them said that they found it useful because each had a task that they had to do. And then, obviously, I was giving feedback to them on how they would improve on the next task, or that particular task. They found that very helpful. They said the writing in interventions they found it to be helpful because essentially academic skill, academic writing skills is not just a 1 1-year thing or not a one semester kind of thing. Students go on to the 3 year or 4-year program, but they need to be able to submit assignments. They need to know how they go about making an argument or supporting a discussion. So, this whole book kind of outlines how helpful this were to them.

So that’s one of the things I could say. The other aspect that the students brought about was not only having teachers but having motivated and passionate teachers. That also really contributes to how the students perform in the class. And I mean, I don’t want to boast here, but I’ll tell you. I used to teach the academic English course many years ago, and I would have a lecture at eight o’clock, and there were 700 students in this class. One day I noticed the attendance would be 90%. There would be 90% students in the class. The students told me that, sir, the subject is very boring, but you make it so exciting that we show up. We want to know, and they would not feel sleepy in the class, because I would deliver the language academic English in such a way that it sorts of hit them, that why, they were in the class, or why they were doing that. So, I think if that filters down, or if that tickles down to primary school teachers or high school teachers, and they are that they know they don’t just there, because in a fortnight they’re going to be paid. They they’re there because they make a difference to the life of the student that it takes them. You know, from primary to high school, from high school to university, and it’s just going to be good in that aspect to look at it. So those are the key things.

Hanna: I think that’s fantastic place to end Prash! That’s so important. And I think it’s lovely also, for I know some of my students who are English language teachers or teachers in training will be listening to this. And I think that’s a really lovely point to end on which is that, yeah, it’s not just about having teachers, of course, although, of course, that is of paramount importance. But it’s about having passionate and motivated teachers. And that’s very impressive to get 700 students to turn up at 8 o’clock in the morning. I think that speaks. That’s a great compliment for any teacher.

Thanks again, Prash, and thanks very much to our audience for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the language on the move podcast because we talk about fantastic topics like this. And our partner, the new books network to your students, colleagues and friends until next time.

Migration separates families

I am a second generation migrant from my mother’s side. When my grandfather migrated from the former Czechoslovakia to Australia after World War 2, only one member of his immediate family was a fellow survivor, his older brother. The brothers were desperate to get out of war-torn Europe and start a new life, but there was a catch. They weren’t able to go to the same place. While my grandfather received permission to emigrate with his young family to Sydney, his brother received the same from the United States. Despite already losing their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in the war, the brothers were unable to prevent losing each other. After they emigrated, although they wrote letters, and spoke on the phone very rarely, they never saw each other again.

Today in Australia where I live and work, cross-border communication is likely to be by phone, not letter and for the majority of migrants the greatest barrier to seeing family is likely to be economic. Many of the participants I spoke to for my research into mixed language couples living in Sydney frequently spoke to family members by phone, sometimes even daily. This is significantly more affordable now than it was fifty years ago. However, migrant families continue to be separated for many years and often permanently. The border closures during the pandemic were a very difficult period for migrants unable to travel to spend time with family, particularly aging parents and relatives. So how does communication maintain family ties across borders? And how can we as scholars engage with this topic, theoretically, methodologically and ethically?

A theory of communicative care

I was recently lucky enough to speak to Dr Lynnette Arnold about her new book on this topic, Living together across borders: communicative care in transnational Salvadorean families. In the book she describes how communicative care both sustains and resists dominating geo-political forces which maintain continued migration from El Salvador to the United States across multiple generations as solution to meeting the economic needs of the nation.

In the book Arnold details an analytical approach based on the concept of  communicative care. By this she means that the everyday communication which families engage in is an enactment of care, and that this care is “the most fundamental way that transnational families maintain collective intergenerational life in the face of continued, and seemingly endless, separation.” (p.6) She uses the term convivencia or living together, to describe the culturally specific practices she observed in her data collection with transnational Salvadoran families.

I found communicative care a particularly useful lens for examining the links between what are sometimes referred to as local or micro practices and processes and their connection to larger macro processes such as the economic and political systems governing nations. An example of this is the role of communication in maintaining the flow of global remittances which support the Salvadorean economy as well as the individual families. In this sense the book is a powerful tool for researchers who are interested in both a nuanced exploration of language practices in context and in the transformational power of research to speak back to hegemonic forces such as borders, global capitalism and neoliberalism.

Participants as researchers: researchers as participants

This study took a two stage approach to collecting the data. Starting with a lengthy ethnographic study of a village in El Salvador where she lived and worked as a young women, Arnold built up relationships with two transnational families. These families then formed the research participants for the second stage of the study, where four months worth of telephone conversations between migrant and non-migrant family members were recorded.

This stage centred the agency of the participants themselves by training them as data collectors of the recorded phone calls between transnational family members. In the interview, Dr Arnold discusses how she also employed research assistants from El Salvador who recognised the social identities – as well as the language varieties – of the research participants. This facilitated their contributions, both as accurate transcribers of the audio data but also as cultural informants in the data analysis process.

The ethics of working with migrants and language issues

For those of us working in the field of migration and language, how can we behave ethically in a space where there are profoundly unequal power relations, the stakes are high and global tensions continue to bubble around issues of migration, borders and citizenship? This is especially true for scholars like me, who are not first generation migrants themselves and thus speak from a relatively privileged position.

According to Arnold, we can start by asking what is language doing? How does it connect with the relational aspect of people’s lives and the geopolitical contexts they exist in? Thinking critically about the role of language in creating social reality allows us to become informed advocates for linguistic diversity. It enables us to think about issues of access, inclusion and ultimately social justice.

I’ll leave you with one example from the book’s conclusion which I found particularly compelling due to my own research interests into the links between language maintenance in migrant families and second language education. Arnold makes the point that one way we can support transnational families to maintain networks of communicative care is to change existing educational language policy “which all too often functions as a tool of state-sponsored family separation by pushing the children of migrants towards monolingualism in dominant languages like English” (p. 171). Instead of turning bilinguals into monolingual, language in education policy must be guided by what migrant families themselves need, which is the communicative resources to maintain ties across borders. This includes a recognition of the linguistic variety in migrant repertoires, which extend way beyond standard languages.

Reference

Arnold, L. (2024). Living Together Across Borders: Communicative Care in Transnational Salvadoran Families. Oxford University Press.

Related content

Piller, I. (2018). Globalization between crime and piety. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/globalization-crime-piety/
Weiss, F. (2012). Christmas in Nicaragua. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/christmas-in-nicaragua/

Transcript

Hanna Torsh: Welcome to the Language on the move podcast, a channel on the new books network, my name is Hannah Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in linguistics and applied linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Lynette Arnold, Dr. Lynette Arnold is an assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and we’re going to talk about her new monograph living together across borders, communicative care in Transnational Salvadorian Families published by Oxford University Press. Welcome to the show. Lynette.

Lynnette Arnold: Thank you so much. Hi, everybody! Ola.

Hanna Torsh: Can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book?

Lynnette Arnold: Sure! So my book, Living together across borders, explores how members of transnational families find ways to live together despite being separated across borders. The families I work with are from a small rural village in El Salvador, with migrant relatives living in urban locations across the United States. I am not Salvadoran. I do not have Salvadoran family members. So you might wonder, what is it? How did I get involved in this? And my interest in this topic really emerged from 2 different but interrelated personal experiences.

I spent 5 years living in El Salvador from 2,000 to 2,005 during the years when most people are in college. I was living in El Salvador, and this is a really eye opening experience, because I got to know many young people, my age, who had grown up during the Salvadoran Civil War that happened in the 19 eighties, and in getting to know them I learned a lot about the involvement of the Us. Government in perpetuating this 12 year conflict through immense financial support of the Salvadoran military and training Salvadoran soldiers in brutal, scorched Earth tactics. All of these, the ways that us support had really caused a lot of harm in El Salvador, and that was an eye opening experience for me to realize that this big gaping hole in my education as a Us. Citizen not understanding something so vital about my country’s history and involvement in the world.

So that was one inspiration was really to help my fellow citizens better understand the human impact of us foreign policy. Our involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War was a direct cause of the widespread emigration that El Salvador shows still today. And so that was kind of one piece was recognizing that I hadn’t learned these things and wanting to share them with my fellow citizens.

The second experience was sort of more deeply relational, and it has to do with the ways that the relationships I made in El Salvador continued. When I moved back to the United States to go to college. When I moved to the US. I stayed in contact with people in El Salvador through phone calls, and I suddenly found myself part of this transnational network of folks in El Salvador, their relatives here in the United States, who I had met in El Salvador, but who had since migrated, and I started to get really interested in what was happening in those phone calls and all the kinds of complicated things that people were working out on the phone across borders. At the same time, at that moment in my life I was navigating a kind of growing realization or separation from my own family of origin. I had left at that point permanently left the Christian Commune where I was raised, and where my family still lives, so I have a very different reason for separation. But I was navigating in my own life how to be family with people that I wasn’t living together with. And so, though I juxtaposing those 2 experiences, got me really interested in how people do family at a distance and the role of language? So that was really what brought me then to the topic of the book.

Hanna: That’s so fascinating. And just a quick follow up question. You know you talk about living there, living in this rural village at a time when sort of other people were at college. How was that experience of language learning for you at that age, in this very remote community, especially when we consider today how almost how difficult that experience is to have with the new affordances that we have in terms of technology and the reach of technology.

Lynnette Arnold: That’s such a great question. Yeah. So I went to El Salvador, knowing very little Spanish. I had been raised in a kind of bilingual culture with German. So I had German as kind of a heritage language, not for my family, but from my community growing up and understood a lot of German, but went to El Salvador, so I knew how to be bilingual. I didn’t know Spanish. I took 2 weeks of intensive one-on-one Spanish courses in the capital.

And I told the guy, the instructor like this is what’s going to happen. I’m going out to this rural village by myself for the next 4 months like I need to be able to survive in Spanish, and I had a dictionary, and I had a grammar workbook and then I went out into the village. I knew one other person in the country who spoke English, who I saw maybe twice the entire time that I was there. So it was really immersion. I was living with a family. I was trying to figure out how to, you know, support the English teacher who didn’t really speak English, you know, like all of these things while also learning the language. So I think obviously, having already been bilingual, helped me like my brain, knew how to learn language, knew that, like learning, the grammar was helpful, and that then I could be like, oh, that person just used the subjunctive! That’s what it sounds like in real life, you know. I remember having experiences like that.

I think the other thing that came out of that experience for me was that I was really learning the language and the culture at the same time. So it wasn’t that I was learning these abstract grammatical forms, but I was learning how to communicate in the language as a young woman, so that was the other, like the gendered, and age the fact that I was, you know, a Us. Citizen, a foreigner. All of those things I had to learn how to use Spanish in that very kind of accurate, contextual way. And still to this day, when I speak Spanish, I find myself realizing how much that has influenced the way that I speak Spanish today. People are not familiar with my accent. I have a very Salvadoran accent. The vocabulary that I’m most comfortable with is like about farms, and, you know, growing food and animals and raising children and not, you know, academic things. And I think that experience was certainly also influential in shaping my research trajectory and the project of this book, because it made me think a lot about the really close connection between language and culture and the sort of social work that language does.

Hanna Torsh: Yeah, wonderful. I think a lot of our audience can resonate with that experience of finding their voice in another language, and having to learn how to be an identity in that language, and then perhaps shifting to another space, and having to then relearn how to be in that language.

So moving on to your book in your book, you talk about two really important concepts, and I’m interested in hearing what these mean. I think our audience would like to hear about them, too. So the 1st one is this idea of convivencia, or living together, and the other one is the idea of communicative care. Can you explain what these 2 concepts mean, and how you use them in your research and in the book.

Lynnette Arnold: Sure I’ll start with convivencia, because it’s the title of the book. So convivencia is two words; con together, and vivencia, live, so live together, made into one word in Spanish convivence as a noun form. It can be all these different things. It’s really a flexible word. People use it a lot when talking about social life. In El Salvador in general, it’s just a very high frequency word. Convivio is another related noun, that is a word for a gathering. Many different kinds of gatherings can be called convivios.

So, in addition to using the word convivencia a lot. People also spend a lot of time carving out opportunities for convivencia or living together what we might call at least an American lingo hanging out just spending time. So it’s a very common thing in rural Salvador culture to see people sitting around on the patio, kind of intermittently talking. Maybe somebody is doing some husking of corn or some other kind of work is happening. Children are in or out, in or out but that sort of spending time together, talking, hanging out, not doing a whole lot of anything is a really important part of the culture. Sometimes convivencia happens in more formal ways, like big gatherings for birthdays, or, you know, religious celebrations or things like that. But they can also be much more informal.

So when I this really sort of caught my attention in the context of the book project, because when I talk to members of transnational families both in El Salvador and in the United States. Many of them mentioned that they missed the ways that they used to convier with loved ones. So they missed that kind of living together when they were separated across borders. So I heard that truth coming out over and over in the interviews, but at the same time from my research perspective, I was seeing these families still doing a whole heck of a lot of conviviando. Even if they weren’t in the same place, they were still finding ways to live together. So I knew that from participating in the transnational networks that from sort of a research perspective, convivencia was still happening, but families were telling me that it looked different than it did when they lived together.

And so, as part of the kind of participating in these transnational phone conversations. I really started to realize that my intuition about where a lot of this living together was happening was that it was happening in these phone calls and these transnational conversations were a really crucial way that families were still able to live together when they couldn’t be in the same place. So that’s what really got me into thinking about what’s happening with this communication and communication away as a way of being together, living together when you’re separate.

So that seems like, if we want to put a label on it, we could call that the more Emic framing right the more the way that people in the community would understand what’s happening here. Convivencia is probably the label they would put on it. Communicative care is really my term and is kind of more informed by my theoretical considerations. I’m a scholar of language and communication, and I’m very interested in how language acts in the world and what language does. And at that time I had been thinking a lot about and reading a lot about feminist scholarship around care and feminist scholars, writing about care often describe it and define care as the labor or the work that we do to keep ourselves alive as a species. So it’s the work that allows individual and collective well-being and survival.

And I came to feel that what was happening in the conversations was families doing precisely that work through language? So I decided to come up with this idea of communicative care as a theoretical frame to capture what I what I thought the work was that was happening in the Conversations. I also wanted to label for the fact that I saw that care and communication were entangled in some very complex ways, and so I wanted a framework that could capture all of those different ways of entanglement. So I decided the communicative care would be a capacious way to talk about that.

Hanna: So just for our audience to understand, you have talked about those transnational phone calls. So maybe we could just take a step back and you could just describe the actual data that you work with in this book, so that so that we have a context for that.

Lynnette Arnold: The data that I’m working within the book primarily are recordings of transnational phone calls. So they are dyadic, mostly dyadic conversations between a person in the United States and a person in the El Salvador who are related to one another in some way. I have interviews and other kinds of ethnographic data that I use to sort of triangulate. These were conversations that were recorded over a 4 month  period. So in many cases I could track how something developed over time. The conversations involved, although they were dyadic, many different dyads within the family. So I could track how different dyads talked about different issues.

So that’s when I’m saying that the families are doing a lot of this conivencia, this living together through conversations, I was able to see that in recording, these phone calls and paying really close attention to what exactly they were doing when they were talking to each other on the phone and why they spent all of this, you know, effort, money and time to have these regular phone calls with one another.

So I felt the need for a framework, because I wanted something to capture the different ways that language and care were connected. So it was very clear to me that language is something that makes other kinds of care possible. So think about many kinds of care that we all engage in on, you know, part of our everyday lives. Language is absolutely central to those for these families. The money that immigrants send home is probably the form of care that most people associate with transnational families. That is not possible without communication. There’s a lot of communicative work that goes into making those remittances, those economic transfers happen. But beyond that I wanted to show. And I show in the in the book that language enacts care. Language is something that does itself do care work. It’s a way of maintaining and forging the kind of relational bedrock that is the foundation of all other kinds of care. So that was really important to me to draw that out. That language is not just facilitating other care, but that it is itself a kind of care. And then also, as we know, scholars of language know, language is always making meaning. So as it’s facilitating remittances. And as it’s enacting relational care, language is also a way that people. I used to create meetings about like what kinds of actions, when carried out, by which people count as care and which things don’t count? So all those things are sort of entangled and happening at the same time. So with a communicative care perspective, I was really trying to come up with a theoretical and analytical way to approach that and fully grapple with what was happening with this communication. And the book demonstrates ultimately that communicative care.

This approach really sheds light on how transnational families are able to forge convivencia and live together across borders, through language when they can’t be at the same place for many years at a time.

Hanna Torsh: One of the things that I found really fantastic about reading your work is that the approach you took to data collection, this very inclusive, very participant centered approach to data collection. Could you tell us a bit about how you approached the methodology in your work, and why?

Lynnette Arnold: Sure. And I want to answer this question in a way that will be helpful to emerging scholars who are maybe formulating their first research project or anybody embarking on a new research project. Because, as we know, things often don’t go to plan when we’re doing research. In fact, they often tend not to go to plan but really, if my research had gone to plan, I would not have the book that I have.

So that’s the kind of message here that things can go differently than you imagine, and still be great. So my project started off as a very traditional ethnographic. Sort of like an ethnography of communication. In that tradition I did a lot of participant observation in El Salvador and in the United States with family members, spending time in their homes, eating meals with them, hanging out on the weekends, trying to go to their workplaces, going to their schools. Just kind of spending time understanding what was happening in their lives. And then I conducted interviews with members of families in both countries. And I had that, you know, interview data that I recorded and started to analyze, and, you know, have some other work about narratives that were told in those interviews, for instance.

And then I was planning to do a longer stint in El Salvador of sort of more intensive ethnographic research, and really tracking what was happening. Over an intensive period of time in El Salvador. But then things beyond my control happened. Things got very dangerous in El Salvador. So this was in 2,014 which was a time when there was an intense spike in organized crime and gang violence, especially targeting young people. And there was a whole crisis of unaccompanied minors coming across the Us. Mexico border in relation to this and the area where I do. My research is kind of on a line between the territory of two gangs and got incredibly dangerous.

So my advisor felt like it was really unsafe for me to go back and spend a long time in El Salvador, and she was probably right. So I had to pivot and I decided to pivot to a project that was much more focused on the transnational communication.

So I ended up focusing on the phone calls and deciding to work with two extended families that I had. I knew the most members of and had the deepest relationships to. And I worked with them to record phone calls that they made across borders over a period of 4 months. I based on the interviews I had a sense of from the interviews how much people spent on phone calls per month, and I gave families this kind of stipend per month to cover the costs of the communication during the time that the recording was happening, and then I also hired research assistants in in each family. These were in both cases young people living in the United States because I was able to get to them and train them. So these were young people who were more tech savvy, who were literate and who crucially didn’t have tons of family obligations like they weren’t parents yet and so I was able to go visit them and train them in how to use the recording technology. I used a very, very simple earpiece recorder that you just held the phone up to. I had a little carrying thing for the recorder, so people could still walk around on their cell phones. These were all cell phone calls while having a little MP. 3 recorder on the kind of in their holster

And the family decided amongst themselves which calls to record. And then they didn’t necessarily have to pass all the recordings on to me. They could delete data if they wanted to. I still did delete some things that were passed on to me that I felt, especially when they were pertaining to people’s immigration situation. That I felt like legally, I didn’t want to be responsible for having that information. So I just deleted those recordings.

So that was the sample that I got was the things that families, you know felt okay about me having. And I was still surprised. You know they still felt very from my experience, participating in these networks, very authentic conversations. And there’s conflict. And there’s, you know, disagreements. There are things that happen in these calls. So I I would definitely say it’s not a entirely representative sample in that. Maybe, like the most extreme cases of conflict were not recorded, or whatever but I didn’t get the sense, either, that people were like consistently, always on their best behavior on these phone calls, for instance, it felt like they had. You know they were kind of in the habit of doing this.

Hanna: What did you then do with the with the recordings that you had. How did you go about analyzing that data?

Lynnette Arnold: Yeah. So this is another thing that many of us who do language research, you know, end up with hours and hours of recorded data, and we want to look at it closely, and it gets really overwhelming. So one thing I did that I learned from my undergraduate advisor, Mary Bucholz, was, instead of transcribing all my data. First, st I did a 1st pass of doing what’s called an in what she calls an index, which I think, is a good term. So you’re making a time stamped kind of account of what is happening every minute or so. 30 seconds, depending on how fast moving. The data is in the call, and that is a good way to listen through your data. And just what is in there, what’s happening. Get it in your head right in a way that maybe transcribing especially. This was obviously in the time before AI. But I know now lots of people are using AI to do a 1st pass on transcription. It’s not getting the data in your head in the same way. So working through an index is really good because it makes you start to see the patterns so indexing allowed me to do some qualitative sort of coding of what were some communicative patterns that I started to see what were. Think, what were things that people were doing over and over and over and over again? And decided to focus on transcribing, then, examples of those things that were happening a lot, and you’ll see if you read the book that there’s a chapter about greetings. That’s a thing that happens a lot in these phone calls. And by an example of greetings. There is a chapter about negotiating remittances which is also a thing that’s probably the thing that happens for most of the time.

And then there’s a chapter about remembering in conversations kind of reminiscing in conversations, which was one that I hadn’t, you know. It wasn’t 1 that I went in looking for necessarily but jumped out at me as something really powerful that was happening in these conversations. I was really fortunate.

During my graduate time, when I was collecting and preparing the data to be able to work with undergraduate research assistants. All of whom were Salvador of Salvadoran descent, which meant that they had the linguistic capability to understand this variety of Spanish I think at one time I tried to work with a Mexican descent student, and they were just like this. Spanish is so different from the Spanish that I’m familiar with. I don’t think I can transcribe this accurately. So it was a lovely, lovely opportunity to also extend mentoring towards you know, 1st generation largely Salvadoran American students who were an amazing help for me as well in doing the transcription, and they are all named in my acknowledgements.

Hanna Torsh: Excellent. Yeah, that’s that’s a real challenge for us here in Australia, because we are so linguistically diverse. Having that match with research support in terms of linguistic repertoire.

Lynnette Arnold: And I think even in doing the transcriptions we would meet to talk about the transcriptions. But our conversations would diverge just from the actual transcript. And they would say things like, Oh, my mom. Salvi, mom, this is a thing my mom does all the time. Or, you know, topics of conversations. They were all parts of, you know, transnational families as well. So it was really enriching, not just in the transcriptions, but also in helping me to recognize that what I had in my data was something that was broader than just the two families I was working with.

Hanna Torsh: In your book, you talk about the contradictory ways that digital communication has impacted on the families that you worked with, but also on transnational and cross border family communication generally. So could you tell us a bit about what you found out about these contradictions for your research participants, and any examples that you had would be also fascinating to hear.

Lynnette Arnold: I think there’s kind of a couple of possible answers here. And I think I’ll go with. There’s like a technology answer. And then there’s like a social life answer. And I think we maybe can do both. The technology answers that we often assume that like newer technology, more inclusive, like video technology is better and that people will default to using technologies that are more complete. So if families have access to video calling, they will use video calling, for instance, research with transnational families beyond mine. But just within the field of transnational family research has found that video calling can actually be very emotionally challenging and costly for people to engage in, and that sometimes people dis prefer, even if they have access to videos, that they prefer other forms of communication. So I argue in my work that for these families, phone calls are a real sweet spot. Because they don’t require as mo as much emotional investment. I mean, imagine yourself as a parent or as a family member separated from your loved one for years at a time. You see them on screen, and you see in real time that they’re different than they were when you were there with them. So it’s a real physical visceral reminder of the passing of time that you’re not together. On the phone that is a little bit more held at bay. But you still have the intimacy of somebody’s voice, and you can really hear all of those cues of emotion and all of those things that are so important, especially in the sort of delicate communication that families are doing often on the phone.

Phone calls are also very accessible. So I think that’s another thing to think about in terms of technology is like, and the family is who within the family can use a given technology and phone calls for the families I worked with were maximally inclusive because preliterate children can still talk on the phone and also in the families I worked with elders, and the families were often not literate or had very low literacy levels, and certainly did not have technological literacy to know how to navigate something more complex than a phone call. So phone calls were really a sweet spot, both kind of relationally and what they allowed but also because of their accessibility to everybody within the family. So talk a little bit about that in the book. Why, phone calls in this era of all polymedia. I felt the need to talk about that. It also had to do with the fact that smartphone technology hadn’t really entered El Salvador quite yet. Now it has but I still talk on the phone to my comrade. The mother of my goddaughter in the El Salvador we sell each other voice memos on Whatsapp. So you know again, you see that kind of preference for the voice communication over over video, even though it’s now more possible than it used to be.

And then there’s another answer that has to do with what digital communication affords for these families in terms of their relationships. So as I’ve been talking already, on the one hand, communication is absolutely vital. It’s the way that families are able to live together and sustain their relationships across border. It’s a means of emotional support. It forges the groundwork for this ongoing economic support like remittances. So it’s really positive things for families. But we also know from transnational family scholarship in general that digital communication for families can be really charged. It can lead to people feeling surveilled or micromanaged, especially children and women in families.

In my book, I found that kind of the the negative consequences or effects of digital communication were the ways that it perpetuated divides between migrants and non migrants within families. So if you think about a transnational family, you’ve got this big division of people living in different countries, and the migrants are perceived as those with access to more resources, and the non migrants as those with less access to resources who need help from their migrant. This is kind of a pretty broad generalization that holds for most transnational families, I think.

And what I found in my research was that this divide played out in communication, so that in family conversations there were very different communicative expectations placed on people depending on if they were migrants or non migrants. So, for instance, non migrants needed to learn that when they needed remittances they shouldn’t just ask. They shouldn’t just say, Hey, can you send me 100 bucks?

But they should tell these elaborate stories about family life in El Salvador, in which they would embed conversations of somebody else complaining to somebody else about needing money. So this very like indirect, layered way that people learned a very specific way of doing like a remittance request right?

And then, if you zoom out to think at the kind of macro level. This kind of communication is sustaining and shoring up migration right? It sustains the transnational family form. It keeps the remittances flowing so from a nation perspective, it makes migration succeed as an escape valve, as a means of generating revenue through migrant migrant remittances. Right? So in that those ways, we can see that the communication is really shoring up some inequalities right at the interpersonal and kind of the global level.

Even as it’s a lifeline for these families. So both of those things are true at the same time. And I just want to kind of end by saying it isn’t the case that communication only re in reinscribes inequalities. There are. There are ways in which communication also opens up space for people to resist and create, create new ways of doing things.

Hanna Torsh: Yeah, I’m I’m really keen to hear if you could tell us about some of the participants that you talk about in the book, and some examples of those ways of maybe either kind of perpetuating those inequalities or resisting those inequalities.

Lynnette Arnold: Yeah, I think I’ll go with the resisting examples, because they’re more interesting to me.

Hanna Torsh: Sure.

Lynnette Arnold: So one thing that’s really interesting about digital communication is that it opens up ways for young people to participate in family communication. So some transnational family research shows that young people are actually really get involved in family communication because they have to be the tech. And they’re let the tech help, you know, and then they’re there helping grandma with the laptop or whatever, and then they participate in the conversation. In my families, I found that the kind of a polymedia kind of situation where there were phone calls, but also other kinds of technology happening. Between family members opened up some conflict. So in this one case, some young men were being raised by their grandparents in El Salvador, and their dad was in the United States. He sent them a laptop. They opened Facebook accounts. They started messaging their dad on Facebook. Their grandparents are not literate. Their grandparents are not tech literate. They have no idea like what’s happening when their sons are on the laptop and so the sons use this kind of private channel of communication to complain to their dad about some stuff like teenagers do right.

Hanna Torsh: Yes, I do. Yes.

Lynnette Arnold: As they do and the dad was just hearing from them about this, and so then he called his parents, and, you know, kind of scolded them, taking his son’s word as like you know the truth rather than realizing that it was just kind of one perspective on what was happening. And this resulted in a lot of conflict within the family that then got resolved by multiple phone calls from multiple people, in which people then navigated and kind of smooth things over, and he eventually called and apologized to his mother for not understanding the situation more clearly. But so there there was a case where young people were using technology to kind of have more agency right in what’s going on in the family and try to pressure, you know, put some weight on the scales in terms of things coming out in the way that they wanted it to come out. The other example that I I like to talk about and think about is about gender. So we haven’t talked about gender yet, but it is a theme throughout the book. We know from feminist work that women around the world do the lion’s share of care in pretty much every context you can think of, and that is also true in communication.

I do have cases of men doing amazing communicative care work, a lot of like really touching emotional communication between men. So this is not to say that men are not doing the work. But one thing that I find is that women get asked to do kind of the most onerous tasks. So if a report about oh, the migrants sent money for the cornfield, and there was a flood, and all the corn seedlings died, and we need more money so that we can replant women get asked to have that conversation, even though agriculture isn’t traditionally feminine domain. But they get asked to kind of communicate that information and take on that less pleasant communicative burden. But what I found in some cases was that sometimes women were then using that that they were put in this kind of conduit position to migrants. They were using that to kind of carve out more space for themselves within family decision making. So in one instance, the father in El Salvador had sold one of the family’s cows. He had not consulted with his daughter, his eldest daughter, who lived with him in El Salvador about this decision, and she was kind of mad that he hadn’t consulted with him. But then he this was the same corn example. He needed her to talk to her brother in the United States, his son, and, you know, get some money for the corn so he came over at one night and asked her to do that the next time her brother called to ask him for more money so that they could replant I happened to be there when the brother called, and she didn’t say anything, but instead she told all about the cow, and how her brother had, how her dad had sold the cow without consulting with her, and how it was a poor decision and a waste of the family’s resources and blah blah, and that she should be consulted. So really getting a kind of word into the migrants. And then, when her Dad came back the next day to see what had happened. And what if the money was coming? She was like? Well, I didn’t tell him about it, because, you know, if I’m not consulted on things, I I can’t. You know I can’t communicate. So she really kind of used her. She was in this pivot Lynch kind of PIN position communicatively, and she used that to try to press for a like more decision, making power within the family in these kind of agricultural domains that traditionally, in traditional kind of salvadorange roles would not have been within her purview. So those are the kinds of things, and I think there were more of those things happening than I saw where people were using women especially. We’re using communication to do this kind of torquing in the mechanical sense of gender roles and kind of incrementally shifting things a little bit. So all that’s to say, I think that there are.

There were other ways to in which people were using communication to resist. So I in my, in my account, I wanted to kind of resist. One size fits all characterization of what was happening here, and really capture the complexity of communication as a wonderful lifeline for these families, but also as reproducing inequalities, and also maybe sometimes allowing for resistance, especially to gender them, and generational hierarchies within families.

Hanna Torsh: That’s wonderful. It’s a great example it kind of reminds me of also the the kind of dual role of women in households where they have to do the bulk of the domestic labor, but that also affords them a certain amount of power over some decisions. And so it’s often hard to for them to give it up, because that is then their only power traditionally, in the in those sorts of family situations. So I think that’s a yeah. And it’s really interesting, the way that intersects them with the digital world. And how the same sort of negotiations are taking place. So like, Okay, well, if this is my job, then I am going to try and carve out more agency for myself in a system where I have less agency, you know a patriarchal system. So yeah. Oh, look I I would love to talk more with you, but I am have to jump to my last question. And and and make it really open for you. I I think one of the one of the things that you talk about in your book is how you’re essentially interested in, in, as you say, providing a much more contradictory and nuanced picture of particularly transnational migrants when they have been traditionally particularly, you know, in in public discourse, cast as victims and and and really there’s been a lot of focus on the negative. So I guess I would like to ask you, you know, what? What did you? What are the key? Things that you would really like? The key findings. You would like emerging and established researchers in linguistic diversity and in transnational migrants, to take away from your wonderful book.

Lynnette Arnold: Thank you. I’ll start with a linguistic diversity piece. And I just the I cannot say strongly enough that we cannot. We can’t study linguistic diversity without also be thinking, thinking about what language is doing. So linguistic diversity cannot be separated from the function of language. What people are doing with their communication and the context in which they’re doing those things really shape what linguistic diversity does and what it’s made of. So it’s really vital to think about. One of the main things that people are doing with their communication always is relational. They’re doing relational work of all kinds, with family members, with bosses, with everybody. Right? We’re constantly managing relationships through our language. And so we need to think about that. And also the kind of geopolitical context within which those relationships are playing out. So this may get to your question about language maintenance. Actually, because I wanted to talk here for a little bit about the children of migrants in the United States. So I noticed in my research that the children of migrants in the Us. Were largely excluded from transnational communication.

This was not the case for children in El Salvador, who participated quite actively in and were trained actively trained to participate in the transnational communication, as I show in my chapter on Greetings. That shows how kids learn even before they’re verbal. They’re taught how to do these greetings.

So why does that happen? Well? Linguistic diversity is part of an answer to the question. Relatives in El Salvador tended to perceive the children of migrants in the US as not being Spanish speakers, and therefore they perceived the language barrier that kept them from communicating with grandchildren, nieces, nephews.

Whatever the relationship was, there are, of course, language barrier issues here. There are educational issues at play. Many of the children in the United States did not have access to bilingual education in Spanish and English, and obviously the social dominance of English, certainly reduced Spanish fluency for some, at least, some of the children, but many of the children who were perceived in El Salvador as monolingual English speakers would actually be characterized as bilingual. They just didn’t speak Salvadoran Spanish. They spoke US Spanish, which is a variety of Spanish that has large has been in contact with English right for a long period of time. And so it’s grammar. Its vocabulary is shaped by English and so I think that the unfamiliarity of the children Spanish was perceived by some relatives in El Salvador and this dialect difference was perceived as a as a full on language, barrier, and led to to children being excluded.

So the linguistic causes of children’s kind of exclusion from family communication were really complicated. But it’s also important to recognize that their exclusion from this communication was also influenced by non linguistic, relational and structural issues. So when families envision their future generations down. You know they envision the future of continued emigration, of continuing. So today’s children in El Salvador are tomorrow’s future immigrants. And so it was really essential for children in El Salvador to be heavily socialized into being members of transnational and families to being committed to these cross border relationships, because they would then be the ones to carry those seeds with them. When they traveled the children of migrants are seen as kind of less predictable sustainers of transnational families like well, they just really weren’t sure what was going to happen with these kids.

They weren’t sure they were going to stay committed to the family, so they were less pro. Those relationships were less prioritized in the kind of communicative care work that families were sustaining across borders. The relationship with children in the in the Us. Just wasn’t a priority. Because of this way of thinking about right and this way of understanding their future makes a lot of sense from a geopolitical perspective. It’s heartbreaking.

But I think, unfortunately, realistic reading of the inequitable global distribution of resources, and that for families to get access to those resources. People are gonna have to keep migrating right? So what this example shows us is that the kind of linguistic, the relational, the geopolitical, are all like really tightly entwined with each other. So I just want this example to sort of be a call for us as researchers of linguistic diversity, to be able to think on all of these scales at once, and to think about their interconnections.

And for me, thinking about what language is doing in the world for people. What people are doing with their language is a way to get at that and the lens of care has been a really for me a very capacious lens that has allowed me to think about the relational and interpersonal and the geopolitical kind of within the same framework and their interrelationships. So that’s really my big takeaway for kind of language researchers. Is to think about what language is doing?

I think I have takeaways that are kind of more broad for people living in a global world, which is all of us. Now. And I think I want to especially speak to readers who may not themselves be migrant to listeners right who may not be migrants themselves may not be the children of migrants themselves. And just say that it’s really important for us to understand the lived experiences of migrants. They are so integral to maintaining our societies today. But their lives do not stop at our borders. You know they have connections that go, you know, far beyond what we can see in terms of what we think is happening with migrants and what their lives are like. So this is just kind of a call for all of us to think about, how can we establish relationships with the migrants that are in our communities? And start to think about? You know what’s happening in their lives? Beyond, you know, our immediate communities, our immediate national context.

To think about also the policies and that our governments are passing their foreign policy, their immigration policy, and how that’s affecting lots of people far beyond our national borders through these transnational family connections. So again, that’s kind of going full circle back to where I started of like wanting to educate us citizens about El Salvador. Just to say that there’s so much more that we need to be aware of as you know in thinking about migrants and the roles that they play in the world. And really, yeah, wanted to make sure that they ultimately, I think what I call for my book is that migrants? I want a world where people can have full self determination over how they choose to live as a family. And that is not true for most of us in today’s world. But it is really not true for transnational families. They do not necessarily want to live in 2 different countries for decades at a time, with no chance to visit each other. And so ultimately. That’s where I end. The book is just to say, like, What can we do? How can we work in our own individual ways? For a world in which people have more self determination over care in their own. Of all kinds, including communication.

Hanna Torsh: Oh, thank you so much. I think that’s such an important message and a a great place to finish, a great message to end with. The idea of self-determination for families. And yeah, absolutely reminding us that this we might find all of this very fascinating. But of course, this is not something that any family wants. It’s kind of decade, long separation. And I really love the idea of imploring non migrants to think about migrants, and to that idea of not finishing their lives, not ending at the borders. So yeah, thank you so much.

We’d like to thank you again for talking to us about your work. We will put a link in the blog to the book. Thanks everyone for listening to us today, and if you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5 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. Thanks. Again, Lynette.

Lynnette Arnold: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a real pleasure to talk to you today.

Hanna Torsh: Thank you until next time.

The conversation addresses community and heritage language schooling research and practice, and our guest’s long history of important language policy research and activism, as well as the interconnections between the two.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Reference

Cruickshank, K., Lo Bianco, J., & Wahlin, M. (Eds.). (2023). Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges, and Teaching Practices. Taylor & Francis.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 29/05/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dr Torsh: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

I’m very pleased today to say that my guest is Joseph Lo Bianco, a foundational figure in linguistics here in Australia. I could say many things, but I will introduce him as Professor of Language and Literacy Education at Melbourne University. Today, we’re going to talk about his new book, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. It was co-edited with Ken Cruickshank and Merryl Wahlin and published by Routledge.

Welcome to the show, Jo!

Prof Lo Bianco: Thank you very much, Hanna.

Dr Torsh: Now, for those who don’t know your very impressive body of work or, perhaps, are new to this field, could you just start by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Prof Lo Bianco: Ok, well thank you for the invitation. I’ve recently retired from the position at the University of Melbourne in Australia which I’d had for 20 years. Prior to that and even during that period of time at the university, I worked in language policy studies. I started off my academic life as an economist. I was very interested in the integration of migrant populations, particularly migrant women.

I worked in that focus of work in Victoria. But I became less interested in it when it started not to focus on culture and not provide any kind of focus on people’s language. I retrained as a language person and educator and linguist, and then I became slightly uninterested with the descriptive tendencies of a lot of linguistics. I’ve always really been interested in public action probably more than anything. So, I started to research policy around language. I became actively involved in those things myself directly.

Then, during the late 1970s, early 1980s in Melbourne, Victoria and other places, I was very involved in activism around these things. There were some political changes which meant that I was invited to put my money where my mouth was. I was basically demanding that governments do better for minority populations and they said, “Well, let’s see what you would do.” So, I was invited to draft policies. I did write these, and I became extremely interested in the traction of ideas.

The policies were accepted. The National Policy on Languages in 1987 was the peak. Really, it was the first multilingual policy, some people say the first one ever anywhere, but certainly in English speaking settings. Then I became very heavily involved in the implementation of this. I developed a very acute interest in problems of making change real. This moved me away from academic research considerations. I had always loved research, but you can’t do so many things at once. So, I became very actively involved in that.

Because the policy was adopted by government and launched and funded, there was a lot of interest in it internationally, and the early successes that we had. Languages started to boom. We had extraordinary growth in research and interest in translation and interpreting and in the approach that we took in the policy, which was comprehensive.

Most policies, if you look at them, on language tend to be just the policy on behalf of the official dominant language of a country. Country X protects Language Y. That’s typically what language policies do. Or they tend to be some concession to a minority population, but they don’t go very far.

We were trying to do very ambitious things, you know. Think about public discourse, how people spoke to each other, inclusion of minorities, social cohesion, but also justice and rights questions. Naturally, a lot of opposition grew up against this from people who didn’t like what we were trying to do. So, the politics of language became my life, really, for many years.

Then, because of what we were doing, it got noticed by people like Joshua Fishman in the United States, who invited me over there. I’ve never done what I promised him I would do, actually. At one point he said I really should document this as an experiential process, and I will do that in my retirement at some point as a reflection on how to do language policy from the inside. Even though language policy is something that is studied by applied language scholars, they still tend to theorise it a lot. So, its practicality is lost, I think, and I want to reinject that.

But anyway, this was noticed around the world, and I got lots and lots of invitations to work in different places, including with international organisations like UNESCO and UNICEF and the Council of Europe. So, I started to do assignments on invitation in Southeast Asia – Samoa, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu. And in South Asia – Sri Lanka for the World Bank, Myanmar for UNICEF and other Southeast Asian settings. Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines. I went to many assignments in Europe.

So, this has been my career since then, working on practical language policy things, which always raise questions of literacy and language study but also the linguistics of these problems. Who describes what language is? How do they do them? What happens with the work that linguists do? How does it get taken up or not get taken up within practical contexts? That became my obsession.

Recently, we’ve just submitted for publication a book on Tunisia that I’ve done with a colleague. We’ve looked at language, ideological discourses. Arabic, French, the two kinds of Arabic, English and Berber and other language issues there. So, it became a kind of reverberating set of discussions. I’ve had a very wonderful career of working all around the world in different settings on practical problems.

In some places, we’ve produced significant change. In Thailand, we produced the first language policy in that country that wasn’t just about the protection of the national language. In Myanmar, we did 45 public discourses around language rights for minority populations, the learning of the main language by minority populations, which is often also a grievance. This kind of thing. I did a trilingual policy in Sri Lanka in 1999 and submitted this and worked with the President’s office on the implementation on it. Then it got thwarted by conflicts there.

So, I’ve had this wonderful opportunity and in this part of my career I want to think about putting down some reflections on this experience.

Dr Torsh: Oh, thank you. That’s so interesting. I’m thrilled to hear that you’re going to write a reflection about that process of putting together the National Policy on Languages because that’s something that continues to be important in the work of myself and other scholars in Australia, so that’s really exciting.

Ok, but we’re here to talk about your new book at the moment, so congratulations on that new edited book. Before we talk about it, the book is called, as I said, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. For our listeners who aren’t really across the community languages sector in Australia, could you just give us a brief overview of it? Obviously, it’s also connected to your own policy activism, and how did that happen? How did it come about that it was established in Australia, and how has it changed? How has the policy focus and the sector changed since that time?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it’s a long and convoluted story, and I can only tell a tiny fraction of it. Suffice to say that in really nearly every society that I’ve worked in, I’ve visited and worked with community language schools in Nagoya in Japan, these kinds of processes of a community generating institutional structures to support and maintain and transmit their languages to their children is really universal.

In some cases in some societies, it’s heavily repressed, and in other societies they’re actually encouraged. But the phenomenon is practically global, I would say, and it tends to be ignored. Most of what focuses the attention of researchers in relation to language education is mainstream or official or dominant schooling. We’ve had this third sector, you might call it, third sector schools. The two sectors other than that are the public government school and then the independent or private schools, and in Australia there are large Catholic school sectors. So, they’re the two other sectors and then you have these parttime schools in the main, although some of them are also full time, that are schools whose primary purpose is the transmission of language and culture to immigrant children, but also increasingly indigenous children in our society.

Now, traveling around the world and the kind of work that I’ve done that I described before, I noticed at meetings and other places there would be community representatives, or even academics who would come and say, “Look, I’m working with Chinese schools in Malaysia” or something or other. And that can be mainstream government schools or that can be the parttime schools.

So, with Ken and Merryl we decided that we would hold an international conference to try and do some proper comparative work. This had never really been done. And we had this very successful conference in Sydney, much affected by Covid and restrictions on travel, but nevertheless it was a very successful conference. And we realised there’s a huge unaddressed agenda there, well we suspected that. So, we thought we’d produce a volume that started to map out the territory. There’s a little bit of a taxonomy that I started to produce in my own chapter, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done into this.

But also, what needs to be both theorised and then developed in a practical way, is what do we want of these schools? If we’re adopting a pluralist position where we believe in language rights, what role would we hope for these schools? Then, in practical terms, what could be done?

Now, in my policy work, right back to the really early 1980s, late 1970s, I worked for government in Victoria. We promoted all sorts of things like cooperation and integration between these schools. Sometimes these schools use the premises of a mainstream school on a weekend or after hours. So, we used to do very practical things. We did this in 1981, you know, facilitating the writing up of contracts, of meetings between the two sectors. Often, the teachers are not trained, or they can be trained teachers in another system but it’s not recognised here. We would facilitate collaboration.

You can imagine the kinds of problems that would be there of a practical nature. Of people not understanding each other, even mistrust. Sometimes much worse things than that. All of these things were there and in spades, which is a colloquialism of saying in large quantity. So, we started to do lots of facilitation of this.

In 1982, actually from your university, Macquarie University in Sydney, Professor Marlene Norst, who has sadly passed away, she was commissioned partly from some of the pressure we had been putting on the federal government, to do a survey of these schools as a preparation to some kind of systemic support for them. She produced a wonderful report (which) unfortunately got repressed by forces who didn’t want this report. It wasn’t just a survey. She produced a really interesting guide to what could be done. She went beyond the brief in a very helpful way.

There’s always resistance to any kind of progress. We know this. Unfortunately, her work got marginalised. But I promote it a lot because I liked her a lot. She was a good scholar and tried to do a great thing, but it’s got ignored.

I took that up in my 1987 National Policy on Languages and promoted it, and we got some extra funding for these schools, so they started to be incorporated into the system. So, this is what we wanted to do in the book, is to think, “Well, what do other societies do? Are they marginalised? Are they given municipal level support, but not state or federal government support, depending on the governance structures in different countries? Are they actively repressed? Are they underground schools?”. This happens in very repressive systems. This can be very dangerous to the lives, actually, of people, to engage in this kind of activity. So, I think there’s a call for solidarity with people who struggle against repression, but also to learn from systems where more substantial work is done.

In some systems, government and public education, or mainstream schooling, only supports prestige foreign languages and these community languages tend to be marginalised and they might get some token support or acknowledgement or given a license to continue to teach, but they’re not actually encouraged. And all the community language teaching and language maintenance, as distinct from second language learning, would happen only in those marginal settings.

Well, in Australia and many other countries in the world we have a much more integrated approach. Our mainstream schools teach multiple languages, including many community languages. Many students study the language at school, at mainstream school, that they might also study in an after-hours system. So, I think, and we can go onto this with another question, but I think we need to think imaginatively and in a future-oriented way about cleaning up this mess, as it were.

Having principles that start from a different basis, not a toleration basis, but a basis of learning, for having a different way in which all of these – I mean, children just have one brain. The learning goes on in that same one brain, and if that one brain is shopped around different systemic structures, those structures ought to get their act together rather than the child and the family having to continually have to adjust to different forms of provision.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, great, thank you. I think for those who are outside of the sector and aren’t that aware of it, can you just explain what that discontinuity actually can look like for those who haven’t experienced it?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it can look like a child studying whatever language it happens to be, let’s say Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, in a school in Sydney during the week. They might do a one- or two-hour program during the week, so it’s not a huge commitment of time. And then, because their family might come from Malaysia and be an ethnic Chinese family but they might not speak modern standard Chinese, or Mandarin, in their home, the child goes to a Saturday morning school run by the community, or an after-hours school two days a week. And sometimes that after-hours teaching happens in the same physical premises as the week program.

Now, there’s a lot of issues here. One of them is about the coherence of the pedagogies that are used in the two places and the wastefulness of the lack of any collaboration between the two systems. Wouldn’t it be much better if it were possible for this to be maybe not seamless, that would be an ideal aspiration, but at least less jagged and disruptive if it were coordinated in some way, pedagogically as well as in other ways. If there were shared knowledge among the different teachers about individual children.

It would have to start from a child’s focused look and also be informed by good pedagogical language learning processes and also of the affordances. Different systems afford different possibilities. Imagine a highly literate mother tongue speaker teaching on a Saturday or Sunday but who isn’t necessarily a trained teacher. This might be a perfect input for colloquial, continuous communicative language. Then you might have a more structured grammar-centred approach in the school system. These are just some ideas that I’ve had that we could work on, and we’ve put them into action in some places.

But I feel like systems, governments, run away from this. It seems to them like an immense problem, a very messy problem. But as I argue in my chapter in the book and at the talk I gave at the conference, I think they’re going to have to deal with this at some point because of the radical changes that are happening in the world of communication and learning anyway that are going to overwhelm all these structures. We’re going to be forced to think about these things differently. I always think if you can predict a change happening, prepare for it. Start talking about it. Get intellectuals in to start theorising what’s involved. Literacy scholars have got a lot to contribute here, and people who think about the semiotics about the representation of language with communities.

I love partnerships which involve these kinds of interactions. I’ve always found them very productive, and I’ve always tried to set them up. That’s what we did in Myanmar (with) all those dialogues.

Sticking with the community language schools which, in some countries, I have to clarify, are called heritage language schools, or heritage languages, and I and other people have resisted that encroachment of that terminology here. Not because it’s bad terminology but because typically in English, I think, “heritage” has a connotation of something that’s in the past, like a heritage façade of a building. Or the heritage which might be the historical memory of a community. I’m not saying that it’s inevitable that it has that connotation, but I think it often does. Whereas a “community language” suggests that it’s something that is present and vibrant and vital within an existing alive community now. So, I’ve preferred it from that point of view.

In the book, we say “community/heritage” because obviously other people use the other terminology. And of course, we can inject new meaning into terms. We don’t have to be defeated by past ways in which words work. So anyway, there’s that kind of issue there.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, that’s great, thank you. I’m now rethinking my use of “heritage language” in my own work, so that’s great to think about that.

I’m really interested in this argument that you make in your chapter, as you said, about changes in our understanding of what literacy is. So, you have a chapter in the book which is based on a talk that you did at the conference. The chapter, which introduces the volume, is called “Community/Heritage Language Schools Transforming Education: Beyond complementary, more than integration”. And you’ve already said systems need to grapple with this idea that you can’t have these two sectors not talking to each other, that it’s not in the interest of the learner. You argue that in part because of this idea of the way we understand literacy is changing as a result of technology, of the fourth industrial revolution.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that, for our listeners? I realise they have to go read the chapter, but just a little bit of a summary for them, to draw them in?

Prof Lo Bianco: It’s an immense topic, of course. If you look at any organisation that has worked in literacy for a long time, you can’t fail to notice that they have adjusted their definition of what it is. One organisation whose definitions I have studied is UNESCO. Of course, they are a very important organisation in this because when they were founded, from the very beginning, they were given the world mandate I would call it for kind of a global agenda for literacy in the world. That’s how I’ve described it in a publication.

If we look at how they understood literacy in the late 40s, early 1950s, and compare it to how they understand literacy today, it’s cheese and chalk. Two very, very different notions. Teachers and researchers have done this. I mean, there have been many movements in this. One of the most important ones was the new literacy studies of the 1990s which started to inject social understandings of literacy and move away from a pure and psychometric or cognitivist approach. Of course, it’s moved on even a lot since then.

So, what we know is that what is taken to be literacy has expanded beyond simple capacity to read and write a language to multiple other dimensions of what’s involved in being a literate person in a society that penalises people who are not literate. This is the really important social consequence of this, that we have the social cost. It shouldn’t be like this, but it is. The social cost of low literacy even understood in traditional ways of understanding literacy is very, very high. There is a high risk of unemployment. It’s no accident that a really high proportion of prisoners in jails are low literate people. There are multiple explanations of this. It’s not a predictor, it’s a consequence of the social punishment.

I’m very committed to this because both of my parents were very low literate people. Neither of them had any serious formal education. And yet, they were both very intelligent people. So, we can’t make any kind of connection between intelligence. This is an enormous discourse, and I’ll just leave it planted there, but what I did want to say about this is that what’s changed in our understanding about literacies from the 50s to now has been this social dimension.

What’s changing increasingly now is a massive technological injection in which multimodality is the principal characteristic of literacy. I mean, anything we do online cannot be reduced to language-centred semiotics. It involves manipulation of multiple semiotic resources that are not just linguistic anymore. Colour, movement, image – there’s any number of things that go into a very complex meaning-making practice. This is going to continue to accelerate in what some people call literacy 4.0. My colleague Professor Lesley Farrell at the university uses that term. (This) mirrors industry 4.0, the 4^th industrial revolution, which is not just computers but artificial intelligence beyond computing as a practice that people are in charge of. It’s absurd in a way, to call them machines anymore, but machines which learn and can learn independently generate their own kind of knowledge and then project that into the space of meaning. So, we’ve got something really radical going on. That’s going to change how language works.

I think one of the reasons we have a crisis in language study today, and this is very true, sadly in English speaking or dominant countries in particular. We have the biggest struggle for language teaching and learning that we’ve had for many years. People misunderstand the technologies as obviating the need for language study. That’s because they’re very reductionist about what’s involved. People used to take literacy in this very reductionist simple way. They take language to be very reductionist, and they tend to think it’s just basic communication. So, we can inject that stuff with voice retrieval. You can ask your little pen to say something in Japanese and you’ll hand that to someone and it’ll say “good morning” in Japanese.

This is completely possible. It exists. There are very sophisticated technologies that will even do lip syncing, so that you’ll look like you’re speaking the language when you take a video of yourself speaking German or Italian or whatever it happens to be. So, this is going to be a battle that we have, to persuade administrators and other people that language learning is not this. This is forms of communication. Let’s welcome them. Let’s adopt them. Let’s embrace them. We can’t deny them. They’re there. They’re going to grow. Elon Musk wants to inject probes or whatever they are, implants in people’s brains. All of these things are going on at a very rapid rate, and some of them might be ethically very, very questionable. But I can’t see any way that they’re going to be stopped or slowed down until we get on top of what they mean for people.

So, we have to understand them. What they mean is that people’s learning will be occurring in places other than in schooling. It will be self-generated and generated by outside forces including machines. It’s going to be massively challenging to everything that curriculums, official curriculums, require and prescribe in schooling.

This is going to create, I think, for indigenous populations, and especially for dispersed, small populations – I worked with the Tigrinya community in Melbourne many years ago with a very small population in Melbourne but who had other members in Brazil and in Africa and in Italy and other places. You can aggregate numbers in communities with the technologies that you can’t do otherwise very easily. So, there are multiple benefits that we can point to. Individualisation, aggregation, personalisation, learner control and pacing. There’s lots of pedagogical impact that a learner can govern in this.

The challenge for schooling is absolutely foundational, almost existential I would say. Therefore, we have to embrace it. In my chapter, and I only just make a small dent into the problem, we have to think about a new way to imagine learning and start from there. The school systems that currently are the principal institutional ways of delivering learning have to be redone, and they have to be seamless. Teachers have to be managers of the educational experiences of learners. That’s how I call them. Rather than the exclusive input to the learner. So, they have to understand the principles of the acquisition of language knowledge.

I see a bigger role for professional language specialists in this, to interact with practitioners directly, but also curriculum writers and others. We have to rethink these things. And then communities who own community or heritage language schools and who are the repositories of the communication in these languages, you know, the Arabic, Tamil, Vietnamese and Greek in Sydney and everywhere else in Australia and other countries. A large part of what’s involved in learning is interaction with speakers, so we have to make sure that there’s seamless connection there.

So, I’m just touching on the outlier of this, but that’s what I’m trying to do with this, is to get people to imagine more creatively, pushing ahead, but not that far. These things are imaginable within a decade. Many of them exist now. Instantaneous translation, voice to script, I mean all of these things challenge all the separations we’ve ever had. What is literacy going to be when it’s possible to have no division between spoken language, signed language and their representation in a written form or some other form?

They’re really important questions to ask and to be asked by people who are interested in multilingualism.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, so much to think about. And I guess this kind of question that you sort of answered, but I want to make sure I understood and maybe you can elaborate a little bit. For mainstream teachers, this is the question you pose at the end of your chapter and that somebody asked you, and I really was interested in this. What can mainstream teachers do in order to support the learning of community languages? It sounds like you’re saying they are also a really important part of this process, of this existential crisis that we’re seeing in education when it comes to both language and literacy and what they mean.

Prof Lo Bianco: I’m often asked this question by mainstream teachers when I give talks. As I said before possibly, I’m speaking to Indonesian teachers in Victoria tomorrow. One of the anticipated questions is exactly this even though their specialist teachers of Indonesian are mainstream teachers.

When you look at students who drop out of language programs – I did a study once in the western suburbs of Melbourne in working class schools. I interviewed and discussed and did subjectivity analysis with large numbers of kids. I published it in a book in 2013 out of Multilingual Matters. One of the things that we found (is that we) classified students according to whether they were going to continue or drop language study. We classified them as “waverers” or “committed” kids and then we worked heavily with the waverers to think about what was it that was going on in their minds.

One of the things that came up repeatedly is something that mainstream teachers have got an enormous amount of influence on, and not just the language teacher. That is the attitude or ideology that is attached to the practice of language teaching and learning.

We found that lots of students had imbibed a negative, sometimes quite racist construction of what they were engaged in. This was not coming from the language teacher. This was coming from systemic imagery and systemic, often not even openly, hostile – anyone who’s had children or raised children or been around children, little children I mean, knows quickly that they are semiotic sponges. They pick up signals from multiple sources. They know when something is half-hearted. In the book I called it half-heartedness. When schools are just half-hearted about something, kids get it. They know it’s less important than something else. You’re not actively saying that learning Japanese or Italian, the two languages in that particular volume, is less important than doing something else like sport. But I see the way the school is arranged, and I can work out that’s exactly what you’re doing. One of the girls I interviewed said this to me. She said, “They don’t really, really mean it. We can tell. So why are they pretending?”. So this is something mainstream teachers can do, be enthusiastic supporters.

I helped introduce a CLIL program in a Japanese school where the boys, it was a boys’ school in this particular case, had had a mostly grammatical or formal syllabus. They were doing fine. And as soon as the Japanese teacher started to teach content that was about the Fukushima earthquake, really interesting material in which the kids had to research online and the teacher had to teach technical language ahead of time so they could manage to read these complex texts and stuff like that, the first thing that happens is pushback from the mainstream teachers. Oh, geography, that’s my space. Or, oh science and physics, that’s my space. You’re just the language teacher. That was all resolved beautifully when the teachers understood that the purpose of the CLIL was for the language teacher to enrich the content in the Japanese program. It wasn’t the exclusive teaching of the science or geography. Then they started to see the benefit of additional focus on the content they were teaching as specialists. So, the collaboration was brought about.

These conversations between the mainstream and specialist language teachers are essential. Mainstream language teachers can either choose to be an innocent bystander, an active supporter or at least an encourager. Again, it’s this same one mind that these children have. One mind, one heart that gets shipped around to different classes. The multiple messages that they pick up about the choices they need to make are significant. So that’s something I would say in relation to that question.

Dr Torsh: Great, thank you. Yeah, I know that study well. I’ve used it in my own research. It’s fantastic. I think that it’s really helpful to teachers, and I know we have education students who listen to the podcast, so really helpful to know what they can do.

That was really my last question, but before we wrap up, I just want to know – you’ve talked a little bit about your next project on Tunisia, which is a fascinating context. I’m excited to hear about that. What else is up next for you?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, that one’s in press, or it’s under review. I’m working with a dear colleague in Sri Lanka. I’ve lived and worked in Sri Lanka, and my colleague and I are putting together a volume on bilingual education there. Bilingual education means, typically, English plus either Sinhala or Tamil. That’s a project that will come out next year. I’ve got a book coming out with some colleagues from Hong Kong Uni on supporting learners of Chinese. There’s a lot of other work. I’m much less efficient than I used to be because of illness and old age, both of which have made me slow down.

But I really, really want to go back into the theory of language change and deliberate language change. Language always changes. Everyone knows that language is a dynamic process and changes. But language policy and planning is deliberate language change, and even deliberate language change can happen unconsciously. But planned deliberate language change, which is what I call language policy, and as I said, Joshua Fishman, when I first met him, said that I should document this, a kind of insider account of policy writing, and that’s what I want to devote some time to.

But unfortunately, I was trained as an academic in an era in which you made a distance between yourself as a scholar and the subject matter. I know I haven’t done that for years, but that’s still my predilection. I have to overcome that a great deal to speak personally in this way in writing. I need to do that. That’s something I ought to do. I’ve got a huge amount of documents from, like, 45 years of engagement in language policy, agitation and writing and stuff, and criticism.

You can’t just criticise if you want to – I mean, a lot of language scholarship is dominated by a critical disposition these days, especially sociolinguistics. That’s been important to uncover and expose a lot of injustices and hierarchies in the world. But I don’t think we should overstate the agentive power of our disciplines to really affect change. You have to engage with processes of concrete change, and you have to not set aside criticism, but make criticism productive. I find that, unfortunately, a lot of critical scholarship, maybe not a lot, some critical scholarship is not so productive. If you want to be productive, you have to engage with people whose views are different from your own. You have to compromise on things. You have to find conceptual categories that unite differences.

When I was working in Myanmar and south of Thailand where there’s been a conflict for many years in which language and script and bilingualism are implicated, it’s really really indispensable. It’s not just a methodological, I think it’s an ethical requirement to adopt a different set of understandings and practices. Criticism is something that has to be understood as being particular to some purposes and not others. So, I do think that there’s too much mindless criticism. Too much of a disposition to begin activity with a critical air.

Having said that, I don’t want to be assumed to be anti-critical. Criticism is critical to civil life, to decent life, to social improvement. I just think that there are moments of productive participation in shared creation of new things in which criticism can be a problem. I’ve seen that to very bad effect. I’ve seen it from people who have been trained just in the critical tradition who don’t know when to stop.

So that’s something I’d like to do. I’m going to think about that a lot. I haven’t written enough about that. I read other people’s writing on this and I’ve learned from it, but I feel as someone who has tried to write language policies and be engaged with concrete productive change and not just analysis or critique, that that’s something I want to think about more carefully.

Dr Torsh: Oh, that’s a really wonderful place to end, I think, on that. What do we do beyond criticism, especially for emerging scholars and research students? So, fantastic. Fantastic.

Look, I would love to keep going, but I have to wrap up. So, thanks again, Jo! Thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend our Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time!

Long-time Language-on-the-Move team members and friends Hanna Torsh and Alex Grey got to sit down for a formal interview

Here are Language on the Move we know that linguistic diversity is often seen through a deficit lens. Another way of saying this is that it’s perceived as a problem, particularly by institutions and governments.

So what does good governance in a multilingual city actually look like?

This was the key question of Dr. Alexandra Grey’s keynote speech at the Linguistic Inclusion Today Symposium held at Macquarie University on December 14^th 2023. I was fortunate to interview Dr. Grey the day before her presentation and to ask her the following questions:

1. What was it about the topic of good governance in a multilingual urban environment such as Sydney that sparked your interest? Why is this an important or relevant topic to research today?
2. How did you investigate good governance in multilingual urban environments? What were the main challenges and opportunities when you carried out this research?
3. What did you find out and why does it matter?

In the interview Dr. Grey presented in her clear and engaging way why we should care about this topic, what some of the key challenges of doing this research during the COVID-19 pandemic were, and how this research into linguistic diversity is connected to social justice in a participatory democracy.

Happy listening to this latest episode of Chats in Linguistic Diversity!

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick; added on March 06, 2024)

Dr Torsh: Hello and welcome to this Language on the Move interview. My name is Dr Hanna Torsh, and I’m interviewing Dr Alexandra Grey today as part of our Chats in Linguistic Diversity. I’d like to start by acknowledging that the land on which this interview was carried out is the land of the Wallumattagal people of the Dharug nation whose customs have nurtured this country since the Dreamtime, and I’d like to pay my respects to any indigenous listeners listening today and to acknowledge that this always was and always will be aboriginal land. Dr Alexandra Grey is giving the keynote speech at the symposium held here at Macquarie University hosted by Language on the Move entitled Linguistic Inclusion Today. She’s a chancellor’s research fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, and she’ll be very familiar to many of our readers as she writes frequently about her work which lies at the intersection of law and linguistics. Today Alex is going to be talking about her work on urban multilingualism in Australia, and we started the interview when I asked her why this topic was important to her and how it became something that she noticed.

Dr Grey: Look, Hanna, it’s important not just to me but to researchers who are still researching and were in this space before me who were pointing out the fact that Australia has, in fact, since the time of settlement and particularly in recent times been a very multilingual society with a lot of individuals who speak more than one language and across Australia a great range of languages. From various times over history what those languages are changes – aboriginal languages, Torres Strait Islander languages, migrant languages from different parts of the world and different varieties of English. My own background is in both law and linguistics, so I’m always interested in how governments respond to and represent linguistic diversity. The project I had just come out of was about a really quite legislative approach, you know, a government that saw law as something that should be used in relation to languages and multilingualism, and that was my PhD in China. In the Australian context that’s not really the way things are done, but I was still interested in this underlying reality of multilingualism and thinking, “Well, how does our government do in that situation, and does it do things that could do better, you know? Does governing in a in a good or a better way rely on acknowledging or somehow actually adapting to this linguistic diversity?” And then there was a very particular catalyst. My father was working at a local council in Sydney, and he brought home (because he just knows of my general interest in posters) that they’d made, had designed, had laminated all about when bins were collected and other sort of, you know, services that local governments provide in Mandarin. And I thought to myself, “Ah!”. You know, that’s clearly not the only local council in Australia doing this, but equally not all local councils are doing that, and in the past local councils were not necessarily doing that. What’s driving that sort of decision-making in government? And so I started thinking to myself, “ Well, is that coming just from the grassroots or from pressure people are putting on local government or requests they’re making in that sort of interactive politics, or is it coming from some sort of rule or some sort of rights-based approach that is, if you like, more top-down that’s directing decision-makers to think about linguistic diversity?”. And I proposed a project about essentially that question to Sydney law school. They had a sort of, as it turned out, one-off postgraduate research funding opportunity, and they liked this question too. So I took it up, and I framed it really around that bigger question that I’ve just articulated – what is the framework of rights or rules that might be influencing decision-makers within Australian governments, so at state and federal level, to tailor their approach for a linguistically diverse public? And that’s still a bit of a broad question, so I had to focus on specific jurisdictions, and I focused then also on mass communications from government departments. Of course, there might be other ways that governments respond to that linguistic diversity too, but in a way, thinking back to those local council posters, I was still thinking, “Well, you know, there’s not a lot of documentation or research for investigation going on but clearly they’re changing practices with those mass communications, so let’s have a look.”

Dr Torsh: I’m really interested in what you said about the different approaches between China and Australia, and out of your PhD research what were some of the key differences that you can think about between those two different approaches to multilingualism?

Dr Grey: Look, I can probably say three things, and these are all structural things, and so I will preface them with a caveat that those structures don’t necessarily work the way you might think, or they work differently in different practice. But three structural differences: First of all, there are officially-recognised minority languages in China. Not just one, but many. Secondly, there is a constitutionally right to use and develop minority languages. The Australian constitution says nothing about languages, doesn’t say anything about English either, says nothing about languages at all in terms of recognition of official status or use or language rights. The third difference is that in China, linked to this idea of official minority language and official minority groups, there are counties, cities, prefectures, regions which have nominally, at least, a legal autonomous structure. And that is not unique to China, and it’s not even unique to, if you like, similar countries. It comes out of a Soviet model. For instances, I understand also Spain had developed autonomous regions in the 20^th century. So there was, if you like, a mode of thinking that was not unique to China. But it’s definitely not something that was imported into the Australian context. And there are reasons for that to do with culture and our culture of, if you like, adherence to English as a dominant language, maybe a sense of the need for a unifying language and a unifying ethnicity. But there are also legal structure reasons. Australia is a federation, so each state has a very high level of legal autonomy, if you like, anyway, within a federal structure. And so an autonomous region doesn’t sit well within a federal structure.

Dr Torsh: So interesting. Okay, so, you went about this project looking at these sorts of structural issues in mass communication in multilingual urban Australia. How did you approach it? It’s a huge topic, as you said. So, what sort of approaches did you take to doing that research, and what were some of the challenges that you encountered, and maybe some of the opportunities as well?

Dr Grey: I think the first challenge was my approach, which was a bit chaotic (laughs). I went into the project attempting to gather data, attempting to do lots of things on lots of fronts, and as it turned out I really needed to sort of step back and spend more time doing things slowly and planning. My approach in general was to, first of all, look at legislation on the books. Australia has very good public records of acts of parliament, or what we call legislation, and so along with a research assistant who later became my co-author, Ali Severin, who I know is a teaching colleague of yours, we started assembling legislation and doing an analysis of words using search terms to find laws that dictated a choice of language. And then we had to go through them to find was it in terms of individual interactions, say, mediated by an interpreter, or was it the sort of public communications that I was focusing on? And my plan was to do that jurisdiction by jurisdiction in NSW, the commonwealth, but also say Victoria, Queensland, etc. And at the same time, I wanted to, but these are only two points, I was going to say triangulate, but at least compare (laughs) empirical data that I was to collect of actual public communications practices. So website posters, government announcements, government radio slots, all these sorts of things, and I had gone somewhat down the road of starting to do that when Covid struck, which was, of course, the major challenge. And I clearly remember well sort of pivoting the research because, you know, from my perspective at least, a benefit of Covid for this project is that the government, at the state and federal level, started to take multilingual communications more seriously. It started to be discussed in the news media, and we started just to see a lot of government mass communications about Covid rules, about where to get testing, and then as we rolled into 2021, vaccination campaigns and so forth. So just a time of a lot of mass communications from governments. So once we had sort of adjusted to that scenario and it was safe to at least go out of my house and do some field work, you might recall, Hanna, we did this together on a bitterly cold day in the middle of 2020. We went to a couple of Sydney suburbs that, on the census data, have high rates of multilingual households, and we started recording the signage that we could find, both commercial and government signage in key public spaces and the language that it was in. And so that turned out to be one of the key forms of empirical data that I collected that I collected, and then I also, along with Ali, did research on government mass communications on websites, which we had planned to do anyway and we had already started looking at websites in 2019 across a number of NSW government departments. Again, with Covid I could focus, drill down on a number of NSW and federal government health websites in particular that were really important when we were all sort of locked at home with the internet as the main source of information. So I ended up gathering a whole subset of the empirical data that was just about Covid communications, but I also then continued to do the analysis of legislation. Covid interrupted a lot of things, and so I didn’t end up having the time to do every jurisdiction as I’d hoped. But, with Ali, I ended up doing NSW and the federal jurisdictions, so looking at acts that control choice of language, and then to sort of marry with that Covid-specific data set, I then did an extra limb which I had not originally envisaged, which was to look at international law, and then international organisations’ commentary about a rights-based approach, particularly in regards to the right to health and linguistic non-discrimination in the enjoyment of human rights, and sort of looking at guidance from that space as another supplementary form of, if you like, top-down impetus for decision-makers, whether that guided them and obliged them to make multilingual government communications.

Dr Torsh: I’m so interested in the idea that there was this obligation because one of the things that we found, and I remember that too when we were going around and looking at all the signage, it was very interesting and for me it was the first time that really a lot of those language, because I usually read English, were really so salient in communities that we walked around. So, what struck you during that time about some of the examples of governments doing multilingual communication about Covid well or not so well?

Dr Grey: Yeah, two things struck me. First, in article after article in the news you would read, you know, quotes from community organisations, all sorts of sources saying, “Look, there’s a problem with multilingual communications. It’s not reaching us. We’re not being taken account of. This was translated terribly, etc.” And the government response would always say something like, “We’ve produced 700 million pdfs in different languages.” And already in some of the data I had been analysing pre-Covid, I had been seeing with Ali that information in languages other than English might be on websites but very hard to find for various reasons. And we later came to the conclusion that that website architecture had both a monolingual logic and was primarily designed for an English-speaking intermediary to somehow find that material in other languages and share it with the appropriate people. And so that just became more and more clear through Covid, that, you know, there was a problem with the government almost, I won’t say complacently, because they were putting a lot of effort into some of these multilingual communications, but somewhat misunderstanding the uptake or the accessibility of these resources. And so the fact that these resources existed or that the number of these resources was increasing, was not really addressing the problem that people were raising. So that’s something that really struck me. The other thing that struck me, particularly when we did the physical fieldwork together, was not only that you saw that translating into the public space some of these freely-available government posters and so forth were just not appearing in shop fronts, but instead we saw that a lot of local businesses in some areas, and in some areas local councils, were stepping in and producing their own not handwritten, totally ad hoc signs, but you know, designed professional-printed, multiple copies of their own Covid information signage. And to me, that was really interesting that these were the players stepping into this space. Local businesses, often in consortia, and local councils. And I started digging a little deeper, and it’s research that I’d like to pursue a lot more if and when the time presents itself, but local governments seemed to have a better feel for the linguistic needs of the community and be more responsive, but not in all cases. Like, you know, the day we were out and about in Strathfield, in Sydney, Korean, Mandarin clearly present on signs made by the local council. In neighbouring Burwood, just a few kilometres away with equally high rates of multilingual households, and we’re talking over 70% of households in that area in the last census having a language other than English spoken, nothing from the local council at all. Is it a resourcing question? Is it just a blind spot? Is it one particular decision-maker who says yes or no? What is it that leads to these very differential outcomes?

Dr Torsh: Yeah, it’s such a good question, and I think we are seeing since the pandemic more and more awareness of the need for multilingual communication because it literally means the difference between good and bad outcomes, and we saw that during the pandemic, of those communities being, unfortunately, subject to higher rates of disease and death because, in part, of that communication gap.

Dr Grey: That communication gap can definitely cause those sorts of serious health outcomes, but it can also cause the policing, or if you like, higher incidences of getting slapped with a fine. And that’s not because particular communities are more willing to bend the rules or less respectful of the police necessarily. It might also be because the types of information with the specific, really up-to-date rules – those who mainly communicated in English through certain media channels that certain people cannot read or do not have the habit of accessing or perhaps even knowing are there – that is an area that I think we’ve seen even this year a reversal of a huge number of on-the-spot fines given by police. I think there’s more to look into the question of how the differential linguistic reach also led to differential policing.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, so fines that were issued during the Covid pandemic, for international listeners who might not be sure, yes during the periods of lockdown we had on-the-spot fines for all sorts of things, like being out of your house when everything was really shut up to if you were out and you were a non-essential worker, those sorts of things. And we’re seeing those being challenged in the courts and being reversed at the moment.

Dr Grey: So, I mean, that’s an area that, you know, as someone who is in a law school with criminologists, that’s an area of research that occurs to me, but that’s sadly not the research that I have the time and resources to do myself as one person or even, you know, with you or with Ali. But I just wanted to hone in on that point that the differential outcomes of having fewer resources in one language compared to English, they can be quite serious. As you say, health. As I say, policing outcomes. But I also make the point in some of my work that sort of regardless of these grave outcomes, it’s also just about autonomy of individual people being able to make decisions about their own health, their own healthcare, family, and to do that, people should have equal access to information.

Dr Torsh: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that’s a really good point. I’m really focused on health at the moment, but of course I think justice and also education but I am not a law person myself, so I often forget about justice. So I think that’s a really important space. So, what else did you find out once you did all this research and put these, I think, three case studies that you did together? What did you find out about multilingual urban communication that we haven’t already covered?

Dr Grey: Well, for the first study, I call it an audit. That’s the one that’s about sort of what legislation controls language of communication. I found, predominantly, that legislation in NSW doesn’t touch on choice of language and it certainly is not providing strong impetus for multilingual communications. It’s not forbidding it either. There are a few what are called government advertising guidelines that say that for various government information campaigns over various spending thresholds, a certain percentage has to be spent on what they call “culturally and linguistically diverse communities”. But it doesn’t go into details as to what kind of language that might entail or who should be involved or what the quality assurance processes are. I’ll come back to that issue in a minute, but that’s sort of what the first case study identified. And I have an inkling that it’s very similar in other Australian jurisdictions, but I didn’t get to complete my audit of these sets of laws. In terms of actual NSW language practices then, it’s probably not a surprise that the second case study found really great variability, but something I haven’t perhaps touched on is just the extent to which the NSW government sometimes uses so many languages. So, we looked at 24 websites of all 10 government departments and then a sample of government agencies. Across these websites there were 64 languages. And so most of those websites, in addition to English, if they were going to use another language would use some of the most frequently spoken languages in Australia, which are also most frequently spoken in NSW – Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese – but not always. For instance, I think it was at the time the Taronga Zoo website for the usual pattern, but not Arabic, for no obvious reason to me, you know, a great number of those, I think over half of those in this sample were only in English. Not a really clear pattern necessarily. We’re trying to look at is it public-facing government departments vs others, or various kinds of agencies vs others? But not necessarily. And then some websites, particularly Department of Health at the NSW level, that’s the one that’s creating this enormous list of languages, you know, up into the 60s, but on all those websites the information in English is both more voluminous and more up to date than the information in other languages. And then, you know, this might be sort of suggesting perhaps that there needs to be some more rethinking or some more quality assurance or some more community participation, you know, it suggests that there might be a problem. It doesn’t necessarily conclusively prove it. Then the Covid case study, the one in which I looked at international law and international organisations’ commentary on how those legal obligations should apply, I found there’s a really clear emerging standard, it’s not yet crystallised, it’s a very strong discourse in recent years, about planning for community involvement in at least crisis communications. Maybe more generally. So at least for health crises. Not just, you know, ad hoc, suddenly having to find “Who is our Nepali community, and how do we reach them?”, but in having training to raise the capacity of various members of that community. Of having pre-existing works and links and an idea of what media that group might consume, and a strategic plan as to how language might be used in communicating with that group. And so that’s advanced planning with community input, and that’s really emphasised in a rights-based approach that the international organisations are talking about. And you can understand why that might be something they want to encourage because it does, to my mind, seem to be an approach that might help with the kinds of problems that I’m empirically pointing out in Australia, particularly an absence of materials or very inaccessible materials, very disparate or unequal materials, and a legal framework that doesn’t really guide decision-making in that space. So I have said in my most recent paper that international guidance could be very useful for Australian government in terms of thinking about how to do their public communications better. And by “better” I mean not just reaching people in a way that is more effective, getting information across and getting people to act on it, but also more representative, building up a sense of affiliation or trust or social inclusion.

Dr Torsh: Yeah I think that is such an important point, that last point that you make, that it’s not just about the communication or information. It’s not just about, you know, getting people to get their shots on time and know when to enrol their children in school. But it’s also about including everyone in this imagined community of this country, and acknowledging that it’s not an extra that they are included. It’s not a special favour. It’s not tolerance. It’s genuine inclusion. I think that’s a really important point. And do you think that your next step is going to sort of continue that work? I know now that you are doing this fantastic work at the University of Technology. Is that something you’re going to take into your next project?

Dr Grey: Yes and no. My new project is just really commencing, but for our listeners, just sort of shifting headspace – a lot of the current thinking about indigenous policy and indigenous research really focuses on what we call a self-determination paradigm. You know, allowing people to not just have a say in matters that affect them, but have some level of control. And so my current project is looking at a different kind of inclusion. It’s looking at the space of language renewal, which is a space that Australian governments have, in recent years, made quite unusual steps into, both in terms of sort of policy support and legislative support for aboriginal language renewal. But it raises this sort of potential tension or question of “Is the state including indigenous people sort of in a paradigm or approach that the state itself is dictating, or is there a way of allowing indigenous people to take control of their own language renewal processes that might be different to different communities? And if that approach is taken, what is the role of the state?” So that’s a project that raises some different questions of social inclusion, but it all stems back to these bigger questions of language use in the public space. Things like naming of places according both to indigenous language and indigenous knowledges of place. Something I’m looking at very much at the moment – using indigenous languages in Parliament, which requires in most cases a change of the rules, which are called the standing orders that govern the parliaments themselves. And so again, there I’m looking at both sort of linguistic diversity and inclusion through this lens of political participation and representation.

Dr Torsh: Thank you for listening and thank you, Alex, for being here.

Dr Grey: Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks, Hanna.

Professor Gogolin speaks at the International Symposium on Bilingualism

Why is linguistic diversity important in creating educational equity? How is the migrant experience different across different nations? How does the perception of national identity impact on migrant inclusion? How can research help us better understand and promote educational equity?

These are some of the questions I recently had the pleasure of discussing with Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Ingrid Gogolin from the Department of General, Intercultural and International Comparative Education at Hamburg University. Professor Gogolin is a long-time collaborator with Language on the Move editor Ingrid Piller, and together they head the global Next Generation Literacies network, along with professors Silvia Melo-Pfeifer (Hamburg University) and Yongyan Zheng (Fudan University).

Professor Gogolin was in Sydney to attend the International Symposium of Bilingualism. On the sidelines of a packed and engaging conference, I interviewed her about her globally renowned work in linguistic diversity in education. Over her distinguished career, she has been a passionate, powerful, and systematic advocate for recognizing and managing linguistic diversity in education in the school system.

I first asked Professor Gogolin to introduce her work to the Language on the Move audience and to explain why with all the educational inequalities in the world today, her focus was on linguistic diversity and educational inequality. Her answer will not surprise regular readers, who know about the various ways language matters in educational contexts around the world, from learning Mandarin as a second language to international students in Australian universities.

We then talked about the differences and similarities between Australia and Germany, where we both live and research, in terms of attitudes to migrants and migrant education. Professor Gogolin mentioned one of her articles which had a big influence on my own thinking about language in education (Ellis et al. 2010), and we talked about how much things have changed in Germany since it has become one of the world’s top migrant-receiving countries in the last few decades.

Finally, we talked about the all-important question of research impact. I asked how her research on linguistic diversity and education has been received by the general public and stakeholders, and how she feels about her contribution to teacher education and educating the general public about these issues. This is particularly important at a time when right-wing populism is on the rise around the world.

Reference

Ellis, Elizabeth, Ingrid Gogolin & Michael Clyne. 2010. The Janus face of monolingualism: A comparison of German and Australian language education policies. Current Issues in Language Planning 11(4). 439-460.

Image credit: Alexander Dummer via Unsplash

In the current crisis, when schools and childcare centres may be closed for long periods, many families have to make choices about work and childcare in new ways. In many households, mothers are finding that the burden of working and looking after children falls to them, while their husbands’ job, with its higher wage and lower flexibility, comes first. One writer has suggested that for women in the West, the pandemic has sent them back into the 1950s, when married women did not work outside the home.

This is not news to those of us looking at issues connected with women, work and the unpaid labour of childcare and the domestic sphere. In my work, I look at minority language transmission, through the lens of family language work, building on Toshie Okita’s book Invisible Work: Bilingualism, language choice and childrearing in intermarried families.

I started thinking about this topic while working as an English language teacher in Sydney in 2008. A student sought my advice on what language she should speak to her daughter. Her English-speaking husband wanted her to switch from speaking Thai to English, which she had been speaking to her daughter since birth. She wanted some “expert” advice to negotiate with her husband about the family’s language policy; I told her she was right to speak her language and she seemed happy with that.

But the episode stayed with me. Who wouldn’t want their child to grow up with two languages? And why would the husband ask his wife to stop speaking her strongest language to their child?

My resulting doctoral research draws on interviews with participants in 30 linguistically intermarried couples. Questions of what to do about children and language came up often. For mothers in particular, these questions were linked to a sense of primary responsibility for the child’s language development. Even, surprisingly, when they did not speak a second language themselves.

“And I never asked them to do it, it happened naturally”

In her book, Okita pointed out that many of the British husbands of Japanese migrant wives felt it was natural that their wives spoke to the children in Japanese, especially when their English was less proficient. The migrant mothers I spoke to in my research were highly accomplished multilinguals, which seemed to make the language choice both less clear-cut and more fraught. In fact, the majority of families reported that their kids were not actively bilingual. This was a source of great regret for those parents whose children could not effectively speak to family and friends in the first language of the migrant parent.

One exception was the family of Lucia and Marc, who had a sense of great pride that the kids spoke Spanish with each other, and not just with their Spanish-speaking mum:

And I never asked them to do it, it happened naturally and they always talk to each other in Spanish, of course they mix English words when they don’t have them, when they don’t have the Spanish word they, you know, insert the English word, but you know all the structure and the communication’s in Spanish. […] (Lucia)

Unlike many couples I spoke to, Lucia and Marc, were hopeful and positive about the idea of raising their kids with two languages. Perhaps Lucia’s positive attitude towards language mixing through language contact played a part in their approach. Related to this is the fact that Lucia, herself an English/Spanish bilingual from a young age, felt equipped for and was prepared to do the work of speaking Spanish to the children. For other migrant mums, working and integrating into a new country was enough to make the job of bilingual childrearing an ongoing and often insurmountable challenge.

All his friends said “oh my god, you’re not, your children aren’t speaking Polish”

The situation was different again for the English-speaking background mothers I interviewed, who were either monolingual or had become bilingual later in life, often without much formal education in the language. Despite this, they felt responsible for the presence (or absence) of the other language in their children’s lives.

They spoke about mothers-in-law sending books from overseas; about enrolling kids in language classes; about listening to music and watching television in other languages; and about the pressure they felt for their kids to be bilingual, as in this example from Michelle:

All his friends said “oh my god, you’re not, your children aren’t speaking Polish” and I would just say to them “that’s the whole, that’s why it’s called mother tongue, you generally, as a kid you generally spend more time with your mother” and so you know, um, I think that’s it.

Michelle argues against the pressure to raise her children bilingually by subscribing to a mother tongue ideology. Her mother tongue is English and so she feels she has done her duty. Other mothers talked about how they saw their role as encouraging their husbands to speak the language with the children, such as Megan:

My husband, he’s more than happy to read them books in Hindi but I have to be the instigator of everything (laughs). “Why don’t you sing them a song in Hindi? Why don’t you read them a book in Hindi?” (Megan)

This is similar to the findings of Piller and Gerber’s (2018) study of how parents conceptualised their children’s bilingualism in an online parenting forum. They found that English-speaking background mothers were the main contributors to the forum, and that their multilingual partners were often represented as failing in their duty to speak their language to the couple’s children.

This was echoed by the mothers in my research who, whether they had proficiency in the language or not, positioned their role in their children’s language education as a primary one. In contrast, many English-speaking background husbands saw their role as marginal, as supporting their bilingual wives’ efforts by sometimes just permitting the language in the home and tolerating the fact that this often left them excluded from conversations. They saw their wives, as speakers of the language, as the primary decision-makers around language choice in the home:

Hey look, I’m happy to help. If you’re trying to teach the baby something or talking to it in Serbian, teach me a couple of phrases like, “put that down, don’t do that […]”. (Jonathon)

In these examples, mothers are positioned as the parent who makes bilingualism in the home happen. This is not to say that fathers did not value bilingualism for their children, in fact almost all participants of the study were generally positive about bilingual childrearing. It just meant that they did not hold themselves as primarily responsible for it, even when the wives did not actually feel equipped to pass on the language. Thus, I argue that gender trumps language when it comes to bilingual childrearing.

Over the past thirty years there has been a welcome social shift in many places towards supporting families to pass on their indigenous or migrant languages in our transnational, globalised world. To better support families, researchers need to start paying attention to how social roles, such as motherhood, determine and shape family language policy experiences in very significant ways.

*This blogpost is based on chapter 5 of my new book on this and other topics to do with language in couples and families: Linguistic intermarriage in Australia: Between pride and shame, published by Palgrave Macmillan and available as an e-book and print edition.

References

Okita, T. (2002). Invisible work: Bilingualism, language choice, and childrearing in intermarried families. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227
Torsh, H. (2020). Linguistic Intermarriage in Australia: Between Pride and Shame. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Professor Peter Siemund, Hamburg University, during his guest lecture at Macquarie University

It is easy to assume that bilinguals are better at adding another language to their repertoire. But is that always true?

Evidence from English language learning in multilingual classrooms in Europe

School children in European countries such as Germany all study English as a foreign language as part of their education. Most of these school children will be monolingual in German but an increasing number speaks a language other than German at home. How do these students’ monolingual repertoires in German or bilingual repertoires in German and another language affect their learning of English?

This is the question explored by Professor Peter Siemund from Hamburg University in his lecture in the Lectures in Linguistic Diversity series at Macquarie University.

Professor Siemund started out by identifying a paradox of multilingualism research: multilingualism is often thought to be an advantage for both cognitive development and learning, but, at the same time, cross-linguistic influence research shows that speaking more languages often leads to more negative interference in the learning of subsequent languages.

For instance, he cited research (Lorenz, 2018) that found that Turkish and Russian monolingual learners of English were able to get the meaning of the English progressive aspect right 100% of the time. In contrast, German-Turkish and German-Russian bilinguals only got it right about as frequently as monolingual German speakers. It seems obvious that transfer from German, which has no progressive aspect, negatively affected the English language learning of these bilinguals. So in this case, bilingualism did not help but hinder when it came to this particular grammatical feature of English language learning.

Different languages, different findings

In another study described by Professor Siemund the relationship between reading comprehension scores in German and another language on the one hand and test scores in English on the other were examined. It was found that German comprehension skills correlated with English test performance for German-Russian bilinguals but not for German-Turkish bilinguals. This highlights the fact that bilingualism is not a unitary phenomenon and is different depending on which languages are involved.

The trade-off between linguistic accuracy and fluency (Source: Peter Siemund)

Accuracy versus flexibility

It is not only bilingualism that is not a unitary phenomenon but the same is true of language learning. What do we mean when we say that someone is a good language learner?

One relevant dimension is linguistic accuracy; another is linguistic fluency. In my own experience as a language learner and teacher, learners who are more accurate are often less fluent, while those who are more fluent often sacrifice accuracy.

This was also the conclusion reached by Professor Siemund, who argued that there is a trade-off between accuracy and flexibility. While monolinguals might be more accurate, plurilinguals might be more flexible. He closed by suggesting that bi-and trilingualism might be equilibrious points where accuracy and flexibility are most likely to be in balance.

What do these findings mean for advocacy?

For those of us who are interested in advocating for the rights of migrant language speakers, it can be tricky to talk about the disadvantages of being bilingual or multilingual. It is a balancing act between supporting linguistic diversity and fighting against the discrimination experienced by speakers of minority languages. Supporting linguistic diversity in the abstract sometimes overshadows the fact that some kinds of bi/multilingualism are clearly more equal than others. In fact we already know that being multilingual can be disadvantageous in education and at work, whether it’s for minority language-speaking children who are unable to access education in their first language and standardised tests which discriminate against them or migrants whose linguistic repertoires are problematized in the workplace.

Maybe we need to reframe the question: instead of asking what the advantages or disadvantages of bi- and multilingualism might be, we should ask how we can help ensure equality of opportunity regardless of linguistic repertoire, as Ingrid Piller does in her recent book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice.

References

Lorenz, E. (2018). “One day a father and his son going fishing on the Lake”: A study on the use of the progressive aspect of monolingual and bilingual learners of English. In Bonnet, A. and P. Siemund (eds.) Foreign Languages in Multilingual Classrooms (pp. 331–357). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice: an introduction to applied sociolinguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Dr Fadila Boutouchent during her guest lecture at Macquarie University

When she was in kindergarten, my oldest daughter came home one day talking about “our soldiers” who “went to war for us“. It was the Anzac Day history lesson, a day which commemorates Australia’s involvement in World War 1 and the loss of life which resulted. However, just who was that “us” supposed to be?

My daughter has past and present relatives from the (former) Austro-Hungarian, British and Ottoman empires. As is true of most Australians, during WW1 my daughter’s ancestors would have actually been on both sides of the battle. This made me particularly uncomfortable with the idea of pitching a unified “us” against “them”.

As a parent, I expect my school to utilize a curriculum which is inclusive, not exclusionary and divisive. In fact, most of the time, they do. This was the only time I could recall that our school had tapped into this way of thinking about culture and belonging.

Educational curricula are powerful sites for the construction of national identity.

How does that work in a diverse society? What happens to newcomers who may not fit the dominant imagined identity? How can schools fullfil their obligation to meet the needs of students of diverse backgrounds while still attempting to instill a shared sense of identity and belonging?

The research of Dr. Fadila Boutouchent (University of Regina, Canada) addresses these important and fascinating questions and asks how immigrant parents perceive their children’s education, particularly in Francophone schools, which have as a central role the maintenance and construction of a Canadian Francophone identity. As part of the Lectures in Linguistic Diversity series at Macquarie University, Dr. Boutouchent presented her research on these schools in the small city of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada.

New Brunswick is a province with a bilingual language policy, which means that citizens have the right to access services in either French or English. In addition, New Brunswick prioritizes French-speaking immigrants, in order to maintain its Francophone community.

In the Canadian context, research into immigrant students has tended to focus on Anglophone schools which are in the majority, have more experience with and are better resourced to manage the needs of diverse students. In contrast, little is known about the experience of migrant children in Francophone educational contexts, which are managed by the Francophone community.

Bilingual welcome sign at the entrance to Moncton city (Source: Wikipedia)

So how do recent migrant families fit into this picture? Dr. Boutouchent and her team sought to understand how immigrant families perceive their children’s education before and after their arrival in Moncton, and how they are involved in their social and educational integration.

The researchers interviewed 14 parents of families who had migrated from Africa or the Caribbean between 3-10 years prior and whose children were enrolled in Francophone schools. They found that there were some key issues for immigrant parents across the group.

The first was that immigrant parents felt they were not informed about the school system before arriving in Moncton. In particular, they did not know about the existence of Francophone schools. This group of parents was mostly highly educated and had very high expectations of their children’s educational success. Although they had trusted that the school would be good quality because it was in a developed country, some were disappointed, and one mother even said she would have liked to teach her daughter at home if she had been able to.

These issues of quality were at times compounded by language. The local variety of French is quite distinct. The Acadian French identity is historically very strong, and is marked by an accent which may be difficult for newcomers. This is similar to my own research on adult migrants in linguistic intermarriage who reported that they had unexpected problems with the Australian English accent on arrival.

The Chiac slogan “Right Fiers!” (“Right proud!”) has caused controversy (Source: cbc.ca)

We know from the previous lectures in the series that children’s willingness to speak different languages changes over time and that schooling is a key time for the formation of language habits. A particular challenge for immigrant children in Moncton is constituted by the fact that local youths speak a variety called Chiac, a mixture of French and English. Francophone migrants raised with standard French found Chiac incomprehensible and alienating.

One participant reported that her son began to stay inside during break times because he could not understand or speak to his fellow students.

If you can’t speak to other kids, how can you feel like you belong?

Parents also reported that their children experienced bullying and racism, and that the schools were not always well-equipped to manage the needs of refugee children who were not at the same educational level as their peers. They also regarded the lack of inclusive, multi-ethnic content in the curriculum as a problem.

There are no easy answers as to how to balance the educational and linguistic needs of newcomers with those of old-timers, but a good first step is to listen to the voices of those who are living the encounter. Small cities, like small schools, have the advantage that the distances between people and institutions are smaller, making both problems and solutions more visible. This also means that change is potentially easier to implement.

Dr. Boutouchent finished her lecture by making the case that Moncton is a site where Francophone schools could become “spaces for intercultural communication and nourish a culture of understanding and acceptance”. That sounds like a goal which all schools and parents could agree on.

Reference:

Benimmas, A., Boutouchent, F., & Kamano, L. (2017). Relationship Between School and Immigrant Families in French-Language Minority Communities in Moncton, New Brunswick: Parents’ Perceptions of Their Children’s Integration. In G. Tibe Bonifacio & J. L. Drolet (Eds.), Canadian Perspectives on Immigration in Small Cities (pp. 235-253). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

“How bad is your cultural cringe?” (Source: Jenna Guillaume, BuzzFeed)

Keith: I’m still really shit at pronouncing Lisa’s surname. With the umlaut o.
Hanna: What is Lisa’s surname?
(laughter)
Keith: Do I get three goes?
(Keith, Australian, in a relationship with Lisa from Germany)

Despite the increasing value of multilingualism in a globalised world, English-speaking countries such as Australia remain stubbornly monolingual. At the same time the benefits of speaking more than one language are regularly touted in public discourse. My research investigates how speakers of Australian English with a partner from a non-English-speaking background feel about their linguistic repertoires. Embarrassment, as in the example above from Keith (all names are pseudonyms), comes up a lot. So does inferiority. Because of their low proficiency in foreign languages (often as a consequence of their poor quality or limited language learning experiences in formal education) these participants feel they are bad language learners. This response seems to be one way of engaging with and mitigating their own privilege as native speakers of the powerful global language, English, compared to their partners who learned English as an additional language.

“It’s my deficiency”: being a bad language learner

And I I think I was completely in awe of that the fact that she could speak so many different languages freely, and a little bit jealous, and at the beginning was a bit more kind of definite about trying to learn German, um and I think the whole experience intimidated me cause I think I’m the kind of person who if they don’t pick something up really quickly kind of just gives up very quickly (…) (Keith)

For Lisa and Keith, Keith’s first and Lisa’s second language, English, has been the language of their relationship. Keith sees Lisa’s language skills as impressive while blaming himself for his own inability to learn German. He feels that Lisa “probably speaks better English than most native English speakers in Australia”. While Lisa learnt languages formally in her school education as a child and young adult, Keith faces all the frustration of learning another language as an adult.

In his own education Keith’s choices were limited. Although he comes from an Italian migrant background, Italian was not available at his public school in inner Sydney in the 1990s. He decided to take Latin instead, but he dropped it after junior high school when he lost interest in his schooling. He has done no further foreign language study in contrast to Lisa, who studied four languages over many years in her schooling in Germany. So when it comes to saying Keith’s Italian surname their pronunciation reflects their differing language learning trajectories:

Hanna: And how are you at pronouncing Keith’s last name (laughs)?

Lisa: I am tempted to pronounce it Italian which then nobody understands (laughs).

Keith: She- like I’m reading out a, a pizza on the pizza menu from our local pizzeria and she makes fun of my Italian accent. You know like quattro formaggi, she’s like (puts on a strong Australian accent) quattro formaggi. ‘Cause she speaks Italian, you know, these fucking Europeans!

(laughter)

In Keith’s comment about his partner’s Italian pronunciation of his Italian surname we could read humorous disparagement of her ability to pronounce it in the Italian way; in Australia foreign names are usually anglicised or pronounced in an English way. Both his lack of educational opportunity to study Italian and his Anglicized pronunciation cause him in that moment to position himself as a (monolingual) Australian in opposition to (multilingual) Europeans.

Stephen, from Australia, who is married to Christina from Argentina feels similarly critical of his own poor Spanish skills. He describes his attempts to learn Spanish as “a token effort”, says he “hasn’t got an ear for languages” and it dismissive of his own attempts to learn Spanish:

Hanna: You said you’re the odd one out; how do you feel…

Stephen: No, not at all, because uh because I recognise that it’s my deficiency in not having had the time to devote to learning a language. Now, I I make the standard joke I have 50 words of [unclear] of Spanish that I know. I work very hard and uh it’s a standing family joke (…)

In fact, Stephen studied Spanish at night, has a Spanish speaking community in Sydney and has two children who are bilingual. He also regularly visits Argentina and has frequent Argentine house guests. Spanish is a regular feature in his life. In the interview he also says that learning Spanish is “a commitment I’ve probably made and haven’t fulfilled” and feels he is a “handicapped Aussie” compared to his multilingual relations.

Another participant, Amy, has a strikingly similar evaluation of her own language skills. When I asked her why she was interested in talking to me about language she said:

Well, I suppose, I suppose it’s just there and I suppose for me it’s that I’ve got to learn more Spanish (…) And I went to lessons and I started learning and I was enthusiastic because we were going to Columbia, but as soon as we came back from Columbia I was just like that’s it, I’m just not interested anymore. And I learnt that I’m not a good language learner(…) (Amy, in a relationship with German from Columbia)

Amy’s language learning experiences at school were typical for my participants. In twelve years of state school education all she studied was ten weeks each of Italian, German and French in her seventh school year. In contrast, she praises her partner for his excellent English language skills which he acquired in Columbia from the “movies and music” he consumed from their powerful northern neighbour.

A new kind of language cringe

It seems these participants characterise their persistent monolingualism as a personal failing, a source of embarrassment, a source of language cringe. In Australia language cringe is a child of the cultural cringe. It has traditionally been associated with being embarrassed about speaking Australian English, rather than the more highly valued British English of the mother country. However, in my research I have found a new form of language cringe, related to monolinguals who speak the most valuable global language compared to multilinguals who are non-native speakers. This kind of language cringe contradicts the idea that a native speaker will always be “better” than a non-native speaker through an acknowledgment of the level of skill and knowledge which come with learning an additional language to a high proficiency.

This is most obvious when it comes to accent, because language cringe views an Australian native accent as lower value than (some) non-native accents. Lisa points out that she found the Australian accent strange on first hearing.

Lisa: I just remember the first Australian I ever met in my life (…) we started talking in English and I just thought who the fuck is this person? (laughter) It sounded so outlandish I’d never heard that before.

When I asked Keith about what kind of accent he would like his daughter to have, he reluctantly admitted that he wanted hers to be more “international”. Stephen points out that on first travelling to the United States with his wife, the locals “struggled” with his “obvious Australian accent” while she “was much more readily understood”. The implicit high value of a native accent is challenged by the transferability of a more international non-native accent.

Understanding and being able to explain the grammar of a language is another site where language cringe manifests itself. Paul, from Sydney, met Sara from Spain while travelling around South America. He was quickly hired as an English teacher because he was a native speaker. But it was Sara who taught him enough English grammar to make it through the first lesson.

(…) when Sara and I first met I needed to get some work and we were in Chile, um I just before I arrived to Chile we’d split up for a few weeks on the way to. and I’d asked Sara can you hand out a few CVs to English schools when we get there, or when you get there, which she did and I basically arrived and there was a job waiting for me which was perfect. But I’d never taught, I’d never thought about English I had no idea [Sara laughs]. and so the very first lesson I had to do (…) and uh [laughs] they, you know, the school said uh here’s the book this is Headway, this is what you’re using, they’re up to page thirty two or whatever. I opened it up and it was the present perfect and I looked at it and I was like what’s the present perfect, what’s a past participle and Sara sat down and taught me. (Paul, my emphasis)

Sara also spoke four languages to, at that time, Paul’s one. Although Sara is the one with the multilingual skills, Paul was seen by the language school as a better language user because he is a native speaker.

Managing native speaker privilege

Like Keith, Paul is impressed by his wife’s linguistic skills but he also recognises that because of the privilege of the English native speaker Sara’s multilingualism may be less valued. Rather than being embarrassed about his own failings as an individual language user Paul draws attention to the wider failings of the native speaker ideology in terms of its tenuous relation to actual knowledge about language as a system or teaching expertise. Paul acknowledges his partner’s linguistic superiority and the inherent injustice of an employment situation where he benefitted from a discriminatory language ideology because he is a native speaker.

For my other participants it may be that their conception of their own language skills as inferior in relation to the linguistic repertoire of their partners is their way to manage the inequalities brought about by this privilege. Recognising their own limited linguistic repertoire and casting it as a personal failing may be a way to tip the scales back in favour of the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual partner.

English-Only Australia? (Source: blogs.crikey.com.au)

In recent Australian political conversation, there is an increasingly bipartisan recognition of the value of cultural and linguistic diversity. So it’s fair to ask, what is Australian society offering those whom it characterises as “diverse”? As far as being multilingual goes, it seems highly skilled, highly educated migrants still experience it as a negative rather than something that is highly valued. Below I briefly discuss the cases of two such women who I interviewed as part of my doctoral research into linguistic intermarriage in Australia.

The wrong accent

“’Scuse the recording but I fuck it up so many times with my accent [laughs] … it’s years after and I still muck it up in terms of accent sometimes.” (Sara)

Sara (all names are pseudonyms) is a trilingual professional from Spain who has worked in Australia for over ten years. Despite her high level proficiency in English, her accent shapes people’s views of her as an exotic foreigner. Sara is well aware of the stereotypes her accent evokes and she talks about using them to her own advantage to connect with people by putting them off their guard and playing up to stereotypes about the European who talks with her hands.

Yet despite all this she still feels that she doesn’t get it right sometimes, and that she should mention this to me in the interview. Why? At what point will she get to “own” English and her way of using it? When does the linguistic privilege of an English speaker rub off on someone who has clearly mastered the language in so many domains?

The wrong language

“It’s my right to speak Chinese mate!” (Jessie)

Jessie is another professional who completed her Masters in Australia, worked in Shanghai for many years for a multinational company and now works in the finance sector in Australia. Like Sara she is a highly balanced bilingual. It is perhaps not surprising then that she was offended when she experienced the kind of policing which is part of linguistic privilege. A colleague in Australia, herself an adult migrant from a non-English speaking background, criticised her for speaking Mandarin socially at work. In fact, she exhorted her to “speak English!”, putting herself in the linguistically privileged position and making Jessie the foreigner who doesn’t know the rules. As Jessie said to me in the interview, it can feel strange or artificial to speak another language with someone you know shares the same linguistic and cultural background as you. Jessie is granted none of the privileges associated with being a “native” English speaker and is a target for criticism for the way she speaks even during her own personal time.

Rather than being a plus, it seems that being a speaker of accented English in Australia is often a minus. Minus linguistic privilege and minus social power, it’s all about what you are not, rather than what you are.

Multilingualism at work

“… and so I just realised I did not want to be the ethnic in the ethnic team, and so I went from that position to the most boring dry … policy officer in the most boring department. Middle-aged white fat women, just because I thought otherwise I’m gonna be always ethnic, ethnic, ethnic.” (Sara)

It is often argued that speaking many languages will lead to better job opportunities. I asked both women about their experience working in Sydney. Had their language skills, particularly their multilingualism, been useful to them? Neither of them found that speaking Spanish or Mandarin had helped them in their careers. In fact, for Sara coming from a language background other than English meant she was stuck in a career pathway which was limited to what she called “ethnic” roles in the public service. For Jessie, speaking Mandarin did help her with customers at a Sydney branch, but that work was largely invisible to her employers. Both women talked about how they got out of roles they felt limited them professionally. Even where multilingualism was useful, as it sometimes is in customer service in a diverse society, this value was not recognized by the organization nor was it remunerated.

Multilingualism at home

“For me I feel like I uh I s-, I don’t have a choice as such that I would like to, Louis to be able to speak Chinese and English or I would like Louis to speak English only, I don’t have a choice because my parents they can’t speak English, so Louis has to speak Chinese otherwise they can’t communicate with Louis and I’m in big trouble then so (laughs).” (Jessie, talking about her son Louis)

It is easy to see why some parents might be ambivalent about the often expressed and casual exhortation to raise their children bilingually when they experience their own linguistic repertoire in such contradictory and often negative ways. Like Jessie, for many parents it may be more about personal relationships than about any notion of global citizenhood that they want to raise their children in two (or more) languages. Even when multilinguals are highly proficient language users and better educated than ninety per cent of qualified Sydney residents (based on Australian Bureau of Statistics 2012), they still experience language anxiety and discrimination on the basis of language. Given that bilingual child rearing is incredibly hard work, and even more so if you are the only parent who speaks that language and you have no institutional support, it may not seem such an obvious proposition.

As long as diversity is seen to be the province of those who are outside the mainstream people like Sara and Jessie will bear the burden of living within the contradictory celebration of diversity on the one hand and the lack of social recognition of the value and experience of multilingualism on the other. This is the double burden of multilingualism in Australia today. However you look at it, it is not as simple as having something that the majority do not. It may be a richer experience of communication, even a more diverse and complex experience of life but it can also be a burden that is no less heavy for being invisible to those who do not share it.

Reference

Australian Bureau of Statistics (2012). “2011 Census of Population and Housing: Basic Community Profile (Catalogue number 2001.0) Sydney (1030) 4063.7 sq Kms.”

Australia in Asia (Source: unitingworld.org.au)

Since starting a PhD in February in a different field to my previous work, I’ve been running a weekly alert with the words “language” and “Australia” to see what was around. That’s when I discovered a key theme in linguistics in public discourse in Australia, and that is the need for “Asia literacy”.

“Australia must boost Asian language learning!”

Almost every week since February there has been an article, mostly in an Australian media source but also, as in the heading above, from the country’s Asian neighbours in Indonesia and India, lamenting Australia’s declining enrolments in Asian languages. Other headlines read: “Australia needs to break out of language cocoon”, “Loss of Indonesian expertise poses security risk” , “Australia lagging in learning a second language”, “Foreign Affairs staff have a French accent”, “Australia should send Hindi-speaking diplomats to India: Expert”,  “Asian literacy critical to children” , “In the right place but lost for words”. This media attention is the result of the commission and imminent release of the Australian Government’s White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century. Furthermore, significant political figures such as the Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and his deputy Julie Bishop have made their commitment to Asian language learning public in the last twelve months (“Asian Language Should be Mandatory for Australian Schoolchildren Julie Bishop Says”, “Abbott Accuses Government of Playing Class War Card”).

The same old story

But on closer inspection it seems that this theme is not new. In his book The Politics of Language in Australia Ozolins notes that Asian literacy was first considered a problem by the Australian Ambassador to Japan, Alan Watt, in the 1950s. He was clearly before his time as it was not until the 1990s that the then Labour government committed to Asian languages in the form of the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools (NALSAS) program. This was then discontinued by the Howard government two years before the funding was supposed to run out. The Rudd/Gillard government reinvented the program as the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Scheme (NALSS) from 2008 to 20012. Both programs focused on four ‘strategic’ languages, namely Mandarin, Indonesian, Korean and Japanese, and the rationale for choosing these languages came directly from figures from the Department of Trade, rather than from numbers of speakers in the community.

Who are the Australians who need to learn Asian languages?

So it seems that suggesting Australians learn another language, and particularly an Asian language, in order to increase our job skills (note the continued focus on the diplomatic service in the headlines above) has a lot of currency in our public discourse today and indeed over the last sixty years. But who are the imagined language learners here? When the numbers of students studying Mandarin is referred to in the debate, there is often reference to the fact that many of them come from a Chinese ethnic background, as though this dilutes the strength of the numbers (e.g., “Australians Falling Behind in Asian Language Education”). Can it be that these young people, whose “ethnic” background should in no way lead us to assume any knowledge of Mandarin, given the diversity of languages in China as well as the diversity of language practices in migrant homes , do not “count” as normal Australians in the debate?

“Ethnic” Asians do not count

Indeed, despite the fact that NALSAS and its successor mention drawing on the considerable population of speakers of the four strategic languages as potential language learners, as Susana Eisenchlas  and others have pointed out here on Language on the Move, often this group is seen as a problem for language learning. When Ms Bishop is quoted as saying “It would be a brilliant form of soft diplomacy if we had a large body of people in Australia who were able to speak an Asian language,” my immediate response is that, “Actually, we do! … but they are clearly not the Australians you have in mind!”

Rather than acknowledging the linguistic diversity in Australia (as evidenced by the 2011 census results), this imagined group of learners are homogenous in their English-speaking  (Anglo-Celtic?) Australianness . Rather than seeing it as a tale of failure to provide bilingual education for a diverse population, the comments on imagined learners in the Asian literacy debate construct a world of learning which is uni-directional; from the Australian classroom outwards to the world of foreign diplomacy. And rather than building on and supporting the use of these four languages (and others) in many thousands of Australian families, this approach values these skills so little they are not even a salient part of the debate. For those who genuinely believe in more language education in Australia, we must start by acknowledging, appreciating and supporting the diversity of potential language learners themselves, rather than harking back to a mythical White monoculture which masks our true diversity.

Bilingual Sydney-based couples wanted for research participation

Researchers at Macquarie University are looking for bilingual couples and families to volunteer for a study on language, identity and culture. We are looking for couples where one partner is an Australian English speaker and the other learned English as an additional language.

Participation involves taking part in an interview where you will be asked questions about your life story, you and your partner’s language skills and your ideas about language and culture.

If you are a partner in a bilingual couple and are interested in participating in this study, please contact the researcher hanna.torsh at mq.edu.au.

Participation in this research is voluntary and can be withdrawn at any time. This research has the approval of the Human Research Ethics Committee at Macquarie University.

(a) Because I speak German.
(b) Because it’s a place name, so a translation is not going to make it any more meaningful.
(c) Because verdammt noch mal I speak German!

Issues of opportunity to practise come up a lot in a language classroom, and as an English language teacher I’ve done my fair share of encouraging learners to take every opportunity to practise their newly acquired language skills. I am guilty, however, of ignoring the politics of speaking different languages in different contexts and what using different ways of speaking means in different spaces. For a classroom of Mandarin speakers in Australia, asking them to speak English with their fellow students may in fact be asking them to ignore context-specific rules about what is appropriate language use. Different language ideologies come into play: how is each language valued in that space? What does it signify, to use English or Mandarin or another language to a fellow student?

In her article “Malays are expected to speak Malay”, Rajadurai describes a case study of a learner who went to great lengths to practise her second language, English, despite the social isolation she encountered as a direct result of what speaking English meant in many Malay-speaking contexts, where “promoting English is often regarded as a threat to the Malay identity and an erosion of Malay dominance” (Rajadurai, 2010, p. 94). Her efforts to use English were seen, not as an attempt to engage with dominant ideas about the value of English as a global language, but rather as an attempt to distance herself from her Malay identity and to criticise Malay culture as inferior.

In my case, I think that my new acquaintances were drawing on a their own ideas that speaking English was the appropriate thing to do in a space where there were non-German speakers present, while I was drawing on my identity as a second language speaker who was keen to become visible as such, not something I get to do very often in Sydney unfortunately. So while my conversation partner was no doubt responding to pressure from herself and her friends about the right thing to do, I was very disappointed that she didn’t pick up on what I actually wanted, which was to speak a bit of German! Interestingly, the one non-German speaker there was herself multilingual, so being in a multilingual environment would have been familiar. Despite the fact that everyone at the gathering was multilingual then, I felt that the language ideology which ‘ruled’ was a monolingual one, which privileged singularity over diversity. It would be interesting to explore these sorts of language contact events more thoroughly to see if my ideas about language ideologies actually hold.

Interestingly, when I complained to a friend of mine who counts German and English as part of her language repertoire she responded by assuring me that although she would make an effort to speak as much German with me as possible, it was in fact impolite to speak a language others around you do not understand.

In my Australian TESOL contexts this constitutes a powerful discourse of language control. Something I often heard in the staffroom was that it was impolite for Mandarin speakers (for example) to speak Mandarin if there were other language speakers in their group. This linguistic control is often cast as being in the best interests of the learners, rather than being about teacher exclusion from learner talk and the consequent loss of power over what is said to whom. Speaking another language in an ‘English-only’ classroom is thus constructed as being a bad student who is also a rude person. This is also an ideology learners themselves internalise, as I often found when I discussed “class rules” with learners. As language teachers and researchers, we need to be more aware of the ways in which our students really experience what we might think are ideal opportunities to practise, but which they may see and experience very differently.

Rajadurai, J. (2010). “Malays Are Expected To Speak Malay”: Community Ideologies, Language Use and the Negotiation of Identities Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 9 (2), 91-106 DOI: 10.1080/15348451003704776