Figure 1: Transitional “Hayakom at HBKU” sign marking HBKU’s presence in the TAMUQ building (picture taken by authors)

Walking into the Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) building today feels different from just a year ago. As part of an ongoing project, several students and I (Sara) have been documenting the visual and linguistic changes taking place across the TAMUQ building in Education City, Qatar. The university’s traditional greeting Howdy, its maroon banners, and the familiar Aggie insignia (the shared nickname and identity of Texas A&M students and alumni) are still visible, yet they are beginning to lose their dominance. In their place, visitors are now welcomed by new blue-and-white signs displaying a translingual message: “Hayakom at HBKU.” The Gulf Arabic word hayakom, meaning “welcome,” has become increasingly prominent on posters, banners, and orientation booths. Although much of this signage is not yet permanently installed, the shift is already evident.

This evolving dynamic from Howdy to Hayakom reflects more than just a sudden change in branding. It marks a shift in Qatar’s higher education landscape, as the U.S. branch campus TAMUQ, part of Qatar Foundation (QF) and located in Education City, prepares to close in 2028 while its fellow QF institution, the homegrown Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), gradually assumes its facilities and students. The closure decision followed a surprise February 2024 vote by the Board of Regents of Texas A&M University’s main campus in College Station, Texas, which cited regional instability and a renewed focus on its U.S. mission. Soon after that announcement, the three of us began photographing every Texas A&M emblem, sign, and display in the building, creating a record to track the changes over time and to preserve a piece of the campus’s history. Over the past year, we have watched the visual culture of the space shift in real time. Through signage, slogans, and colors, the linguistic landscape of the building and the identities it projects tell a story of institutional transformation, cultural localization, and shifting ideologies of belonging.

The educationscape as a site of change

Scholars of linguistic landscapes often remind us that signs do more than convey information; they materialize power, ideology, identity, and values in public space (Ahmad, 2022; Hillman & Ahmad, 2024). The same can be said for educationscapes, where universities use visuals, language, and architecture to communicate identities, values and affiliations (Krompák et al., 2022).

Figure 2:  Howdy signage inside the TAMUQ building representing Aggie identity and transnational continuity (picture taken by authors)

At TAMUQ, Howdy has reigned supreme for more than twenty years. As the official greeting of Texas A&M, faculty, staff, and students at the main campus use it to welcome one another and to greet campus visitors as a sign of Aggie hospitality. On the Doha campus, Howdy appears in signage, emails, and posters for Student Affairs events such as “Howdy Week.” Its cheerful informality reinforced continuity between College Station and its branch campus thousands of miles away.

Now, however, Howdy coexists with Hayakom. HBKU has introduced its own greeting, one that foregrounds the local linguistic and cultural context. HBKU Student Affairs has also begun cultivating its own traditions: “Hayakom Tuesday,” echoing TAMUQ’s “Howdy Week,” and “Blue Thursday,” where students are encouraged to “wear blue, show blue, scream blue!”—a parallel to TAMUQ’s maroon-and-white Spirit Thursdays where Aggies are encouraged to “embrace the maroon and white.”

This bilingual, bicultural overlap reflects the liminal moment both institutions currently inhabit. TAMUQ has not yet closed, and many of its students and faculty still identify strongly with Aggie traditions. At the same time, HBKU is asserting itself through new rituals, slogans, and events.

From maroon to blue: Rebranding space and identity

Alongside slogans, colors play an equally prominent role in communicating institutional belonging. TAMUQ’s maroon and white palette linked it visually to its U.S. home campus, reinforcing transnational identity and Aggie pride. Walking through the corridors meant walking through a transplanted Texas brandscape, complete with photos of College Station landmarks.

Figures 3a and 3b: HBKU “Blue Thursday” and TAMUQ “Spirit Thursday” posters on Instagram (screenshots taken by authors)

Today, that palette is fading. Blue and white, the colors of HBKU, now dominate new signage, orientation banners, and student activities. Cushions in the front entrance lobby now feature HBKU’s blue and white geometric logo, and the hallways are lined with images of the Minaretein building (meaning two minarets), HBKU’s signature architectural complex that includes both a mosque and academic colleges, replacing many of the Texas-centric visuals that once dominated the space.

The color shift is more than aesthetic. It signals a deliberate rebranding that seeks to reshape not only institutional identity but also the sense of belonging for students, faculty, and visitors.

Signs of state and leadership

The changes are also visible in the presence of Qatar’s leadership. At the building’s entrance, portraits of the Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and his father, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, now hang prominently. Such state imagery was absent during the TAMUQ era, when visual emphasis rested on Aggie traditions and the global prestige of Texas A&M. Their presence today highlights HBKU’s identity as QF’s homegrown university and its role in advancing national priorities. The walls themselves remind visitors that HBKU is a Qatari institution, rooted in the state’s vision for education and innovation.

Bilingualism and the Arabic language protection law

Another notable change is that TAMUQ operated under a cross-border partnership agreement with QF and was not required to maintain bilingual signage. As a result, its displays were often inconsistent, with some appearing only in English and others in both English and Arabic. However, HBKU complies more with Qatar’s 2019 Arabic Language Protection Law (Law No. 7 of 2019 on the Protection of the Arabic Language). This law requires Arabic to be the primary language on all public signage.

In practice, this means HBKU’s official signage is almost always bilingual, with Arabic typically placed above or beside the English text. This layout gives prominence to Arabic while reflecting HBKU’s use of English as its official medium of instruction and as a shared language among its diverse student body

Figure 4: Portraits of Qatar’s leadership, including the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (left) and the Father Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani (right), now displayed at the building’s entrance (picture taken by authors)

The difference is visible, for example, in faculty office nameplates. At TAMUQ, they appeared only in English, whereas at HBKU they are consistently bilingual, with Arabic displayed first. This small but significant shift reflects how language policy is made material in the everyday visual culture of the university.

Belonging and identity in flux

What does it mean for students, faculty, and staff to inhabit this shifting educationscape? This is a question we are currently exploring in our ongoing research about the transition from TAMUQ to HBKU. For Aggies, watching maroon and Howdy fade from view may bring a sense of sadness, as if traditions and ties to the wider Aggie network are slowly being eroded. For new students entering through HBKU, however, Hayakom and the visible presence of Qatari leadership may foster a sense of national belonging and legitimacy that TAMUQ, as a foreign branch campus, could perhaps not fully provide.

The transition also brings into focus broader debates about language, identity, and higher education in Qatar. For years, international branch campuses have stood as symbols of global mobility and English-medium internationalization. HBKU, by contrast, is an explicitly Qatari project, though still English-medium. Its bilingual signage acknowledges the centrality of Arabic in public life while retaining English as the dominant academic language. In this sense, the visual and linguistic rebranding of the building does more than mark institutional change; it materializes Qatar’s ongoing negotiation between global aspiration and national affirmation.

From global brand to national–international project

The TAMUQ-to-HBKU shift can be read as part of a wider trend. Around the world, branch campuses have been praised for providing global exposure but also critiqued for being costly, unsustainable, or disconnected from local needs (Bollag, 2024; Kim, 2025). By 2028, TAMUQ will join the growing list of international branch campuses that have either closed or been absorbed into national institutions. Yet this trajectory is not universal. In the Gulf and parts of Asia, other branch campuses continue to expand, supported by government funding and demand for global higher education pathways.

Figures 5a and 5b: TAMUQ English-only office nameplate and HBKU bilingual Arabic–English office nameplate (photos taken by authors)

In this case, the closure decision was not driven by Qatar’s plans but rather by political currents in the United States, where heightened scrutiny of foreign funding and a turn toward isolationism have reshaped attitudes toward international partnerships. Although HBKU is QF’s homegrown university, it was intentionally designed to be both nationally grounded and internationally oriented—an English-medium institution that continues to attract global faculty and students while advancing Qatar’s local educational priorities. The move from Howdy to Hayakom thus signals more than a greeting. It marks a broader shift from borrowed traditions to localized yet globally connected narratives of identity and belonging.

Reading the signs

As universities, like cities, are built through language and signs, paying attention to the educationscape reveals the symbolic and material contours of change. At TAMUQ/HBKU, the coexistence of Howdy and Hayakom, maroon and blue, photos of Aggie landmarks and Minaretein, encapsulates a moment of transition.

These signs remind us that institutional change is not only about policy or governance. It is lived and seen in everyday spaces: on banners, cushions, doorways, and Instagram posts. They invite us to consider how language, color, and imagery make and remake belonging in higher education. For now, both greetings echo in the same hallways. Yet with each new sign and slogan, the balance tilts, signaling which voice will carry forward for now.

References

Ahmad, R. (2022, October 11). Mal Lawwal: Linguistic landscapes of Qatar [Blog post]. Language on the Move. Mal Lawwal: Linguistic landscapes of Qatar – Language on the Move
Bollag, B. (2024, December 31). International branch campuses spread in Mideast amid concerns about costs, impact. Al-Fanar Media. https://www.al-fanarmedia.org/2024/12/international-branch-campuses-spread-in-mideast-amid-concerns-about-costs-impact/
Hillman, S., & Ahmad, R. (2025). Combatting Islamophobia: English in the linguistic landscape of FIFA World Cup 2022. In K. Gallagher (Ed.), World Englishes in the Arab Gulf States. Routledge.
Kim, K. (2025, July 4). Branch campuses and the mirage of demand. SRHE Blog. https://srheblog.com/2025/07/04/branch-campuses-and-the-mirage-of-demand/
Krompák, E., Fernández-Mallat, V., & Meyer, S. (2022). The symbolic value of educationscapes—Expanding the intersection between linguistic landscape and education. In E. Krompák, V. Fernández-Mallat, & S. Meyer (Eds.), Linguistic Landscapes and Educational Spaces (pp. 1–27). Multilingual Matters.
Law No. (7) of 2019 on the Protection of the Arabic Language. (2019). Al Meezan, Qatar Legal Portal. https://www.almeezan.qa/EnglishLaws/Law%20No.%20(7)%20of%202019%20on%20Protection%20of%20the%20Arabic%20Language.pdf

Author bios

Dr. Sara Hillman is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and English at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU). Prior to joining HBKU, she spent nearly a decade at Texas A&M University at Qatar. Her research spans emotions, identity, and (un)belonging in English-medium instruction (EMI) and transnational higher education, World Englishes and sociolinguistics, linguistically and culturally responsive teaching and learning, and language and intercultural communication. Her current research explores the visual signage and symbols of Qatar Foundation’s international branch campuses and the homegrown Hamad Bin Khalifa University and how they project identity, values, and belonging.

Aishwaryaa Kannan is a third-year Electrical and Computer Engineering student at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ). Alongside her studies, she has been deeply engaged in student leadership and research, serving as the Founding President of the Management & Marketing Association and as a student research partner on the campus closure study led by Dr. Sara Hillman. Having experienced the TAMUQ-to-HBKU transition firsthand, she connects personally with the paper’s themes of identity and belonging. Her interests span technology, education, and human connection, and she is passionate about how innovation and culture shape everyday experiences on campus.

Tim Billy Tizon is a third year Electrical and Computer Engineering undergraduate student at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ). In addition to his studies, he has been actively involved in campus life through student leadership and research. He served as Secretary of the Leadership Experience Club for two years and is currently a member of the Management and Marketing Association. He has also participated in research across several disciplines, including communications and machine learning.

The international research network “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” builds on the “Next Generation Literacies” network

The World Education Research Association (WERA) recently announced the launch of seven new International Research Networks (IRNs) and we are pleased to share that “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” is one of them.

What is a WERA IRN?

The WERA IRN initiative brings together global teams of researchers through virtual communication and other channels to collaborate in specific areas of international importance. “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” joins a growing list of IRNs, contributing to the vision of WERA. The purpose of IRNs is to synthesize knowledge, examine the state of research, and stimulate collaborations or otherwise identify promising directions in research areas of worldwide significance. IRNs are expected to produce substantive reports that integrate the state of the knowledge worldwide and set forth promising research directions.

What does the IRN “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” do?

The IRN “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” aims to initiate and extend international collaborative research on literacy in the context of language diversity and migration. The joint focus is on literacy development and practice in multiple languages. Drawing on varied and complementary expertise from Europe, Australasia, Africa and North America, the objectives are:

1. to enhance knowledge on literacy and student diversity
2. to trace tendencies that go beyond one national, regional or local context
3. to examine literacy development across the life-course
4. to critically discuss the implications of research findings for policy and practice

Literacy is a foundation for participation in complex societies. The proposed research therefore also contributes to pathways to equity. The network’s activities will reach fundamental theoretical insights, which may be transferred to concepts of teaching/learning in educational institutions. This intervention research will attempt to generalise characteristics of successful multilingual literacy development to be adapted to specific contexts. The proposed IRN comprises senior, experienced and early career scholars (incl. PhD students), aimed towards international and intergenerational knowledge generation.

Literacy as a resource

At the heart of our network is the idea that multilingual literacy is a resource to be celebrated. Literacies across languages and scripts empower learners to create knowledge, to navigate education systems, and to participate fully in social and cultural life.

Members of the network bring expertise from early childhood to higher education, from family and community contexts to digital and AI-mediated literacies. Our shared vision is to develop research that responds to the multilingual realities of migration, mobility, and global diversity.

Building on the “Next Generation Literacies” network

The “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” network has grown out of the Next Generation Literacies initiative, an international network of researchers working at the intersection of social participation and linguistic diversity.

Based on the trilateral partnership of Fudan University (China), Hamburg University (Germany) and Macquarie University (Australia), Next Generation Literacies brought together an interdisciplinary group of established and emerging researchers to build a truly global network.

After funding for the Next Generation Literacies network ended in 2024, the IRN “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” keeps that spirit of collaboration alive, while also widening the circle: we are now connected with colleagues from the Network on Language and Education (LeD) in the European Educational Research Association (EERA) and with other WERA initiatives. Under this new umbrella, we will scale up our efforts and make a stronger impact together.

Network Conveners

The network is convened by

• Irina Usanova (University of Hamburg; Lead Convenor)
• Francis M. Hult (UMBC)
• Ingrid Piller (University of Hamburg & Macquarie University)
• Yongyan Zheng (Fudan University)
• Harkaitz Zubiri-Esnaola (University of the Basque Country)

Together with network members, we bring expertise spanning literacy research across continents and research traditions.

Kick-off meeting

On September 24, 2025, we came together on Zoom across many different time zones and continents to virtually celebrate the official launch of the Literacy in Multilingual Contexts IRN.

The kick-off meeting felt like both a reunion and a new beginning: familiar faces from the Next Generation Literacies network reconnecting, and new colleagues from around the world joining the conversation. Together, we are building a vibrant global community of researchers committed to understanding how literacy develops and thrives in multilingual settings. For all of us, it was a reminder of how much we can achieve when we put our multilingual realities at the center of literacy research.

What’s next?

Over the next three years (2025–2028), we will:

• review the state of research on multilingual literacies
• analyze existing datasets across different contexts
• share our work in joint events and publications
• build a sustainable international community dedicated to literacy in diversity

To make this vision concrete, members are invited to join thematic working groups. Topics include multilingual literacy in early childhood, in higher education, in Indigenous contexts, CLIL, multilingual writing and AI, and multilingual policy. Sounds interesting?

An open invitation

The energy of our first meeting showed just how much can be achieved when we bring our different perspectives together. The IRN “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts” is open to any researcher working in these areas. If you are interested in joining, please send your inquiry to Dr Irina Usanova.

Related content

• Legacies of the Next Generation Literacies Network
• Becoming a world-ready researcher at Macquarie University
• A water perspective on language research
• Publishing is an insiders’ game

If you answered ‘yes’ to the above, you are invited to fill in a short survey for a PhD research project on child language brokering (the use of children as interpreters) in schools.

The online survey takes about 15 minutes to complete. Its aim is to gather insights on how teachers communicate with parents who are not proficient in English. The questions focus on occasions when teachers have had a student translate for their parents in school.

To participate simply click this link or scan the QR code.

Participation is voluntary and anonymous. There is no compensation offered. You can withdraw at any time during the online survey. Data will be saved on servers provided by University of Hamburg (Germany). The survey will ask about your experiences and opinions.

This research has been approved by the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics HREC Humanities & Social Sciences Committee.

Your contribution is important as the study hopes to contribute to improving parent-school communication across language barriers and thus support equal access to information for all parents and teachers.

Many thanks for considering this invitation and for your time and support!

For questions and concerns contact the PhD student, Sophie Munte.

Description: Digital technologies are in the process of fundamentally reshaping communication. There are significant opportunities: chatbots can personalize language teaching in a way unimaginable until recently and machine translation promises to widen participation for ever more people, regardless of their language proficiency. Yet these opportunities come with the harms caused by screen addiction, surveillance, and environmental destruction.

In this one-day research symposium we move beyond both the hype and the fearmongering to examine the real-life use of digital technologies in multilingual and intercultural communication. How can digital technologies help to bridge language barriers to social participation? What new barriers do they create? And what research agenda do we need to harness technological transformation for social inclusion in our linguistically and culturally diverse society?

Attendance is free but places are limited. To secure your place, sign up for the event at https://events.humanitix.com/new-technologies-in-intercultural-communication or scan the QR code.

Date and venue

Monday, Dec 08, 2025
Macquarie University, Wallumattagul Campus, Ryde

Program [updated Nov 21, 2025]

09:30-10:00      Arrival, Meet & Greet
10:00-10:30      Welcome
10:30-11:15      Earvin Cabalquinto (Monash U), The myth of digital inclusion: Locating non-digital influences in the migrant’s home
11:15-12:00      Julia Kantek and Thilakshi Mallawa Arachchi (WSU), Sustaining livelihoods in ‘the shadows’: International students’ use of GenAI as digital shadow care support
12:00-13:00      Lunch break
13:00-13:45     Ana Sofia Bruzon (MQ), Using tech in bilingual transnational parenting
13:45-14:30      Hye Eun Chu (MQ), Bridging Language and Inquiry in Diverse Science Classrooms
14:30-15:15      Yeong-Ju Lee (MQ), Social Media and Language Learning
15:15-15:45      Coffee break
15:45-16:30      Laura Smith-Khan (UNE), “Connectivity is the central thing”: Developing legal literacy post-migration
16:30-17:00      Closing panel: Gerard Goggin (UWS) and Ingrid Piller (UHH&MQ), moderated by Sarah McMonagle (UHH)
17:00-18:30      Reception & networking

Abstracts and bio blurbs

Earvin Cabalquinto (Monash U), The myth of digital inclusion: Locating non-digital influences in the migrant’s home

Abstract: The home is a vital space for shaping an individual’s personal, familial and social relations and growth. In an increasingly digital and global economy, such domestic terrain has been reconfigured into a highly mediated and transnational space. For migrants and their networks who constantly navigate their marginalised position in contemporary societies, a home at a distance embodies the paradox of cross-border and virtual mobility. Homing necessitates digital media use, a tactic for coping with the pains of physical separation. Yet, everyday connections, impacted by intersecting social, economic and political factors, become a source of frustrations and discomfort. In this provocation, I offer a critical reflection of the principles, dynamics, and contradictions of digital inclusion by unlocking the migrants’ mediated home. I draw key insights from more than ten years of multi-sited interviews and visual ethnography among the Filipino diaspora in Australia and their local and transnational networks. Significantly, I attempt to locate and centre the asymmetrical non-digital factors – personal, cultural, economic, and political – that deeply impacts the enactment, embodiment and negotiations of the home among migrants and their distant networks. In sum, the presentation provides a critical vantage point to further rethink digital inclusion by disrupting one-size-fits-all and geographically-bounded solutions and foreground situated, relational, and transnational approaches for understanding and redressing intertwined social and digital inequalities.

Bio: Dr Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University, Australia. He has held Visiting fellowships in Lancaster University, United Kingdom (2019), University of Jyväskylä, Finland (2021), Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Migration and Integration, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada (2024), and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (2025). He is the author of (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media” (Oxford University Press). He is the co-author of Philippine Digital Cultures: Brokerage Dynamics on YouTube (Amsterdam University Press). He sits in the editorial board of top journals, including the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Convergence:  The international journal of research into new media technologies, and Journal of Global Ageing. His research on the impacts of digitalisation on migration has been widely published in top-tier journal outlets and specialised edited collections.  His research agenda is driven by critically exploring the dynamics and impacts of digital inclusion and exclusion among migrants and their networks who navigate an increasingly digital and global society. To know more about his projects and outputs, visit www.ecabalquinto.com.

Julia Kantek & Thilakshi Mallawa Arachchi, Sustaining livelihoods in ‘the shadows’: International students’ use of GenAI as digital shadow care support

Abstract: International students are navigating a multitude of structural challenges, including rising living costs, shifting visa conditions, and an intensifying housing affordability crisis. These pressures unfold within a broader post-welfare context, marked by reduced government support for temporary migrants and limited investment in student services. This paper explores how international students use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to navigate these challenges. Drawing on focus groups (N=3) and interviews (N=21), we reveal how ChatGPT (and similar GenAI tools) function as digital shadow care infrastructures, helping students ‘get by’ and navigate everyday precarity (legal, financial, and emotional). By situating GenAI within students’ broader care assemblages, this study contributes to digital migration scholarship, highlighting how GenAI tools ‘fill the cracks’ left open by inadequate formal supports, as well as identifying the factors that shape GenAI use within these contexts. Overall, we argue for policies that not only recognise these shadowed practices, but educate and empower migrants to use AI tools safely and effectively.

Western Sydney University Research team: Dr Julia Kantek, Dr Donna James, Dr Thilakshi Mallawa Arachchi & Distinguished Professor Gerard Goggin

Bio: Dr Julia Kantek is a Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University. Julia has developed research expertise at the intersection of youth sociology, migration studies, and diaspora engagement. Her work explores the ways various transitions (such as those induced by migration, education, and work) shape belonging, identity formation, and wellbeing. Julia is currently co-leading two funded projects through the Young & Resilient Research Centre and the Institute for Culture & Society at Western Sydney University. One explores how digital technologies function as infrastructures of care for migrants, while the other investigates how young people from Western Sydney navigate work-related aspirations and transitions.

Bio: Dr Thilakshi Mallawa Arachchi is a researcher, educator, and activist with a passion for justice, working to nurture caring, connected communities through collective action. Her interdisciplinary background spans digital media studies, media literacy, migration, feminism, higher education, and climate activism. She completed her PhD at Western Sydney University in March 2025, investigating how cultural institutions, such as public libraries, can co-design equity-centred social media literacy education interventions with women from refugee backgrounds.

Ana Sofia Bruzon, Using tech in bilingual transnational parenting

Abstract: Against the background of the digitisation of all spheres of life, including childhood, this project asks how transnational parents use new technologies to support their children’s heritage language learning and use. Guided by a conceptual framework based in language policy and a sociolinguistic ethnographic approach, interview, questionnaire and observational data were collected from 17 Spanish-speaking families in Australia to examine digital technology use in the family, particularly in relation to heritage language maintenance.

Findings show that each of three focal technologies – TV and film, digital communication platforms, and learning apps – has a primary purpose which is not related to heritage language maintenance but results in specific affordances and constraints for heritage language learning and use. The primary purpose of TV and film is to provide entertainment. This allows for beneficial linguistic input in Spanish but is also constrained by child language proficiency and resistance against particular shows and language choices. Similarly, digital communication platforms serve the primary purpose of connecting with geographically dispersed kin. This provides valuable interactional opportunities in Spanish for children but is limited by the inability of distant kin to engage in child-centred communication strategies and is also subject to practical constraints such as time differences. Finally, learning apps are largely brought into the home by school requirements and serve the primary purpose of learning. Learning apps offer precious explicit and implicit Spanish language learning opportunities but parents worry that they expose children to harms such as excessive screen time.

Overall, the project constitutes a novel contribution to the fields of family language policy and heritage language maintenance by concluding that digital technologies constitute a double-edged sword: their value in supporting multilingual practices in a monolingual society is significant but countervailed by limitations inherent in these technologies, particularly as they relate to broader developmental harms.

Bio: Ana Sofia Bruzon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, and a member of the Language on the Move research team. Her research interests include education policy and practice, digital technology in education, and the intersection of language, education and law.

Her PhD focuses on heritage language maintenance, language and education policy, and the digital practices of transnational families. The thesis examines how transnational parents use new technologies to support their children’s language learning and education. Her MRes research, published as Piller, Bruzon, and Torsh (2023), focused on language and education policy and practice, investigating the online linguistic practices of multilingual schools. Ana has a background in law and is a member of the State Bar of California in the U.S., where she practised as an immigration, real estate, and family lawyer. Ana is fluent in English, Spanish, and Italian.

Hye-Eun Chu, Bridging Language and Inquiry in Diverse Science Classrooms

Abstract: Science classrooms are becoming increasingly multilingual and digital, raising urgent questions about how to integrate inquiry-based learning with language support. This presentation synthesises four studies that examine these challenges across Korean and Australian contexts. A survey of 144 Korean teachers revealed strong self-efficacy in inquiry teaching but low confidence in supporting the language needs of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. Classroom observations in Korea showed that CLD students, despite linguistic difficulties, contributed creative and reflective ideas during model co-construction, enriching group learning. An intervention with Korean elementary students developed a Digital Science Text Reading Literacy (DSTRL) program, which significantly improved their abilities to search, read, and evaluate multimodal science texts. Finally, interviews with Australian and Korean physics teachers highlighted both enthusiasm and concerns about Language-Focused Teaching (LFT), balancing benefits for engagement and conceptual learning against practical constraints. Together, these findings call for teacher professional development that embeds language as integral to inquiry and leverages digital tools for inclusive participation.

Bio: Dr Chu is a Senior Lecturer in Macquarie’s School of Education. Her research has focused on several key areas, including monitoring students’ understanding of science concepts, implementing formative assessment in science classrooms, interdisciplinary approaches to teaching science, affective factors affecting science learning, and the integration of the arts into the teaching of science and related subjects (STEAM). Additionally, she has conducted research in conceptual development in science learning, tracking students’ concept development through text (language) analysis, interdisciplinary teaching of environmental literacy with science, and the influence of student beliefs on science learning. Recently, her work has expanded to include studies on the application of AI in education.

Yeong-Ju Lee, Social Media and Language Learning

Abstract: This presentation draws on my new book ‘Social Media and Language Learning: Using TikTok and Instagram’ (Lee, 2025), which investigates how visual and multimodal technologies transform informal language learning and intercultural exchange. The book analyses two studies: a comparative analysis of online data from Instagram and TikTok posts, and a multiple case study based on ethnographic data of narratives from international students in Australia. These studies show how learners use multimodal features such as sound, captioning, and visual composition to create and share meaning across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Based on these findings, in this presentation I will discuss how social media platforms have become everyday spaces where linguistic agency, creativity, and belonging are negotiated in transnational contexts. I will also consider how AI-driven features in social media such as automatic captioning, real-time translation, and personalised content feeds are creating new opportunities while posing pedagogical challenges for multilingual learning.

Reference

Lee, Y.-J. (2025). Social media and language learning: using TikTok and Instagram. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003543541

Bio: Yeong-Ju Lee obtained her PhD from the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Australia. She teaches courses in Applied Linguistics, TESOL, and Literacy. Her research interests include digital language learning and teaching, especially on social media and AI. She is a Chief Investigator of the Data Horizon Research Centre-funded project on a customised AI chatbot for language learning at Macquarie University, and the Teaching Development Grant-funded project on AI and literacy at Australian Catholic University.

Laura Smith-Khan, “Connectivity is the central thing”: Developing legal literacy post-migration

Abstract: Developing a sound understanding of the law is essential for social participation and access to justice, and in the context of migration, can form a crucial part of integrating and flourishing in a new country. Yet there can be a range of challenges for new arrivals when it comes to developing legal literacy, and for service providers seeking to assist them. This presentation will share emerging findings from pilot research on Australian government and non-government service providers’ efforts to help educate the public about Australia law, legal processes and legal services. Drawing on an examination of research interviews, survey responses and public texts, the preliminary findings indicate that while online resources and technology are one element of such efforts, human connectivity and care remain crucial.

Bio: Dr Laura Smith-Khan is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of New England, Australia and an external affiliated member of the Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR), Gent University, Belgium. Her research is interested in the participation of minoritized groups in legal settings, especially migration processes. She was the 2022 recipient of the Max Crawford Medal, Australia’s most prestigious award for achievement and promise in the humanities. She is co-founder and co-convener of the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Research Network, a member of Language on the Move and Next Generation Literacies and serves on the editorial boards of Multilingua and the Australian Journal of Human Rights.

Dr Smith-Khan has written extensively on language and credibility in Australia’s asylum procedures. Beyond her continuing work in this area, she has undertaken research on the education and communicative practices of migration practitioners, on media representations of migration, and on disability rights in forced migration. Aiming for impact, her research has been cited and adopted by the EU Agency for Asylum, the Australian Human Rights Commission, UNHCR and UNESCO, and is used in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. She has tertiary qualifications in both law and linguistics and has been admitted to practice as a lawyer.

A comprehensive and critical overview of the field of intercultural communication

• Key concepts and discussions illuminated with international case studies of intercultural communication in real life
• Includes learning objectives, key points, exercises and suggestions for further reading in each chapter
• A new chapter devoted to intercultural crisis communication; expanded coverage of language in migration; and new studies and examples of virtual, online and computer-mediated communication throughout.

Combining perspectives from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, the third edition of this popular textbook provides students with an up-to-date overview of the field of intercultural communication. Ingrid Piller explains communication in context using two main approaches. The first treats cultural identity, difference and similarity as discursive constructions. The second, informed by multilingualism studies, highlights the use and prestige of different languages and language varieties as well as the varying access that speakers have to them.

If you liked this episode, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast 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.

Get 30% off if you order now

Order through the Edinburgh University Press website and enter discount code NEW30 to get 30% off.

Transcript (coming soon)

We are reproducing the AAH statement here in full because these cuts – along with those at other Australian universities – pose an existential threat to Australia’s national intellectual and cultural capabilities.

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Australian Academy of the Humanities raises alarm over ANU cuts: a national capability at risk

Now is not the time to reduce our national humanities capabilities. Global unrest, the impact of AI on society, wealth inequality, climate change, distrust in democratic institutions – all call for independent and informed Australian thinking. The humanities help us to understand ourselves and our neighbours, and the changes our times require.

Or shall we let others do our thinking for us?

The proposed closure of vital parts of our national infrastructure at the ANU, including the Humanities Research Centre, the European Studies Centre, the Australian National Dictionary Centre, significant cuts to the School of Music and Australian Dictionary of Biography, and the loss of roles across many areas in the ANU’s College of Arts and Social Sciences represents a loss of significant national capability.  The Humanities Research Centre, which celebrated its 50^th anniversary last year, has brought together scholars from around the country and across the world, being a catalyst for innovative, advanced research across the humanities.

The situation at the ANU, however, echoes cuts to the humanities at many universities around the country (in recent months Macquarie, Wollongong, UTAS and La Trobe to name a few). While individual universities have every right to determine their education and research priorities, the truth is that no one in Australia has a handle on the cumulative effects of cuts and their impact on our national skills and knowledge capabilities; a sovereign risk that neither the government nor the university sector is assessing.

We are calling on the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) to step in, and take a national coordinating role, to work with us to identify the loss of disciplinary expertise and its impact on Australia’s knowledge capability. We know that Australia’s knowledge base for understanding Indonesia, Russia and whole regions such as South Asia is already imperilled by the closure of many programs in these areas. And there are many similar instances of loss around the country, denying future generations opportunities to contribute to Australian society in areas of need. Once lost, expertise that has taken generations to build cannot easily be replaced – and the ramifications for the nation are immediate.

Universities have laid some of the blame for this situation on declining enrolments. These declines, however, have been exacerbated by the Job Ready Graduates (JRG) policy which the Government’s own Universities Accord Report has condemned. The JRG is causing many humanities students to be saddled with decades of debt for degrees that provide them with the analytical, critical and creative thinking skills needed to effectively understand and respond to the many complex issues facing our society. Worse still, the JRG policy is disproportionately impacting women, and low-SES, regional and Indigenous students who are more likely to take subjects in society and culture, as their first degrees in higher education. It is our great disappointment that the Australian Government hasn’t acted sooner to remediate this policy, despite acknowledged experts (including HECS architect Emeritus Prof Bruce Chapman) arguing it was ill conceived and has failed.

The Government has shown real commitment to advanced manufacturing and a “future made in Australia”. The Australian Academy of Humanities repeats its call on the Government to “back Australian thinking”.

Imagine stepping into a classroom where students expect you to embody English in its “native” form, fluency, and culture. For many non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in Australia, this expectation is a daily challenge. Yet, these teachers refuse to let such pressures define them. Instead, they embrace a “hybrid professional becoming”—an ongoing process of identity formation—seeing themselves, in many ways, as “cyborgs” in the classroom.

Inspired by Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, NNESTs use the cyborg metaphor to navigate and redefine their professional lives. They mix their multilingual and multicultural lived experiences with digital tools and fluid teaching methods, transcending rigid binaries of “native” versus “non-native” speakers. In this role, they create richer, more inclusive learning environments that challenge hegemonies.

Breaking Down the Native-Speaker “Myth”

Australian classrooms are highly diverse, yet the teaching workforce remains predominantly English monolingual and native-speaking. Many students here learn English as an additional language, making teachers’ lived experiences crucial for bridging linguistic and cultural gaps. However, native-speakerism—an age-old ideology favouring native English speakers—still shapes perceptions. NNESTs are often viewed through a deficit lens, yet they challenge this by showing that effective English teaching goes beyond birthplace or accent.

Phở bò (Image credit: Vinnie Cartabiano, Wikipedia)

Consider Natalie, a teacher from Bangladesh. Despite her experience, she often felt misjudged: “I didn’t just sense that students valued native English-speaking teachers more—I was even asked to be replaced by native speakers before I had a chance to start speaking”. Though these intersectional judgments were hard to ignore, Natalie turned them into a source of multiplicity. “It made me work harder to show that my teaching had depth and cultural awareness,” she explains.

To engage her students, Natalie wove stories, humour, and cultural anecdotes into her lessons, using language-bridging strategies to foster inclusivity. For her Vietnamese students, she joked about the pronunciation differences between “phở” (a noodle soup) and the English word “fur”, drawing laughter as they discussed similar linguistic misunderstandings. For her Lebanese students, she shared stories about common culinary traditions, sparking discussions about cultural similarities and differences. By weaving in phrases like “cảm ơn” (thank you) with her Vietnamese students and “Malual noor” (family is wealth) with her Sudanese students, she created a space where language and cultural understanding flourished, bridging worlds in a shared learning journey.

Embracing the Cyborg Identity in Teaching

Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto frames the cyborg identity as one of assembling diverse parts into a constantly evolving whole. For NNESTs, this hybrid identity defies narrow definitions of an English teacher. Their methods connect students with English while honouring their own cultural heritage, engaging students in ways that promote inclusivity.

Mahati, an Australian qualified teacher from India, exemplifies this hybridity. Though passionate about teaching, adjusting to Australian classrooms wasn’t easy. After working various odd jobs, she found her place in adult migrant education. “Teaching for me is not just a job—it’s my second home” (मेरे लिए पढ़ाना सिर्फ एक नौकरी नहीं है—यह मेरा दूसरा घर है।), she shares. Entwining her cultural heritage in literature and music with modern teaching tools, Mahati creates meaningful connections with her students. “We end sessions with fun songs from Sing with Me Book 1, and I incorporate technology to keep students engaged”, she explains. This approach enriches her classroom with a dynamic, inclusive atmosphere.

Reflective Practice: A Tool for Hybrid Becoming

Reflection is essential to this cyborg-like emergence. For NNESTs, critical reflection goes beyond simple self-assessment; it’s a transformative process to reshape and redefine their roles, tailoring their approaches to the diverse needs of multilingual classrooms and imagining themselves as cosmopolitan teachers of English.

Natalie’s experience with reflective practice exemplifies this plasticity. Despite her extensive teaching background, she continually revisits her lessons to meet her students’ evolving needs. “One of my students once laughed at me for mispronouncing a Vietnamese dish,” she recalls with a smile. “It was a learning moment for both of us—I embraced it and encouraged my students to teach me more about their culture”. Through such exchanges, Natalie moves beyond rigid teaching roles, fostering an environment of mutual learning and responsiveness.

Janaki’s story further illustrates this process. Initially, she felt out of place teaching refugees and migrants in the AMEP (Adult Migrant English Program), many of whom had experienced significant hardship. “It’s been humbling—I had to understand their backgrounds and be patient”, she shares. Reflecting on her experiences, Janaki adapted her methods, drawing on colleagues’ advice and exploring new strategies to better serve her students.

Technology: Expanding the Cyborg Identity

Technology plays a crucial role in helping these teachers develop their cyborg identities. Digital tools enable them to adapt and extend their teaching practices, creating a more inclusive classroom environment.

Namani, a young teacher who initially felt intimidated by her non-native status, illustrates this shift. She struggled with technology, worried about being seen as less competent. “I was so concerned if something went wrong with a digital tool”, she recalls. But instead of avoiding it, she mastered tools like MS Teams and Zoom, transforming her classroom. “Once I felt confident, I realized technology was actually empowering me to be a better teacher”, she reflects.

Frida took this approach even further during the pandemic, recording demo classes to improve timing and engagement. Her experience with technology underscores the cyborg concept, intermingling cultural knowledge with technical proficiency to support students. Using online platforms, she stayed connected despite the distance, teaching her students not just English but also essential digital literacy skills.

Moving from Marginalization to Empowerment

The cyborg identity empowers NNESTs to transcend limitations imposed by native-speakerism. By embracing hybridity, they resist marginalization and actively redefine their roles, affirming their experiences as cosmopolitan educators of English. The cyborg metaphor captures a journey from marginalization to empowerment, where NNESTs reclaim the narrative and leverage their unique identities as strengths.

Laura’s journey illustrates this shift. Coming from a small town in the Philippines, she initially faced students who doubted her due to her accent. “I noticed some of my students were unsure of me, maybe because of my accent”, she recalls. Though it initially unsettled her, Laura decided to use it as a teaching tool. “I always wanted to be a teacher—even as a kid, I’d teach my dolls and pretend to mark papers”, she says with a smile. By sharing her story, Laura highlighted the richness of multilingualism, encouraging students to explore their identities and celebrating diversity in her classroom.

One of Jasha’s most powerful stories involves a Lebanese student whose linguistic journey reflected the beauty of multilingualism. “She spoke French and Arabic at home, then moved to Israel, where her three boys started school”, Jasha recalls. By the time they relocated to Australia, the boys had developed a unique assemblage, mixing French, Arabic, Hebrew, and English in daily conversations. “Listening to them was an absolute joy—I’d try to catch familiar English words,” she shares. This experience reinforced Jasha’s philosophy: learning English best occurs immersively, by discussing texts without a dictionary and encouraging students to “think” in English through activities like jumbled sentences and interactive games. Her approach to grammar focuses on context rather than correctness. “Grammar is just a means to an end”, she says, embedding it within the meaning her students wish to convey.

Toward a New Paradigm in English Language Teaching

The lived experiences of these NNESTs underscore the need for a shift in English language teaching paradigms. Embracing cyborg identities, these teachers demonstrate that an educator’s value lies not in their accent or birthplace but in their hybridity, engagement, and inspiration. Recognizing NNESTs’ hybrid professionalism can help educational institutions move beyond outdated binaries and create spaces where diverse voices are celebrated.

Through their stories, NNESTs like Natalie, Mahati, Janaki, Namani, Laura, and Jasha embody Haraway’s cyborg vision: educators who transcend boundaries, integrate facets of their identities, and reshape the future of education. By embracing cyborg identities, they enrich the classroom and create a new model for English teaching in today’s interconnected world. In their journey from marginalization to empowerment, these teachers remind us that education is a space for hybridity, inclusivity and horizons of possibility—qualities that benefit students, educators, and society alike.

Reference

The blog is based on:
Nigar, N., Kostogriz, A., & Hossain, I. (2024, aop). Hybrid professional identities: Exploring non-native English-speaking teachers’ lived experiences through the Cyborg Manifesto. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1–23.

Author Bios

Dr Nashid Nigar teaches at the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, and has diverse experience in English language and literacy teaching, academic writing, and teacher education. Her recently completed PhD thesis, focusing on language teacher professional identity at Monash University, was graded as Exceptional—Of the highest merit, placing within the top 0.1% to fewer than 5% of international doctorates. Her ongoing research interests include language teacher professional identity and language/literacy learning and teaching.

Alex Kostogriz is a Professor in Languages and TESOL Education at the Faculty of Education, Monash University. Alex’s current research projects focus on the professional practice and ethics of language teachers, teacher education and experiences of beginning teachers.

Tazin and Brynn, two of our enthusiastic podcast hosts

Editor’s note: Time flies: the Language-on-the-Move Podcast in collaboration with the New Books Network just turned one! Time to celebrate and reflect!

We celebrate a passionate team of hosts who created 43 insightful episodes about language in social life which have been downloaded 57,000 times across a range of platforms.

By download numbers, our top-5 episodes were:

1. Muslim Literacies in China: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ibrar Bhatt
2. Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko
3. Politics of language oppression in Tibet: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Gerald Roche
4. Making sense of “Bad English:” Brynn Quick in conversation with Elizabeth Peterson
5. Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko

Providing a service to our communities by sharing knowledge about intercultural communication, language learning and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization is a key benefit of the Language-on-the-Move Podcast.

Another benefit accrues to our hosts who get to chat with key thinkers in our field. In this post, two of our hosts, Brynn Quick and Tazin Abdullah, share their reflections on the occasion of our 1st birthday. Enjoy and here’s to many more milestones!

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Brynn Quick and Tazin Abdullah
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Over the past year, many of us on the Language on the Move Team have been excitedly hosting podcasts about a wide range of topics in language and social life! As we dive into recording and producing our podcasts for the year ahead, we would like to share why this continues to be a rich and rewarding experience for us as PhD students at the beginning of our research journeys.

1. Wider horizons: Sounds cliché but oh, so true! Each time we host a podcast, we spend a significant amount of time doing background research. We research our guests, their interests, and their work. The opportunity created for reading is amazing. Not only do we dip our toes into the vast ocean that is all things language, we learn new things to enhance our own research and add to our reference lists!
2. Bigger networks: We establish relationships with our guests and connect with others in their networks. Our guests are great – they stay in touch! As the podcast is promoted on various platforms, we make connections with linguists around the world and are able to remain updated on developments in our field and directions that different researchers are taking.
3. Informal mentors: Did we mention our guests are great? Our guests indulge us in lively and interesting conversations not just during the podcast but also off air. Every guest shares their experiences, offers us advice and stays open to us reaching out if we have any questions on their area of expertise or if we need to understand some part of the academic journey.
4. Technical skills: Who knew how much work goes into the editing and production of a podcast episode? But this has also been a great learning experience, dabbling with technology and learning the ins and outs of various platforms – another transferable skill for emerging researchers.
5. Successful collaboration: The podcast is just one more example of how collaboration between fellow researchers results in an overall increase in both productivity and learning. Many times, we have reflected amongst ourselves about the way our podcast works. We support, mentor and acknowledge each other and, like a feel-good movie, are left wanting to collaborate some more.
6. Future collaborations: And yes, it has opened doors for us to future collaborations, to be able to reach out through our now wider networks and pursue our wide-ranging interests in linguistics and adjacent disciplines.
7. Non-traditional research outputs: Finally, what we love looking at – our updated research output lists every time a podcast drops! And an added bonus for those of us who prefer talking about research rather than writing about it, this format speaks right to us! As non-traditional research outputs, podcasts have offered us a practical way for us to engage with our learning in real-world settings, to use and develop our various skills, and contribute to research at the same time.

We give our podcast hosting experience a 5-star rating! If you enjoy the Language on the Move podcasts, please leave us 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.

Full list of episodes published to date

1. Episode 43: Multilingual crisis communication: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Li Jia (22/01/2025)
2. Episode 42: Politics of language oppression in Tibet: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Gerald Roche (14/01/2025)
3. Episode 41: Why teachers turn to AI: Brynn Quick in conversation with Sue Ollerhead (09/01/2025)
4. Episode 40: Language Rights in a Changing China: Brynn Quick in conversation with Alexandra Grey (01/01/2025)
5. Episode 39: Whiteness, Accents, and Children’s Media: Brynn Quick in conversation with Laura Smith-Khan (24/12/2024)
6. Episode 38: Creaky Voice in Australian English: Brynn Quick in conversation with Hannah White (18/12/2024)
7. Episode 37: Supporting multilingual families to engage with schools: Agi Bodis in conversation with Margaret Kettle (20/11/2024)
8. Episode 36: Linguistic diversity as a bureaucratic challenge: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Clara Holzinger (17/11/2024)
9. Episode 35: Judging refugees: Laura Smith-Khan in conversation with Anthea Vogl (02/11/2024)
10. Episode 34: How did Arabic get on that sign? Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Rizwan Ahmad (30/10/2024)
11. Episode 33: Migration, constraints and suffering: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Marco Santello (14/10/2024)
12. Episode 32: Living together across borders: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Lynnette Arnold (07/10/2024)
13. Episode 31: Police first responders interacting with domestic violence victims: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Kate Steel (29/09/2024)
14. Episode 30: Remembering Barbara Horvath: Livia Gerber in conversation with Barbara Horvath (10/09/2024)
15. Episode 29: English Language Ideologies in Korea: Brynn Quick in conversation with Jinhyun Cho (08/09/2024)
16. Episode 28: Sign Language Brokering: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jemina Napier (30/07/2024)
17. Episode 27: Muslim Literacies in China: Tazin Abdullah in conversation with Ibrar Bhatt (24/07/2024)
18. Episode 26: Life in a New Language, Pt 6 – Citizenship: Brynn Quick in conversation with Emily Farrell (17/07/2024)
19. Episode 25: Life in a New Language, Pt 5 – Monolingual Mindset: Brynn Quick in conversation with Loy Lising (11/07/2024)
20. Episode 24: Language policy at an abortion clinic: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ella van Hest (05/07/2024)
21. Episode 23: Life in a New Language, Pt 4 – Parenting: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shiva Motaghi-Tabari (03/07/2024)
22. Episode 22: Life in a New Language, Pt 3 – African migrants: Brynn Quick in conversation with Vera Williams Tetteh (27/06/2024)
23. Episode 21: Life in a New Language, Pt 2 –Work: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ingrid Piller (19/06/2024)
24. Episode 20: Life in a New Language, Pt 1 – Identities: Brynn Quick in conversation with Donna Butorac (12/06/2024)
25. Episode 19: Because Internet: Brynn Quick in conversation with Gretchen McCulloch (03/06/2024)
26. Episode 18: Between Deaf and hearing cultures: Emily Pacheco in conversation with Jessica Kirkness (01/06/2024)
27. Episode 17: The Rise of English: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Rosemary Salomone (21/05/2024)
28. Episode 16: Community Languages Schools Transforming Education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Joe Lo Bianco (07/05/2024)
29. Episode 15: Shanghai Multilingualism Alliance: Yixi (Isabella) Qui in conversation with Yongyan Zheng (02/05/2024)
30. Episode 14: Multilingual Commanding Urgency from Garbage to COVID-19: Brynn Quick in conversation with Michael Chestnut (27/04/2024)
31. Episode 13: Making sense of “Bad English:” Brynn Quick in conversation with Elizabeth Peterson (13/04/2024)
32. Episode 12: History of Modern Linguistics: Ingrid Piller in conversation with James McElvenny (10/04/2024)
33. Episode 11: 40 Years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University: Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jasna Novak Milić (08/04/2024
34. Episode 10: Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance in Hospital: Brynn Quick in conversation with Erin Mulpur, Houston Methodist Hospital (26/03/2024)
35. Episode 9: Interpreting service provision is good value for money. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Jim Hlavac (19/03/2024)
36. Episode 8: What does it mean to govern a multilingual society well? Hanna Torsh in conversation with Alexandra Grey (22/02/2024)
37. Episode 7: What can Australian Message Sticks teach us about literacy? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Piers Kelly (21/02/2024; originally published 2020)
38. Episode 6: How to teach TESOL ethically in an English-dominant world. Carla Chamberlin and Mak Khan in conversation with Ingrid Piller (20/02/2024; originally published 2020)
39. Episode 5: Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism? Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (19/02/2024; originally published 2021)
40. Episode 4: Language makes the place. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Adam Jaworski (18/02/2024; originally published 2022)
41. Episode 3: Linguistic diversity in education: Hanna Torsh in conversation with Ingrid Gogolin (17/02/2024; originally published 2023)
42. Episode 2: Translanguaging: Loy Lising in conversation with Ofelia García (16/02/2024; originally published 2023)
43. Episode 1: Lies we tell ourselves about multilingualism. Ingrid Piller in conversation with Aneta Pavlenko (15/02/2024)

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

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

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

Reference

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

Other 3MT videos by members of the Language on the Move team

• Brynn Quick, Curing Confusion
• Pia Tenedero, Communicating globally while working remotely

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

Guest lecture abstract:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reference

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

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Laura Smith-Khan and Alex Grey

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Dr Jinhyun Cho

Dr Jinhyun Cho has investigated interplays between monolingualism and multilingual practices in courtrooms, with a focus on interpreters. Focusing on linguistic, institutional and cultural hierarchies in Australian legal spaces, Dr Jinhyun Cho’s work has revealed how power differentials influence the choices that legal interpreters make in the course of interpreting and drawn attention to the need for legal professionals to enhance their awareness of interpreting through the formalisation of multilingualism within university-level studies of law. She is based at Macquarie University in Australia.

Her 2024 collaborative work on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (the ECCC) represents her broad interdisciplinary approach which brings together interpreting, sociolinguistics and law.

Recent publications

Killean, R., Grey, R., Cho, J., & Stern, L. (2024). Translating atrocity at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. New Mandala.
Cho, J. (2021). Intercultural communication in interpreting: Power and choices. Routledge.
Cho, J. (2021). ‘That’s not how we speak’: interpreting monolingual ideologies in courtrooms. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 50-70.

Research project team (L-R): Dr Julie Lim, Professor Ludmila Stern, Professor Sandra Hale, Associate Professor Melanie Schwartz and Professor Stephen Doherty, April 2024

Professor Sandra Hale

In addition to her role in the project led by Ludmila Stern described below, Sandra Hale and another team at the University of New South Wales in Australia (Prof Jane Goodman-Delahunty, Dr Natalie Martschuk and Dr Susan Brandon) have been working since 2020 on a project funded by the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation entitled ‘Remote simultaneous interpreting in investigative interviews: The effect of language and interpreter training on deception detection, interpreting accuracy and witness credibility’. Keep an eye out for publications coming out of this project soon.

Recent publications

Hale, S., Martschuk, N., Goodman-Delahunty, J. & Lim, J. (30 Apr 2024): Juror perceptions in bilingual interpreted trials, Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice.
Hale, S., Lim, J., Martschuk, N., & Goodman-Delahunty, J. (2023). Note-taking in court interpreting: Interpreter perceptions and practices in a simulated trial. The International Journal for Translation & Interpreting Research, pp.1-21.
Hale, S., Goodman-Delahunty, J., Martschuk, N., & Lim, J. (2022). Does interpreter location make a difference? A study of remote vs face-to-face interpreting in simulated police interviews. Interpreting:  International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting, 24(2), pp.221-253.

Michael Jones

Michael Jones has been involved with the interpreting and translation profession for over 40 years and has worked as a NAATI accredited translator and interpreter between English and Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish (NAATI is Australia’s National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters). He likes to call himself a language nerd. He has always been fascinated with languages since growing up in Sydney near two of the old migrant camps of the 1960s. He studied Linguistics at Sydney University in the 1970s.

As a lawyer specialising in immigration and citizenship law, Michael Jones also works extensively with interpreters and translators in courts, tribunals and other professional settings, and is happy to share his experiences and observations with others studying the field.

Dr Rachel Killean and Dr Rosemary Grey

In 2023, University of Sydney Law School researchers Rachel Killean and Rosemary Grey launched a new project ‘Translating Atrocity: Bridging language barriers in Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal.’ The project focuses on challenges of interpretation and translation arising in the United Nations-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia (ECCC) which works across the Khmer, English and French languages. Drawing on their original interviews with translators and interpreters who worked at the court, Rachel Killean and Rosemary Grey are identifying Khmer terms that have been difficult to translate into English and French and vice-versa; examining how translation challenges have been addressed; and assessing how translators and interpreters have affected the tribunal’s capacity to assess evidence and communicate effectively with the public. The findings have potential value for the functioning of other international tribunals, including the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Members of the public arriving at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia to hear its main judgment (Image credit: Rosemary Grey, Phnom Penh, 2018

Rachel Killean and Rosemary Grey hope to continue collaborations with translation studies scholars, as well as interpreters/translators working in international criminal justice.

Recent publications

Killean, R., Grey, R. (2023). Interpretation and Translation in Atrocity Trials: Insights from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Cambridge International Law Journal, 12(2), 211-234.
Grey, R. (2022). Translating Gender Diversity in International Criminal Law: An Impossible but Necessary Goal. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 47(2), 163-186.
Killean, R., Grey, R., Cho, J. and Stern. L., ‘Translating atrocity at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal‘, New Mandala, 17 January 2024.
Grey, R. and Stern, L., ‘“Kadago’ in the Courtroom: Language Disputes in Atrocity Trials‘, Opinio Juris, 31 January 2024:

Dr Lucy Xin LIU

Dr Lucy Liu Xin’s research centres on the accuracy of Mandarin-English court interpreting and its implications for due process. She is particularly interested in exploring the interface between interpreting and pragmatics in legal settings. Her recent work explores the multimodal aspects of court interpreting, such as examining multimodal turn-taking strategies of court interpreters and utilizing acoustic tools for the analysis of courtroom discourse. She is based at Dalian University of Technology in China.

Recent publications

Liu, X., & Wang, C. (2023). How Does Interpreter’s Intonation Affect the Pragmatics of Courtroom Questions? A Case Study of Chinese-English Court Interpreting. In J. Zhao, D. Li, & V. L. C. Lei (Eds.), New Advances in Legal Translation and Interpreting (pp. 137-162). Singapore: Springer.
Liu, X. (2020). Pragmalinguistic challenges for trainee interpreters in achieving accuracy: An analysis of questions and their translation in five cross-examinations. Interpreting, 22(1), 87-116.
Stern, L., & Liu, X. (2020). Interpreting Studies. In S. Laviosa & M. González Davies (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education (pp. 226-244). Oxfordshire: Routledge.
Stern, L., & Liu, X. (2019). Ensuring interpreting quality in legal and courtroom settings: Australian Language Service Providers’ perspectives on their role. The Journal of Specialised Translation(32), 90-120.
Stern, L., & Liu, X. (2019). See you in court: How do Australian institutions train legal interpreters? The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 13(4), 361-389.

Dr Laura Smith-Khan

Laura Smith-Khan’s work explores how multilingualism is managed in and conceptualized by tribunals and courts in the context of assessing credibility in asylum applications in Australia. This was one focus of her doctoral research and has continued to be an area of interest in her more recent work.

She has also examined how migration lawyers and agents play a role in mediating multilingual communication in migration procedures, both at the initial application stage and at the tribunal, when an appeal is necessary. This work has led her to travel to Belgium in 2023 to spend time at Ghent University as a visiting scholar, and where she continues to have an external affiliation with UGhent’s Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees. She has presented her research to judges and other decision-makers from Australia and internationally and it has also been cited in EU Agency for Asylum guidance on credibility and evidence assessment.

Recent publications

Smith-Khan, L. (forthcoming). Incredible language and refugee legal processes: Challenging asylum credibility assessments, in J Setter et al (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Prejudice.
Maryns, K., Smith-Khan, L. & Jacobs, M. (2023). Multilingualism in asylum and migration procedures, in McKinney et al (eds), Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, 2^nd ed, Ch. 26.
Smith-Khan, L. (2023). Incorporating sociolinguistic perspectives in Australian refugee credibility assessments: The case of CRL18. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 24, 727-743 (invited contribution for special issue).
Smith-Khan, L. (2021). ‘I Try Not to Be Dominant, but I’m a Lawyer!’: Advisor Resources, Context and Refugee Credibility. Journal of Refugee Studies, 34(4), 3710-3733.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019). Why refugee visa credibility assessments lack credibility: A critical discourse analysis, Griffith Law Review, 28(4), 406-430.

Professor Ludmila Stern

Professor Ludmila Stern is leading a team including Professor Sandra Hale, Professor Stephen Doherty and Associate Professor Melanie Schwartz from the University of New South Wales in Australia and a number of partner organizations on the project, Access to justice in interpreted proceedings: The role of Judicial Officers, funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant.

The research team is examining the ways judicial officers can improve courtroom communication and prevent miscommunication and error, particularly in criminal cases where speakers of ‘new and emerging’ and First Nations languages are involved, and where interpreters receive limited or no specialised training. Using an interdisciplinary approach that involves court observations, interviews with judicial officers and interpreters, and discourse analysis of court transcripts, the project aims to generate new knowledge about the variations in judicial officers’ communications practice when working with interpreters, and their impact on the effective transmission of information in the courtroom.

Having initially started in two international courts, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia / International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals and the International Criminal Court, the project then focused on the way judges and magistrates work in interpreted proceedings in Australia courts, with field work now completed in the Australian jurisdictions of New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

Dr Xiaoyu Zhao

Dr Xiaoyu Zhao recently completed her PhD on interpreting studies at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Her PhD project investigated the impact of court-specific factors on Simultaneous Interpreting performance and explains these factors’ effects using Cognitive Load Theory. Her research has provided empirical evidence that enhances the understanding of the impact of task-, environment-, and interpreter-related factors on Simultaneous Interpreting performance in the court context. Additionally, it offers insights into interpreter training and professional practices that align with both national and international standards aimed at improving interpreters’ working conditions.

Dr Xiaoyu Zhao is currently working as an adjunct lecturer at Monash University in Australia and as a research fellow at the Monash Suzhou Research Institute in China. Her current research projects include a corpus analysis of interpreted texts in court settings and court interpreting pedagogy.

Recent publications

Zhao, X. (2023). A multidimensional investigation of cognitive load and performance over time during simultaneous interpreting between English and Mandarin Chinese [Doctoral dissertation, UNSW Syndey]. UNSWorks.

What about you?

Do you work or research in an area related to multilingualism in courts and tribunals, or another area where language and law intersect? Join the LLIRN!

What other language and law topics would you like to learn about? Have your say on our next “LLIRN About Us” blog post. Let us know in the comments or join the network and send us an email!

Upcoming Events

Multilingualism in courts and tribunals is the focus of two presentations scheduled within a themed session at the upcoming Australian Linguistic Society Conference (26-29 November at ANU). The session’s overall theme is ‘Law-and-Linguistics Research: Language, Diversity and Inclusion in Law’, and includes:

• Joseph van Buuren presenting new research on Australian criminal appeal judgements where applicants claim they have been denied rights or procedural fairness on the basis of language difference;
• Helen Fraser promoting inclusivity and justice in the use of language as forensic evidence by analysing the origins of linguistic ideologies and misconceptions in the law.

In the interview, Barbara reflects on the early years of her career as an American linguist in Australia in the 1970s, and how linguistics and language in Australia have changed since then.

The transcript was edited by Brynn Quick.

Update 23/09/2024: The audio is now available here or on your podcast app of choice.

***

Livia: So, you’re very difficult to google and to do background research on!

Barbara: Really?! Whenever I look myself up, I start finding me all over the place (laughs).

Livia: I did find a couple of things about you, like the fact that you had actually studied in Georgetown and Michigan, and that you came over to Sydney in the 1970s. Then I was astounded to find that you were the second linguist at University of Sydney. It was just you and Michael Halliday.

Barbara: Yes, but he only got there a couple of months before me. It was the birth of the Linguistics Department.

Livia: Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like when the field was so young?

Barbara: Well, I guess the answer to the story is that my husband got a job here. He’s a geographer, and we were in Vancouver at the time in Canada. He was teaching at Simon Fraser, and I was teaching at the University of British Columbia. We were both lucky, those were both just jobs for a year or two. I was writing my dissertation at that point.

So, we started applying, and he applied to the University of Sydney, and he got the job! And I applied, and I was told by a number of people at the University of British Columbia, linguists, that I didn’t have a chance. That there was no chance, it was only going to be one other person hired. And Michael, you know had a wife, Ruqaiya Hassan, and everybody was sure that Ruqaiya would get the other job. So, I didn’t have very much hope, but then I got the job!

I was just so amazed that I got the job, and I found out from Michael later that it turned out that the reason I got the job is, he was very interested in starting a department that would combine both systemics and Labovian kinds of sociolinguistics. He thought somehow we’d be able to mesh in an interesting kind of way, having different interests and different ways of configuring what the major issues were.

But we had great overlaps because I was just as interested in applied linguistics, and Michael certainly was and wanted to build a department up as a place for both theoretical and applied interests. So, it was that it was very exciting times for us when we did both get jobs at the same university which didn’t seem like that was going to be possible at all, but it was!

Livia: How long were you at Sydney for?

Barbara: Until I retired. It was my only place until I retired in 1980-something or 1990-something. I know I retired early because in those days women could retire at 55, so it was when I turned 55 that I retired. But after that is when I got more interested in working with a friend of mine in Louisiana, and we worked together for 10 or 12 years after that.

Livia: You’re also a female scholar who migrated to Australia. How did that shape your research or your role as a researcher?

Barbara: I don’t know that being a female shaped my research. I was much more interested in social issues. The time when I was doing my master’s and PhD were times of great upheaval with the anti-Vietnam war situation. I spent some time in my master’s degree working with Mexican children in California. I collected data there, and so it was more an interest in social issues.

I found the linguistics of theoretical people like Chomsky, for instance, very interesting. I found that the kinds of questions and the way he was doing linguistics was so different from writing grammars of language, for instance, which was the main thing that linguists were doing at that point, describing languages that hadn’t been described. I didn’t mind that either, but I was really taken in by the more political sides of things, and so when Labov first published his dissertation which was only when I was still at the master’s level, I just thought, Oh! This is what I want. This brings social issues and linguistics together.

I thought he was asking questions about how language changes, and I was very interested in that as a theoretical question. If it was going on before and it’s going on now, can you observe it changing? And when they came up with these nice statistical means and then the data necessary for using those statistical means to look at language changes, I found that theoretically exciting.

Livia: So, did you have a very big research team helping you when you first did the nearly 200 interviews in the Sydney?

Barbara: No, no, no! Not at all. I mean, that story is kind of funny. When I came here and it was only Michael and me, I had no idea about how the university worked. It was very different from American universities. I didn’t know how different it was. Michael was much more familiar with it I suspect because of his English background.

I came over here thinking, oh my gosh I have to get tenure because in America you have to get tenure within your first six years or else you’re going to go to some other university. And we had moved all around the world, my husband and I and my two little children. When we get to Sydney we thought, we’re just going to stay there. We’re not going to move at all. So, then I thought I’ve got to get busy, so I applied for a grant to do New York City all over again, except in Sydney.

That first year we collected the data from the Anglos. The Italians and the Greeks were in the third year. So, the first year Anne Snell and I collected all the data (chuckles) and made the preliminary transcripts. I think we had money for getting transcripts typed, and we had money for Anne and me to run around all over Sydney trying to get interviews with people. Then Anne and I sat together in my living room at the end of the data collection period just listening to the tapes and checking with each other if we were all hearing the same thing.

Then I found out afterwards that there is no such thing as tenure. If they hire you, they hire you, and they’re not going to think about getting rid of you. Oh! All that work I did! It was very funny.

It was when my supervisor from Georgetown, Roger Shuy, came over for participating in a conference. He said, “Barbara, I’m going to ask Michael how you’re doing.” And I said, “Ok.” He asked Michael did he think I’d get tenure, and Michael said something like, “I don’t know! I don’t think they do tenure here.” (laughs). Oh dear!

So anyway, I was working really hard. I thought I needed to, but I think I would’ve done it anyway. I definitely have no regrets. I’m glad we worked that hard, but it did mean coming home from teaching at the university – because most of the interviews were done at night, they were done after people had dinner – so Anne and I both got home, fed our families, turned around, got in a car and went off somewhere.

Livia: So, let’s talk about your data. You had a lot of data. I read a quote of yours somewhere where you said it was amazing how much variation there was, and that you were really excited about that.

I actually went to the Powerhouse Museum yesterday, and I looked at the Sydney Speaks app. I didn’t get all of the questions right! One of the teaching points in the app was that unless you live and grew up in Sydney, you’re not likely to get a lot of these right. So, for you, who didn’t grow up in Sydney, as an initial outsider, I’m sure the language variation would have been fascinating for you to learn about, as well as all the social aspects behind it. There are differences in society despite the classlessness that Australia prides itself in.

Barbara: Yeah, and again, you know, I came over here totally understanding that what I was seeing was social class. I mean it’s just social class as far as I’m concerned. It wasn’t that much different except certain ethnicities were different and all that sort of thing.

I looked for the sociology in it, and I though ok I’ll do like Labov did. He just found a sociologist, and he just used whatever categories the sociologist did! I found one tiny article from the University of New South Wales, and it just wasn’t that useful, so in a way I kind of had to figure out for myself what I thought. In the book I talk about how you come up against problems, like for example you have somebody who owns a milk bar, you know, in terms of the working class-or the middle class or whatever. So, you know, I think the class thing is fraught, and it’s still fraught today. It’s not well defined, though it’s better defined than it used to be.

Livia: And in general, there are ideas about the categories we imagine that people fall into. There are so many assumptions and myths out there.

Barbara: Absolutely, but then even when you decide that somebody is either Italian, Greek or Anglo, even those titles are complicated. Very many people didn’t like me using the term Anglo because they would rather be called Australians. That’s the way people were talking about it then, that there were Australians, Italians and Greeks.

But I remember one Scottish person said how insulted he was to be put in with the Anglos. I said well I suppose you are, come to think of it. So yeah, it was kind of fraught. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, to come in as a real foreigner, and not really knowing very much about Australia at all before we came and then trying to jump in to something like this.

I guess the thing that helped a lot is anybody who I hired were Australians, so they could um tell me when I was really going off the rails. I felt more comfortable with the Greeks and the Italians because they were foreigners like me, so they had different ways of understanding Australia as well.

Livia: That’s fascinating, especially considering in sociolinguistics at the moment that researcher positionality is a very big topic and having to justify your own positionality and reflect on your influence in the interview.

Barbara: Yes, but you know I don’t understand how we would ever do studies of other peoples if we only had ourselves to look at, that is if everybody else was just like you. First of all, I wouldn’t have found very many Americans of my particular background, so I think you have to be cautious about these things.

But what I also think is that when you do a kind of statistical analysis in the way that I did, and when you see the patterns that resolve, you think something is generating those patterns. It’s probably the social aspects as well as the linguistic aspects. You need to always be conscious of what you’re doing, as I was, with class. I knew I had no right to be assigning class to people because not even, you know, Marxists do that. Even though they believe in class, absolutely, they don’t go along classifying people. They talk about members of the working class, but it’s kind of a broad sweeping hand kind of thing.

So, in terms of picking up on the linguistic variable that I looked at, I really depended upon Mitchell and Delbridge and their work before me. So, we knew the vowels were very important in Australian English. If you look at Labov’s work, vowels are the most likely changing features of a language, and then of course certain consonants come up as well.

Livia: You just brought up Arthur Delbridge. Let’s talk a little bit about your colleagues over the years, particularly also the colleagues you’ve met through the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS). Could you maybe tell me a little bit about your involvement with the ALS?

Barbara: I’m sure that I attended some ALS meetings from whenever I got here to whenever I left! But I didn’t attend after I retired. I don’t recall going to too many meetings, but early on it was a small group of people, as you can imagine. It was Delbridge and I’m not sure who else, but Delbridge for sure was a major person in the early stage in getting the whole thing going as far as I know.

It was a small group of people, a very friendly group of people who got together. It was the first time that I saw a group of students or university people who were interested in Aboriginal languages because we didn’t really have that in Sydney at first until Michael Walsh joined the faculty. So, I realised that, at least among young people, there was really the enthusiasm for Australian linguistics.

The meetings were always held at some university. We always lived in the dormitories together, so it was, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner with a very friendly group of people. And there were good papers. You could listen to papers on Aboriginal languages, for instance, that I wasn’t getting from any other place, so that that was all very interesting.

When I first came here, John Bernard was very helpful to me, and I used his work as well on vowels in Australian English. Those were very fundamental. If I hadn’t had those as a base, I could not have done my work as quickly as I did, but because they’d worked on that for a long time, it was very helpful.

I also remember the systemics people, Jim Martin and Michael (Halliday), coming, and they had a harder time because I think there weren’t a sufficient number of them. There was Ruqaiya and Michael and Jim at first, but eventually, as you know, they got a sufficient number of people, and then they became very, very big.

Then it became the really, the major direction in the department. By the time I left, it was not the only direction. They would go on to certainly hire more people who are in sociolinguistics. Two or three different Americans came over to work, and others like Ingrid (Piller). So yeah, it’s expanded and now it’s a very different department from what it was when I was there.

The department was really small for those first ten or twelve years. We were very close. We used to plan weekends together where, you know, we’d go at the end of the year and we’d go off camping! We’d go somewhere together. The graduate students and the staff just did things together, and that was very nice. So, you made very warm relationships with many people who came from that era. Maybe it’s still the same way. It may still be wonderful.

When Michael Walsh came, it was important for him to come because we were getting to look like we weren’t an “Australian” bunch of people, so when Michael came at least he legitimised us because he was working on Aboriginal languages. He was an Australian, so we all learned how to be Australian from Michael.

Livia: Whatever “Australian” means nowadays, right? (laughs)

Barbara: Yeah, whatever that means. Well, I think of myself as practically Australian now, but nobody else does, so (laughs) that’s just the way it is.

Livia: What’s it like for you walking around, say, Glebe now and hearing all the variation in Australian English? Do you get very excited when you hear people speaking?

Barbara: I don’t think I want to go and do another study, no! No, no. I still like to listen. I feel that there’s some things that I could have pursued, and perhaps I should’ve. I’ve always felt, I keep telling this to every sociolinguist I ever meet in Australia, and that is that somebody needs to study the Lebanese community. The Lebanese community is going to be very, very interesting, and of course if you don’t capture it really soon, you know, it will –

Livia: Has no one done that?

Barbara: No, not really. I know of no major study now. Maybe somebody’s done it a little bit here and there, but I think that would be fascinating to study, so I keep trying to urge people to study the Lebanese community.

Livia: That’s interesting because they’re a fairly recent migrant group but not that recent.

Barbara: No, not that recent. They were when I when I was doing my studies. The Greeks and the Italians were the major groups that anybody ever talked about, so when you were talking about migrants you meant the Greeks and the Italians. But the Lebanese were becoming a force, particularly if you were doing applied linguistic work. If you were working with the schools, the most recent group to migrate in large numbers were the Lebanese. So, I felt even then that I couldn’t face doing another major work like that again. But every time we did get a new sociolinguist, I told them that they should be studying the Lebanese community.

Livia: Too bad I’m nearly finished with my thesis (both laugh). But to take you back to the ALS conference days – what do you remember of those?

Barbara: Bearing in mind I haven’t been to a meeting in many years, what I recall of them is that most of the papers were interesting. I do recall the social aspects of it, getting together with groups of people who are linguists and just talking among yourselves. That, to me, is the best part about meetings all together. Unless it’s somebody who’s absolutely giving a paper right on what you’re interested because then you’re just kind of sitting there absorbing and thinking. But actually talking to people, especially because, as I said, we were a small group at that point, so it was very personal and interactional. That’s the main thing that I think about when I think about the ALS.

Livia: I’m always told when you go to conferences that it’s good to be criticised or challenged in your ideas, or that out of failure come new ideas. I’m just wondering whether you recall a time when that happened to you, that you were maybe challenged in your ideas but that actually ultimately took you in a direction that was more fruitful?

Barbara: I think people treated me very well, so I don’t recall any criticism. No, there was criticism when my book first came out, but it was well-intended. In those days we really didn’t do those things publicly. Everybody was incredibly polite to everyone else, so even if you did think, “oh that was a stupid paper,” you wouldn’t say it, and you wouldn’t embarrass somebody with it. I think you might challenge them later over coffee, but it was a very polite society at that time.

This was unlike some of the American things that you go to where you get somebody in the audience who is just dying to “get you”, you know? That kind of thing was not a nice feeling. People treated me very well, and I know now from looking back that I came over here like a bull in a china shop in the sense of who was I to be coming here and taking on such a big project, and taking it on with the manner and attitude that I had? I know this now because I’ve been here long enough to know how you feel about people who come here, and suddenly they know everything about anything. So, I think I probably stepped on a few toes, partly out of innocence.

One of the reasons I really like Chomsky is that he is argumentative, and I don’t mind a good argument. Not a personal one, not one that’s vindictive or whatever, but I think being strong about what you feel or arguing about what you think is controversial – I think that’s healthy for any field. You need to be able to say, you know, I have a different opinion about that, or I think something else is working here.

I got a really nice letter from John Bernard, for instance, who took me to task for a number of things. He wrote me a very long letter. I appreciated the fact that he had put in all that time to respond. I didn’t necessarily agree with him, but I understood where he was coming from. I guess what I like about John Bernard is that even after that he was always very friendly to me. I never had any problems with him, so I hope he never took whatever I said argumentatively to heart (laughs).

Livia: It’s important to have a good scholarly debate without being personal.

Barbara: Yeah, I think so too. But I can imagine I might have the same reaction if somebody came over and redid my work and they’d only been here three months, and I could say, “What would you know?!” (laughs)

You know, it is true that one of the things was the class issue, that I imposed this class issue. I don’t know that he said I imposed it, but he really did want to make the point that class wasn’t as significant in Australia, and he was still supporting the notion that it was a matter of choice, that you could choose. That was so alien to me, and it is still kind of alien to me.

I think people don’t choose the dialect they speak. I think they speak the dialect they’re brought up in, and that doesn’t mean I don’t think people can’t change their dialect. I think they can if they want to, if they move somewhere else or if they, you know, get a PhD and become professor of Physics or something. I think they can move up and down, up and down. I think that can happen, but it was the word “choose”, I think, that that bothered me a lot. I couldn’t see kids deciding, “oh I’m not going to speak like that anymore,” because they probably haven’t even heard anybody speak any other way except on television, and how much do we get from television? Or radio, or that kind of thing? I don’t think that much. But I just- I came in at that moment, I think, before a lot of people would understand that choosing isn’t probably the right word or the right conception of how dialect changes, that- that you decide to speak a different way. Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it! (chuckles)

Livia: Speaking of changes – you’ve been in Australian linguistics for a bit of a while. What are sort of the major changes that you’ve seen happening in the field?

Barbara: I can tell you about my department. There’s much more interest in descriptive language, grammatical description. That’s really very big in the Sydney department. What’s happening in the rest of the department, I’m just not familiar with.

The set up that Michael (Halliday) managed to create in the department is kind of there, but it has a very different flavour. It’s much more anthropological, what I would call anthropological linguistics. So, still interested in people, still interested in culture and language as well, and especially in studying the variety of languages. I think it’s probably a firmer basis for study than sociolinguistics, and even Michael’s kind of sociolinguistics works best, I think, if you’re a native speaker of the language. I mean, why else is it that we get so much work on English? Because it’s kind of an English-based theoretical position. When I go to meetings, I meet lots of people from Europe and various other places who are studying their own languages in a sociolinguistic manner. But anyway, I would be out of place, I think, in the department now because I’d be the only one doing that.

I’ve been going to the seminars this year, and they’re very interesting papers that are being given with a lot of really interesting and new (to me) people in the department. I know this honours student that I was telling you about, that I was mentoring this year. She is so enthusiastic, and yet there isn’t any real place in this department for her to pursue her work. She had to do a lot of work in figuring out how to collect data, how to interpret your own findings after you’ve done the statistical analysis, all that stuff. She had a real task ahead of her, and I’m glad to say that Catherine Travis has picked up some of my work with that.

I don’t know if you know, but I was about to get rid of all my tapes. I downsized about five years ago. I just decided I was going to downsize. I was not going to do any more research, so it was time to just clean up my house, and I came to those tapes that I had saved from all these years ago. I thought, ah I know somebody in the world would like to have these tapes eventually, but they were still on these little cassettes. They needed a lot of work done with them before they’d be useful to anybody anymore, so anyway she got in touch with me. I said to her, by the way if you have any interest at all in my tapes because I’m just about to ditch them – and she wrote back quickly, “Don’t! Don’t! I’ll be up-I’ll come up and pick them up!”. (laughs)

So, she did, and I’m so glad because she really is doing some great work down there. So, I hope my little honours student goes down there to finish her work because I think she’s so enthusiastic.

Livia: Coming back to Sydney Speaks – I was looking through the Sydney Speaks webpage and there seem to be quite a few projects that are reaching a wider population.

Barbara: Yes, there’s lots of stuff. They’re collecting more data. They seem to be interested in ethnic varieties of English, that sort of thing, so yeah! It’s a whole new revitalisation, I think, of the interest in ethnic varieties of English. There are so many new and large migrations that have happened since the Italians. I mean, the Italians and the Greeks – Leichhardt, for instance, it’s not there anymore. You can’t go there and see that whole row of Italian restaurants that you used to find. Now you go to buy your coffee where you’ve always been to buy your coffee, and it does not seem to be run by Italians anymore, that kind of thing. So yeah, no Greeks and Italians.

I think it’s probably the case that you need two generations. You need the parent generation and the teenager (more or less what I did) because I suspect by the time it gets to the third generation, it’s gone. They’re just Aussies, and they speak like Aussies, and you wouldn’t find anything very interesting. So, you’ve got to catch it when it’s there. Timing is everything.

Livia: Are you going to be attending the ALS conference in December? Are you able to make it?

Barbara: No, no, no. I’ve actually not been in linguistics for quite a while now. That’s why I was downsizing, and I had to face it that I hadn’t been doing anything, that’s it! Give it up! Yeah.

Livia: Well, given that the ALS would like some snippets, I was thinking – Are there any wishes you have for the linguistics society moving forward? For their 50^th anniversary?

Barbara: I’m interested in all of these people who are doing the dynamics of language. When I started looking up Catherine and looking up various others and I see all these people are doing something called the dynamics of language. So, what do they mean by that? Well, you know, I doubt they are all Labovians. I guess I’d love to see the group of them getting together in a discussion of just that. What are the dynamics of language that you’re focussing on? What kind of theoretical issues are there? Do you have overlapping goals, or do you have a single set of goals? Does dynamics actually mean language change as it is associated with historical linguistics? Or does it just mean socially dynamic, like other people picking up your language? Or just the use of language? Or how many people still speak Polish? Or is that the dynamics of language? I’d love to see what people are thinking about with the dynamics of language. It’s obviously got people very interested, whatever it is. That’s what I would like I would like to see a discussion of.

Livia: In that vein of wishing things – do you have any advice for PhD and honours students pursuing linguistics?

Barbara: Be passionate about something, and purse that. I was passionate myself for a long time when I did my bachelor’s degree. I knew I wanted to do English and it was all literature. I knew that what I really like is grammar, but I had never heard the word linguistics before. It wasn’t until I went to Ethiopia and I was teaching at Haile Selassie, the first university (now, Addis Ababa University), that I met a group of linguists who had come over there. And I thought oh, Linguistics! That’s what I want to be, you know? Then I really pursued that afterwards, but yeah, find your passion.

I had a very strong kind of social commitment to making a good society, and language is really kind of right in the middle of that.

That’s such an easy cliché, but because, as I said, when I started off, I had a very strong kind of social commitment to making a good society, and language is really kind of right in the middle of that. What I loved about sociolinguistics is that you could easily go in between the more sophisticated theoretical issues as well as being right on the ground and saying here are some problems that we’ve got. How can we think about these things? So, I did a lot of work with schools, and I think being able to interact with your community for me, not everybody, but for me, that was a very important thing.

Livia: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s interesting that language keeps coming up in the media. People are grasping how complex it is, and it has complex social meanings behind it. I mean, most recently we saw this in the citizenship debates of some of the politicians. There were politicians making fun of each other, saying I don’t sound Greek, but everyone always says where are you from, and now I’m the most Aussie in the room.

Barbara: Yeah, absolutely. No, that’s not true of me because I can go to David Jones tomorrow and get up to pay for my goods, and the people will think I’m an American tourist. They’ll ask me how I find Sydney. So, it isn’t true of me. Nobody has ever, ever said that I was an Aussie. (laughs)

Livia: I’ll ask you maybe one last reflective thing. Thinking back to when you first started and you were involved with all these linguists, particularly in the ALS, what advice would you give to yourself?

Barbara: I think, like I said before, it would be about time. I thought I needed to hit the ground running because my kids didn’t want to move to any other place. We didn’t want to move into any other place, so I had to hit the ground running and make sure that I could stay in this position, so that’s what I did. I think if I had known, “oh look, you know, you’re going to be here forever.” Just sort of do it calmly and carefully, and don’t step on any toes. My thing is, yes, take your time with something, but when you first start, you don’t know how much time you’ve got. Anyway, that’s just an excuse.

My thing is, yes, take your time with something, but when you first start, you don’t know how much time you’ve got

Livia: I can imagine. I mean, I’m in a very big department now at Macquarie, and so being particularly around as linguistics students, we’re socialised into the way the university works and what’s expected of us very quickly. But if you’re one of two in a linguistics department that would’ve been extremely confronting.

Barbara: Yes, and I mean it was hard enough for us to figure out everything with us, meaning Michael (Halliday) and me. Where are you going to be coming from? Where am I? He’s always an open sort of person. If you said, “oh I’m going to talk about this, that or the other thing,” he would never say anything negative. He was very open and so there wasn’t a lot of direction there either, so I just took my own direction in a hurry. (laughs)

Livia: And it’s still making waves today!

Barbara: Still making waves today!

Livia: Well, that’s it. It’s been nice! Was there anything else you wanted to add?

Barbara: I think I’ve said it all. (laughs)

References

For a full list see Barbara’s Google Scholar profile.

Horvath, B. M. (1985). Variation in Australian English: the sociolects of Sydney. Cambridge University Press.

Horvath, B. M. (1991). Finding a place in Sydney: migrants and language change. In S. Romaine (Ed.), Language in Australia (pp. 304-317). Cambridge University Press.

Horvath, B. M., & Horvath, R. J. (2001). A multilocality study of a sound change in progress: The case of /l/ vocalization in New Zealand and Australian English. Language Variation and Change, 13, 37–57.

Horvath, B. M., & Sankoff, D. (1987). Delimiting the Sydney Speech Community. Language in Society, 16(2), 179-204.

Mitchell, A. G., & Delbridge, A. (1965). The pronunciation of English in Australia. Angus and Robertson.

Mitchell, A. G., & Delbridge, A. (1965). The speech of Australian adolescents. Angus and Robertson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bio blurb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Farrell: Thanks so much, Brynn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Farrell: Yeah.

Brynn: You’ve gotten that in America too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what was all of that like for you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International migration is at an all-time high as ever more people move across national borders for work or study, in search of refuge or adventure. Regardless of their motivations and whether they intend their moves to be temporary or permanent, all transnational migrants face the challenge of re-building their lives in a different cultural and linguistic context, far away from family and friends, and the everyday routines of their previous lives. Established populations in destination countries may treat migrants with benign neglect at best and outright hostility at worst.

How then do migrants make a new life?

To answer that question, Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

Today, Brynn chats with Loy Lising, one of the book’s six co-authors, with a focus on low-skilled migrants and how their experiences are shaped by monolingual ideologies.

Use promo code AAFLYG6 for a discount when you purchase from Oxford University Press.

Advance praise

“This volume breaks new ground by focusing on Doings: a group of diverse researchers collaboratively doing close listening and looking over 20 years, as adult immigrants to Australia engage in doing life, things, words, family, and work in a new language. The result is not only new understandings of the participants’ self-making, but also the making of a new research trajectory that focuses not simply on the learning of a language, but on humanity doing life in language.” (Ofelia García, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)

“This is a moving book that represents the voices of migrants on their challenges and successes across different kinds of boundaries. It embodies impersonal structural and geopolitical pressures as negotiated in the dreams and aspirations of migrants. The authors share findings from decades-long separate research projects to develop richer insights, as a model for data sharing and ethical research.” (Suresh Canagarajah, Pennsylvania State University)

Related reference

Lising, L. (2024). Multilingual mindset: A necessary concept for fostering inclusive multilingualism in migrant societies. AILA Review

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added 05/08/2024)

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

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

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

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

Dr. Lising is a senior lecturer in linguistics at Macquarie University, as well as a senior fellow with the Higher Education Academy. She’s a member of the International Advisory Panel for Migration Linguistics Unit at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. She served as program director for the Department of Linguistics Master of Cross-Cultural Communication Program at the University of Sydney from 2012 to 2014.

In 2015, she was awarded the Andrew Gonzales Distinguished Professorial Chair in Linguistics and Language Education by the Linguistic Society of the Philippines. Loy is a sociolinguist whose research interests lie at the intersection of multilingualism and migration. Employing both ethnographic and corpus approaches, she investigates the enduring consequences of this convergence on key issues such as heritage language maintenance, the evolving variation in languages in society, induced by language context situations between diasporic communities and mainstream society, and the de facto multilingual practices present on the ground in a society that continues to hold the monolingual ideal.

Welcome to the show, Loy. We’re really excited to have you here today.

Dr. Lising: Thank you, Brynn. I’m really excited to be here and thanks for having me.

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

Dr. Lising: So to begin, I am an Australian linguist of Filipino, particularly Cebuano heritage. And so, the kind of work I do pay homage to those dual identities. My family and I migrated to Australia in 2004.

And in 2005, I started research work in a unit that was then called the National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research. And in 2007, that unit ceased to exist and was replaced by a smaller unit called Adult Migrant English Program Research Centre for which Ingrid became the centre director. And so, in 2008 and 2009, Ingrid hired me as a postdoc to coordinate this national longitudinal multi-sided research project that was funded by the Australian government department called at that time Department of Immigration and Citizenship, which we now know as Department of Home Affairs.

And the focus of this project was on language training and settlement success of migrants to Australia. So, in that study, we shadowed around 150 migrants to Australia across different states and territories. And in that role is where I also met the other authors.

Emily joined from Sydney Uni as Ingrid’s PhD student, and then Donna, Vera and Shiva then started their PhD journey with Ingrid as well. So, I would say that that particular research project was for me transformative and really laid the groundwork for my future research work in trying to understand how living a life in a new country is impacted by how migrants also need to learn a new language or at least a new way of doing and performing a different kind of English to the one they have already and also to their language learning. So, I think our work in the center gave the five of us who were supervised by Ingrid an opportunity to catch her vision and passion for this kind of research focus.

So really Ingrid is the driving force behind this book and her work on this started in 2001 when she was at Sydney Uni and investigated the success and failure in second language learning. And so having supervised the four other authors and also supervised my own research in 2009, really I would say was the starting point of the idea for this book.

Brynn: It sounds like it was a really natural progression for all of you to come together and work on this together. And what’s interesting about Life in a New Language is that this book is all about this reuse of ethnographic data. And as you said, you and the other co-authors each had your own projects that you were working on, but then in order to create this book, you brought it all together.

Can you tell us about the original research project that your contribution is based on?

Dr. Lising: So my original research project, which my contribution to this book was drawn from was a research study funded by Macquarie University new staff grant in 2009. And so, this was at the end of the AMAPRC first phase research project that I was the research manager for. And so, this MQNS project shadowed Filipino-skilled migrants to Australia on a temporary long-stay business visa, or as it was popularly known then, 457 visa.

And 457 visa had eight streams, and the one that my participants were under was the labour agreement stream. This visa was introduced in 1996, and it was intended to attract workers to Australia in areas where there are shortages. And so, the temporary visa is limited to four years with the possibility of extension if the work contract is renewed, and then also they can have the possibility of applying for permanent residency.

So Ingrid supervised that project, and it was modelled in design and reproach, I guess, on the AMAP national project that we worked on together. It was qualitative investigation through rapid multi-sided ethnography, shadowing three cohorts of Filipino skilled workers, abattoir workers, prefabricated home workers that included both IT professionals and carpenters, making prefab harms for the mining companies and also nurses. And they were situated across three states, so Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales.

So that’s the work on which my contribution to this book has been derived from.

Brynn: And you just mentioned that the participants that you were shadowing were doing quite different types of work, the abattoir workers, the nurses and the skilled labourers.

Dr. Lising: Yeah, prefabricated home workers that included the carpenters who actually built the homes and then the IIT professionals that I guess made the homes technology ready.

Brynn: So, it’s quite different work. However, what you really looked at in your part of your work and that the other authors looked at as well was this idea of finding work in Australia once you’ve come to settle. Can you tell us about what you found about your participants’ employment trajectories in these very different fields?

Dr. Lising: The Filipino skilled workers that I interviewed and shadowed were quite different to some of the participants that we have reanalysed for this book in that they came to Australia already having a job because the temporary long-stay business visa required for them to be identified for a specific work shortage. And so, in that sense, there wasn’t a lot of grief in terms of actually finding work. What there was grief about, however, was in their experiences once they came and did their part.

And that was largely to do with one of the main findings that we have in this book, and that is to do with this notion of linguistic proficiency. And so, for example, the abattoir workers, it’s a no-brainer to note that most people who go into abattoir work, other than those who really love that kind of work, would be coming from an educational trajectory where, you know, they have low education, okay? And that’s why they end up doing abattoir work.

And so, the Filipino workers that were hired for this work were hired by an Australian manager who actually went to the Philippines and observed their knife skills. And so “at the time of, for this particular cohort of abattoir workers, at the time of their employment, English language requirement wasn’t actually on the table. And so, so long as they had an offer of work, that was fine.

And so, the grief for them was when they came and the policy changed, and there was then an English language requirement attached to the renewal of their contract and of course permanent residency. And the requirement for those were pegged on an IELTS, so an International English Language Testing System band score of about five. Now, speaking, listening are perhaps things that you can grow to learn in doing work and life in a predominantly English-speaking country, but literacy skills of writing and reading are totally a different skill set that you need to have a sufficient education to be able to improve on those and be able to meet the band score that you need.

So it was that. And then there was also the issue of doing work in a workplace context that were quite intolerant of multilingual practices. And so, I’ve actually, based on that original research study in 2009, I’ve published in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, this paper that I entitled, Speak English, Social Acceleration and Language Learning in the Workplace.

And so, the analytical lens I use there is the notion of speed at work. And so, we have this expectation that when people do come and they don’t have a lot of English, they’ll learn it at work anyway. But you know, abattoir workers work in a conveyor belt-like system.

And so, if they keep talking, they’re going to be behind with their work. But then again, this intolerance of multilingual practices also kind of, or just talk in general while working, really limited their ability to practice their English anyway. But equally challenging for them was this limitation they felt in having this comfort conversations with co-nationals in their own language, because colleagues who only spoke English would actually be suspicious of them.

And often they are told off for speaking other languages.

Brynn: It feels like a real damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation, where they don’t have the literal time during their workday to quote unquote improve their English. But then when they do try to communicate using the resources that they have, maybe the language that they came to Australia with, they’re told not to.

And to me, I remember when I read that part of the book, the first thing that I thought of was nail salon technicians, because I feel like that is the same thing that I hear, especially monolingual English speakers say when they go to a nail salon, and they’ll hear, usually the women that work there will be speaking Vietnamese or sometimes Thai, and so these monolingual English speakers will be saying, I bet they’re talking about me. I bet they’re talking about how bad my feet are, things like that. And it made me wonder if that’s what was potentially happening in the abattoir as well, was that these English speakers were thinking, well, if they’re speaking in a language that I don’t understand, they must be talking about me.

Brynn: Certainly, so one of the participants from that original work that’s featured in this book, Ellen, she’s real aspiration to improve her English. She only finished high school and she has this very accented English, but she understood that if she just kept speaking English, she will become better. But also, I think coupled with that was she one day was pulled aside by the manager and he told her that he gets really embarrassed when other people are speaking their language because he’s not sure what they’re talking about.

So, I think, yeah, I think and that is a monolingual mindset. Absolutely. So, I’ve just written and actually, incidentally, it’s come out just on Friday, this paper on the multilingual mindset.

Brynn: And I’m glad that you’re mentioning this because I did do an episode a while back talking about the monolingual mindset. And until Friday, we didn’t really have anything to compare that to. And now you’ve written about it.

Dr. Lising: I was very excited about that. And I’m very proud of the work. So, it’s entitled Multilingual Mindset, A Necessary Concept for Fostering Inclusive Multilingualism in Migrant Societies.

And it’s in IELA Review and it’s a special issue that’s actually time for 60th IELA Conference in Kuala Lumpur in August, where Ingrid is one of keynote speakers. Yeah. So, in that, I talk about how, you know, the multilingual mindset refers to a way of thinking about languages that is mindful and expectant of variation in not just language proficiency, but also variation in language repertoire and variation in language practices.

So, if we have a shift for a moment that we go to work and we don’t have an expectation that everybody should just be speaking my language so that I can understand what they’re all saying, because otherwise they can be talking about me, but rather that if we step back for a moment and actually think, well, what is a language for? And the language is you has many functions, right? Not only does it index who you are and your identity, you use it for various purposes, and one of which is to connect with “co-nationals, your banter, to exchange humour for levity and for, you know, just to kind of, you know, have fun.

There’s no point in translating those jokes just for the sake of the English speaker who might think that they’re talking about them. And so, yeah, so I think and I hope that people will read that because I think even if they don’t necessarily accept the argument I put forward, I think it’s based on multilingual reality that we live in. But yet we’re still holding on to this monolingual ideal that yes, we have over 400 languages in Australia, but let’s just speak English anyway.

Because if we entertain this notion that it’s perfectly fine for people to operate in the languages that they have, I mean, obviously it’s different when they’re talking to somebody who’s speaking English and achieving a different communicative purpose, right? I’m not talking about that. I’m just talking about the other uses of languages.

And so, this notion of multilingual mindset allows us to kind of step back and reconsider, okay, well, these are the other things that language or languages are achieving.

Brynn: Yeah. In this section that you contributed especially, you really do get that feeling as you read that it just felt really bad for these workers, especially the ones in the abattoir situation, to be told, no, you can’t speak this language in order to achieve some semblance of comfort during the day, or connection or something like that.

In your opinion, what can we do to make things easier for new migrants, especially in this context where maybe they are doing this more quote unquote unskilled labour, which is silly to me because it sounds like it’s quite skilled, but especially for these people who come and work these long hours, or who are not able to speak their own languages, what can we do to make things easier for them?

Dr. Lising: If I could just pivot back to the main three findings, particularly for that chapter on work that we have, and so the three common themes there are in the experiences of our participants relative to Australian work experience, linguistic proficiency and educational qualification. If I can just revisit each and then I’ll get to the answer to your question. So, in terms of Australian work experience, one of the common things we found is that people are asked Australian work experience before work becomes readily available for them.

And it’s like a chicken and egg scenario where no one’s going to give me work, so how can I have a work experience so that I can actually work? And I guess I can answer your question. So, to that, for the migrants themselves, I find that the way to go around that is to actually do volunteer work.

Now that can only go for so long, right? Especially if you’re the breadwinner of the family, like in our book, Story Franklin, for example, who is a qualified English teacher, and he was allowed to do volunteer work at a Catholic school, but won’t be considered for paid work because his qualification is not recognized.

And so that’s the other thing, educational qualification, so not having your overseas qualification recognized, so not just in Franklin, but the story, for instance, of Vesna, who comes from Bulgaria, who’s a midwife, and, you know, as you know, we have such a shortage of midwives in Australia and a lot of other health workers, but the Overseas Qualifications Authority deemed her qualification insufficient for her to actually be working, and so here’s this woman who is done work on midwifery through four years of bachelor’s studies in Bulgaria and did 30 years of work experience in various countries, one of which is in United Arab Emirates, where she worked at a British hospital, and yet those things are not recognised.

I’ve asked permission and I have been given permission by my husband that I can share his story. So, my husband is a vet. So, he got his veterinary medicine from the University of the Philippines, but he obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in veterinary medicine from the University of Queensland.

And for a long time, for about 20 or so years, he served in an international multinational company as the technical services manager for Southeast Asia, and also started a similar work here in Australia. And that’s what brought us to Australia, and he can create vaccination programs for large swine farms, but he cannot write prescriptions because he is not recognized as a vet unless he studies all over again. Mind you, at some point in his career, he’s a recognized swine specialist, considered to be top 50 in the world and was always guest speaking everywhere.

So, you know, qualification, educational qualification. So to that, I guess, in answer to your question, I think we need to rethink the way that we think about the qualifications and we need to reassess our policy relative to recognizing these overseas qualifications in a way that provides new migrants clear and more accessible pathway on how to have their qualification recognized, right?

“In university, we have an RPL system, recognition of prior learning. And so applying the same principle, if you have similar bachelor’s degree, a tremendous amount of work experience, I mean, sure, you need to have some mechanism to ensure that, you know, there is standard quality of work that will be given, but not this just, you know, outright rejection of qualification, you know, so I think there needs to be some reassessment of that. And the other refining we have, of course, is the linguistic proficiency in terms of our participants in this book, both in terms of assured deficit in language and, you know, and kind of automatically assigned to an English class where they find themselves, you know, sitting in a room learning something that’s not really useful because they know English.

And also, I think that’s related to the non-recognition of varieties of other English varieties. And so, this, I think Ingrid has written about that with Hannah Torsch and Laura Smith-Khan, in terms of, you know, white English complex, this notion of a kind of prejudice against other kinds of Englishes as well that is non-white. So, this understanding again, and going back to what I talk about in the Multilingual Mindset paper of an expectation or variation in terms of language proficiency, right?

So, it’s that it’s really about just pay attention and accommodating the other person. And often it’s about perception. So, it’s kind of like if you like the other person, you’ll listen to them and you’ll understand.

But if you look at them and you have kind of an assumption of who they are or prejudice against who they are, and you’re bound to kind of make a judgment that you’re not going to understand them, even if they’re speaking the same language as you.

Brynn: And that’s what really comes through in the book, not just in the portion that you contributed, but with the other authors as well, is this idea of, okay, at the moment, we seem to only have one standard when it comes to either language or employment, and recognizing the recognition of prior learning, like what you talked about. This is the standard of English that you must meet, or this is the standard of employment or education that you must meet. And it feels like there’s no room for nuance, or to really look and judge on a case-by-case basis. And that just feels unattainable.

Dr. Lising: I can share another story that is actually quite raw, because I’m tutoring somebody at the moment who’s a religious person. And he’s here with his family from a war-torn country. And for him to advance to the next visa category that will allow him to qualify for a permanent residency application, he needs to achieve an IELTS band score of five overall and 4.5 in individual bands.

Brynn: And can you remind us, what is the highest band?

Dr. Lising: Nine. So, nine is the highest band that an English speaker who’s paying attention in the test can gain. And if they’re not paying attention, they will not even get that.

But the point of it is, as you were saying, there’s no opportunity here for new ones in accommodation. So, there are two kinds, perhaps there are more, but the two kinds of standard, and for those listening, I’m doing this in air quotes, tests that our government accepts are the IELTS test and the PTE test. And the PTE is computer based and it’s also computer marked.

And so, this person, and I’m sure he sat the test and was highest in IELTS speaking, 6.5, which is by the way, a university entry mark. But when he sat the PTE, he could only get 28 out of 30. And so there lies your real example, precisely of how there’s no nuance in this test.

And the standard against which I would assume his production in terms of speaking would have been judged against would be British speaker and American speaker. So, but yet in his work, he would speak in Arabic. That’s what his work requires him to do.

And he speaks French, but never mind that.

Brynn: But never mind, we’re not going to recognize all of these other proficiencies.

So, let’s shift gears a little bit into the actual writing of this book. So, I’ve spoken to each of your co-authors, minus one so far, and I’ve asked them all the same questions.

Now I’ll ask you, what was it like to co-author a monograph with five other people? Because as I said to one of your co-authors, I’ve done group projects before, they’re not my favourite. Was it like that or was it something different?

What did you do especially because so much of this took place during COVID? What were the ups and downs of this writing process?

Dr. Lising: I mean, group projects can be fun. And it can be fun if it’s in this way that I’m about to describe. So, for me, the experience of writing this book over the last five years among six of us, have been actually quite an enjoyable experience.

Yes, there are moments where it was hard work and we ensured that we crossed our T’s and dotted our I’s and we made sure all the facts that we have about all the participants. Because you’re talking about putting together a book based on 130 participants drawn from six projects over the last 20 years. So, there are, as you can imagine, there are real challenges there in ensuring quality of the outcome.

But I think that for me, there are two main reasons why there has been an enjoyable experience for me. And I think, judging by my observation of others for theirs as well, are that of friendship and trust. So, the six of us, as I’ve said to you at the beginning, have known each other since 2008.

I’ve known Ingrid since 2007. So that’s about 17 years of working together and we’re still working together. So, it’s gone well.

So, all these years, Ingrid has been constant in the way that she has guided us in our scholarly growth. And the great trust in the group, you know, because of that individual relationship, but also the collective relationship, and there’s a lot of, you know, respect. So, the great trust in the group has allowed us to work seemingly so seamlessly together.

Ingrid has been a glue that has bound us together. But I think knowing that we have the same passion, we have the same understanding on how things are to be done and how we interpret things, I think has really been quite enjoyable for me. I can’t really think of the down.

Maybe the only down was that a significant part of the five years in which we were working this book was COVID years. And so that meant that we had Zoom meet a lot of meetings.

Brynn: A lot of Zoom meetings. Everyone did.

Dr. Lising: That’s right. But we managed a few, you know, face to face, except for Em, who’s quite distant. I think that that relationship that has been there all along and knowing how each other works has been a real formula for the success in this group work.

Brynn: This is a good example of group work then. And I really do love how you all came together to do this because I just think that there needs to be more of this in academia. And I think that’s what is so wonderful about the Language on the Move research group is that it brings us all together.

We have friendships, we have academic relationships, and you don’t feel alone, especially for those of us who are just starting out in this academic process. We can ask questions; we can talk to those of you who know what you’re doing. And I think that many academics don’t get that relationship.

And that’s why I would encourage as many academics as possible to do this kind of collaboration and collaborative work that you’ve all done.

Dr. Lising: And it’s been such a bonus as well to actually have done this at a time when the notion of data sharing is just new. And so, we were all so enthused and excited to be part of this innovation.

Brynn: So, before we wrap up, can you tell us what you’re working on now? What do you have any projects going on? Research, teaching, what are you up to?

Dr. Lising: So, I’m in a teaching and research academic job family. And that means that I do equal part teaching and research. So, I love teaching.

And I think that in as much as you have audience in terms of your own research, who can read the work that you do, engagement with the students and being able to translate the research that I do to advance students’ understanding of the field really just excites me and makes me come to work every day happily, joyfully. So, in my teaching, I teach across the undergraduate. So, in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, we have undergraduate courses and postgraduate courses.

So, I teach in the undergraduate course and in the postgraduate. So, in the undergraduate, I convene this large, two large units. One is an introduction to social linguistics, which is one of my most loved content that I like talking about.

And talk about that in terms of the history of the discipline, but also talking about the two parallel strands in terms of social linguistics, so social linguistics in society and micro social linguistics, social linguistics in languages. So, one has the focuses on language and how language features change because of social factors, and the other one takes society as a starting point and looks at how societal structures and features impact on languages. And so, I love that and I also can be in a unit called professional and community engagement unit, which our linguistics major take and that allows them to do workplace, work-integrated learning and relate that to their own understanding of linguistics.

And I shouldn’t have to tell you because you, you tutor with me in that unit.

Brynn: And I love it!

Dr. Lising: And in the postgraduate, our master of applied linguistics and TESOL course, I teach pragmatics and intercultural communication. Those are my teaching tasks in terms of my research.

I’m currently working on a number of collaborations and those collaborations sit within my social linguistic research program, which is in multilingualism and social participation. So, this has two focuses for me in the Australian context. And those are, one is on the employment experiences of non-English speaking backer and migrants in Australia, and also a macro social linguistic focus.

And the micro social linguistic one is the influence of migrant languages on Australian English. And then there are, I also do a couple of other international collaboration on multilingualism in the Philippines. So yeah, that’s what I have in store.

Brynn: I don’t know how you have time to sleep, but I love everything that you do. And I also took your pragmatics course, which I also loved. So, I can attest to that one.

Loy, I so appreciate you talking to me today. Thank you so much.

Dr. Lising: Thank you for having me.

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

Cover art by Sadami Konchi

International migration is at an all-time high as ever more people move across national borders for work or study, in search of refuge or adventure. Regardless of their motivations and whether they intend their moves to be temporary or permanent, all transnational migrants face the challenge of re-building their lives in a different cultural and linguistic context, far away from family and friends, and the everyday routines of their previous lives. Established populations in destination countries may treat migrants with benign neglect at best and outright hostility at worst.

How then do migrants make a new life?

To answer that question, Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Shiva Motaghi Tabari, with a focus on parenting in migration.

Use promo code AAFLYG6 for a discount when you purchase from Oxford University Press.

Advance praise

“This volume breaks new ground by focusing on Doings: a group of diverse researchers collaboratively doing close listening and looking over 20 years, as adult immigrants to Australia engage in doing life, things, words, family, and work in a new language. The result is not only new understandings of the participants’ self-making, but also the making of a new research trajectory that focuses not simply on the learning of a language, but on humanity doing life in language.” (Ofelia García, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)

“This is a moving book that represents the voices of migrants on their challenges and successes across different kinds of boundaries. It embodies impersonal structural and geopolitical pressures as negotiated in the dreams and aspirations of migrants. The authors share findings from decades-long separate research projects to develop richer insights, as a model for data sharing and ethical research.” (Suresh Canagarajah, Pennsylvania State University)

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added 05/07/2024)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network!

My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

Today’s episode is part of a series devoted to Life in a New Language.

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

Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

My guest today is Shiva Motaghi Tabari.

Shiva is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and a fellow member of the Language on the Move research team. Her research interests lie in second language learning and teaching, intercultural communication, language and migration, and family language policy and home language maintenance in migration contexts.

Shiva completed her PhD in Linguistics at Macquarie University on the topic of Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families. The thesis examined the intersection of parental language learning with child language learning in Iranian migrants to Australia. The thesis won the Australian Linguistic Society’s 2017 Michael Clyne Award.

Shiva, welcome to the show and thank you so much for being here today.

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Thanks, Brynn. It’s great to be here.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you and your colleagues got the idea for Life in a New Language?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Actually, my journey into the realm of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics began during my doctoral studies at Macquarie University. My research interests have always revolved around the intricate dynamics of language learning, multilingualism and intercultural communication, particularly in the context of migration. The idea for Life in a New Language actually emerged from a kind of deep-seated curiosity about the experiences of adult transnational migrants as they navigate the complexities of settling into a new linguistic and cultural environment.

The concept originated during our discussions on how language plays a critical role in the integration process for migrants. We as a group realised that there was a need for a deeper understanding of how learning a new language impacts migrants’ daily lives, their identities and their overall settlement experiences. And for my part, drawing from my background as an academic and a research fellow, coupled with the rich ethnographic data collected by myself and my esteemed colleagues, we embarked on a mission to shed light on these often-overlooked narratives, aiming to provide a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and the triumphs faced by migrants in their linguistic journeys.

And this book, in fact, is sequel to Ingrid Piller’s acclaimed Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. It builds on years of ethnographic research with over 100 migrants from diverse backgrounds. And each of us brought unique insights from our respective fields.

And together we aim to present a holistic view of the language experiences of migrants.

Brynn: All of the co-authors came together with all of their different data and their different participants. And like you said, many of this happened over the course of many, many years. And so Life in a New Language, the book, is all about the reuse of this ethnographic data. Can you tell us about the original research project that your contribution is based on?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: My contribution is based on my PhD research, which focused on bi-directional language learning in migrant families. This research involved in-depth ethnographic work with migrant families in Australia, where I examined how both parents and children navigate the language learning process and the impact this has on their identities and daily interactions. The original research provided rich, nuanced insights into the complexities of language and migration.

In fact, I spent a good amount of time with these families, observing their everyday lives, conducting interviews and participating in their community activities. And this kind of approach allowed me to capture the multifaceted ways in which language learning intersects with their social and cultural integration. So, the insights from this research actually formed the foundation for my contributions to the book and particularly in highlighting the dynamic and reciprocal nature of language learning within migrant families.

Yeah, so it’s actually the foundation and my contribution and the contribution of other group members, my colleagues, spans over a decade of in-depth exploration of the language learning and settlement experiences of migrants to Australia.

Brynn: Your particular research, it had to do with Persian-speaking Iranian migrants. Is that correct?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: That’s correct.

Brynn: And that’s where you are originally from. So, what did that feel like for you to be talking to these migrants in this context? What did you bring from your own background that you found reflected in these migrants’ experiences?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Oh, yes. So there are so numerous commonalities among the migrants from diverse backgrounds, including Persians, actually. This kind of research revealed fascinating insights into the ways in which migration reshapes family dynamics and relationships.

And this is something that I experienced myself when I immigrated to Australia around two decades ago. And how, kind of like many participants, the experience of settling into a new country means renegotiation of familial roles and responsibilities in light of the new social and cultural context. So, we as a group, I mean, those of us who focus on familial relationships in our research, we observed a spectrum of experiences from participants who found strength and resilience through familial bonds to those who grappled with the challenges of maintaining cohesion in the face of, you know, linguistic and cultural barriers.

Brynn: That’s so interesting because in the book that really comes through. It’s really evident that so many migrants and not just from any one particular language background, but from many language backgrounds and many different countries face that shift in family dynamics when they migrate here to Australia.

So, one of the big themes that came up in your particular contribution to the research was the role that language plays in mediating family interactions. Can you tell us more about that and what you found with your participants?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Absolutely. So, one theme that was repeatedly coming up in the research was the pivotal role of language in mediating family interactions, as you mentioned, with language learning serving as both a catalyst for connection and a barrier to communication. That was really interesting.

And another finding related to transforming parent-child in relationships and how parents need to make language choices and how these choices may change family dynamics, like as we may know, children’s oral proficiency in everyday language can quickly become indistinguishable from that of their native-born peers. So, while children make progress in terms of fluency, parents continue to struggle with everyday language and their formal and academic English may well have been far ahead that of their children. But their oral displays were lacking as it was revealed in my research, for example.

So, this discrepancy began to undermine parent-child relationships as children began to feel linguistically superior to their parents. And the key point is that the family transformations as we were talking about and as we’ve discussed in our research do not take place in a vacuum. They are deeply shaped by the exclusions and inclusions migrant families experience in their new society.

So overall, the findings show the complex interplay between language identity and family life in the context of migration in Australia as I did my research.

Brynn: That would be so frustrating. I’m thinking as a parent myself, if I was having this almost battle in my own mind about how I communicate with my child, and those would be really complex feelings of feeling like I wasn’t good enough or I wasn’t speaking my new language well enough, and like you said, but then seeing my child become more and more and more fluent. Did any of your participants talk about their feelings related to that?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Oh, yes, heaps actually, it was a very kind of common answer to this question, particularly for Persians who come from a background that parental authority is a thing for them, and they were worried about the upbringing of their kids on how to make language choices, because on the one hand, they wanted to advance their own language, I mean, conversational language in the new society, and on the other hand, they were worried about using the language of the society, which is English, obviously, at home as a way of practicing their own linguistic skills at home will affect their kids’ home language.

But at the same time, at some point when the kids were advancing in their conversational language, as I mentioned, they felt kind of superior to their parents. And this kind of feeling was very common among the parents who said, we really want to maintain our heritage language because we are feeling that if, for example, one of the parents said, you know, the kid keeps correcting me when I’m speaking, and I have a feeling that if she keeps doing that, then she will think that I’m a weak kind of parent and in other fields as well, in other areas as well, and I will lose my credit as a parent.

And so, it’s better to keep our heritage language as the means of communication with our kids to avoid this kind of relationship or reversal kind of roles in the family.

Brynn: That would be such a hard power dynamic to have to negotiate because, like I said, it is hard enough to be a parent and negotiate power dynamics between you and your kids, but then to throw in language, and especially if these parents also want their kids to develop English because they realize that it is important for living in Australia. I myself, when I used to teach English as a second language to adults, I would often get my adult students say to me, I won’t speak English with my kids because of that exact point that you just made, because my kids correct me, and I understand that they speak English, quote, better than I do, but I just don’t want to be corrected by my own kids, and I completely understand that.

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Absolutely, absolutely. And something that came up as well, in addition to this kind of fear, was the mixed messages or mixed advice, kind of, that the parents got from the society. Some educators would recommend them to use the home language only, and some said, oh no, just use English, because your kid needs to improve their English skills and this was something that parents seemed a bit confused in the beginning, once they arrived and once they just wanted to make language choices, what to do, what not to do.

And this was something very common as well, that it shows that there is something in the educational system that lacks probably, that needs to be worked on to support migrant families on how to deal with these kind of choices and how to maintain that kind of familial bonds at the same time have the linguistic support that they need.

Brynn: Yeah, and that makes sense that they would be getting those mixed messages because I don’t think that we, as a society, have agreed upon what is the, quote, best way to do bilingualism or multilingualism within a family. In your personal opinion, what do you think that we in Australia could do to make that transition easier for these parents, to make it easier for them to make these language choices for their own families?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: As we all know, the journey of migration is full of challenges and improving the situation for new migrants and new families actually requires a kind of multifaceted approach. Of course, there are undoubtedly avenues for improvement to facilitate smoother transition for new migrants, specifically parents and children. Well, I think one key aspect is the kind of provision of comprehensive language support services that cater to the diverse linguistic needs of migrants, which includes not only language instruction, but also access to resources for language maintenance and development within familial and community settings.

It’s really important to encourage families regarding their heritage language maintenance and providing resources. And also fostering inclusive and welcoming environments is really important. The kind of welcoming environments that celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity that can mitigate the feelings of isolation and promote social integration, both for adults and children.

So, some sort of policy initiatives that aim at addressing systemic barriers to employment, to education, to social participation. These are all crucial for creating equitable opportunities for migrants to thrive in their new homes. I believe that one key avenue for improvement, I think, goes through the education system and how our kids, our children, feel safe and secure and happy and proud to have come from a background that has provided them with kind of additional worldviews, additional culture and linguistic skills, in addition to the societal language and the dominant culture.

So that’s the way that I think the education system should have some policy strategies in place for our kids to make them feel secure and happy about this kind of, you know, linguistic skills that they bring from their home countries.

Brynn: That’s a great point that we can kind of as community members do everything that we can to make people feel included, to encourage linguistic diversity and to encourage family languages. But you’re right that there needs to be something that’s a bit more top down in the governmental policies in education because that’s such a huge part of any child’s life and they spend so much time there. So that’s a really great answer. Thank you.

Shifting gears a little bit, I’d love to ask you about your actual experience in writing this book, Life in a New Language. Co-authoring this monograph with five other people, six of you total, had to have been complicated, especially because it was largely written during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Can you tell me what were the ups and downs of the writing process? What was that like to co-author with so many people?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Actually, for me, this kind of, this collaboration was wonderful. So, collaborating with diverse team of authors certainly to me was an immensely rewarding experience. And one of the kind of major upsides I could say was the wealth of perspectives and expertise that each member brought to the table.

Clearly, like every other project, there are some challenges, particularly our research fell during the period of COVID, as you mentioned. And there were some challenges, if you want to call it challenge actually. So, it was just like coordinating schedules or, I don’t know, like navigating different opinions.

So we wanted to make sure that there is a good kind of, I mean, coherence across multiple chapters, how we could achieve that. But nonetheless, our shared commitment to producing a comprehensive and impactful kind of work kept us motivated and focused throughout the writing process, I would say. So ultimately, I would say this kind of collaboration and the collaborative nature of our work allowed us to produce this book that I think reflects by itself the collective insights and contributions of my amazing colleagues.

Brynn: And that’s what I think is so interesting about this particular book, is that it brings so many different types of people together in the stories, because you really feel as a reader that you’re getting a deep insight into migrant perspectives from all different cultures, all different language backgrounds, so you can see what’s different for certain people, but also the themes that keep coming up for migrants of all kinds. And I agree that the co-authorship is a really interesting and unique aspect to this book.

Before we wrap up, can you tell me what’s next for you? What are you working on now? What’s your next project? What are you up to?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Currently, apart from my academic roles, I’m cooperating with some not-for-profit organizations as well, actually working on new projects. The projects that explore the language needs and challenges faced by kind of more vulnerable group of people in our community from coming from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds in health sector. You know, overall, my goal is to continue contributing to the ongoing dialogue about multilingualism and diversity.

And I would love to put theories into practice in real life. I love to see tangible results and if I can have any kind of positive impacts on the lives of people. And I would love to focus on promoting equity, understanding and social change as much as I can.

Brynn: Well, you’ve certainly started to do that with this book. That is very evident in Life in a New Language, so thank you to you. Thank you to your co-authors. And thank you so much for talking to me today, Shiva. I appreciate it.

Dr Motaghi Tabari: It was great to be here. And thank you for having me here. Thanks for it.

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