Life in a New Language, Part 2: Work

This episode of the Language on the Move Podcast is Part 2 of our new series devoted to Life in a New Language. Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. It is a project of Language on the Move scholarly sisterhood and has been co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh.

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 Ingrid Piller, one of the book’s six co-authors, with a focus on migrants’ challenges with finding work.

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 on July 03, 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 Ingrid Piller.

Ingrid Piller is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. There is so much I could say about her prolific academic work, but for now I’ll introduce her as the driving force behind the research blog Language on the Move and the lead author on Life in a New Language.

Welcome to the show, Ingrid!

Dist Prof Piller: Hi, Brynn.

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

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, sure! Look, I’ve been researching linguistic diversity and social justice for like 30 years. So, the key question of my research has been like, what does it mean to learn a new language at the same time that you actually need to do things with that language? So that it’s not just a classroom exercise.

It’s not just something that, you know, you do for fun, but you actually need to find a job through that language. You need to, I don’t know, get health care. You need to rent a house. You need to get a new phone contract. You need to go down to the shops. You need to, you know, make a new life, make new friends.

And so that’s sort of been the key question of my research in various aspects for a really long time. And sort of around in the mid 2010s, I kind of felt like I’ve been doing so many projects in this area. My students have been doing so many projects in this area, and we really should actually pool these resources and these findings and all this research that’s sort of all over the place and bring it together in one coherent systematic exploration of what it actually means to simultaneously learn a new language and have to do things through that language.

And so that’s the story behind the book.

That’s such a big part about starting a new life in a new language. And I think a lot of people don’t necessarily realise that. They sort of separate the idea of language learning and life, and they don’t tend to think of the two together.

Brynn: And something that you’ve just mentioned is about how you had students, other people that you were working with throughout the course of all of these years, who were doing this type of research. And the book, Life in a New Language, is all about the reuse of this ethnographic data. Can you tell us about the original research project that your contribution is based on?

Dist Prof Piller: Okay, so I supervised each and every one of the projects. That is actually the basis. So, in a sense, I’ve had a finger in the pie of each of the research projects that we brought together in Life in a New Language.

But the sort of the one key piece of data that is mine, if you will, came from a research project that I did or that I started in 2000, so 24 years ago. And the interest there was to understand how people achieved really high proficiency. And at the time, I just finished my research with bilingual couples, where, you know, one partner comes from one language background, the other partner from another language background.

And one thing that came out sort of as an incidental finding in that research project, amongst many, particularly of the German participants I had there, is that many of them were sort of often like testing themselves if they could pass. So, they spoke about these passing experiences, like, you know, they, I don’t know, they’ve gone to the shops and someone had asked them like, Oh, are you from some other city down the road in the UK or something? And so hadn’t realized straight away that they had a non-native accent.

This was sort of an incidental finding that people or high-performing second language speakers were really interested in these passing experiences. And so, I kind of thought, Oh, that’s an interesting research project. And let’s do that as a separate research project.

And I got some first internal research funding from the University of Sydney, where I worked at the time, and then later from the ARC to actually investigate high-performing second language speakers. So, people who identified themselves as having been very successful in their second language learning. And so, I conceived that as kind of an individual ethnographic study, mostly an interview study.

And so, we started by just distributing ads and asking for people who thought they’d been really successful in their English language learning here in Sydney. And, you know, lots of people put their hands up in interesting ways, actually. And some of them then when we actually spoke to them, we usually started the conversation with like, you’ve put your hand, been highly successful in second language.

And then they go like, now you tell me whether I’m highly successful. So, it was kind of, you know, really, really interesting. And then the data that we collected from that project over a couple of years also became part of life in a new language.

Brynn: That’s so cool because I feel like we very rarely have those research opportunities with people who feel like they have been successful in the language. I feel like so often, I mean, rightly so, we do a lot of research with people who might feel like they’re struggling with the language.

What did you find with them just out of curiosity? Was there any sort of through line?

Dist Prof Piller: One of the most interesting people on that study, and someone I sort of went from participant to friend, was a guy who’d signed up. And when we interviewed him, the first interview we did, I did that together with the research assistant, Sheila Pham. And we had this conversation.

We were chatting about all kinds of things, like, you know, his language learning stories. He was from Shanghai. He was really like extrovert and kind of talking a lot about how Shanghai is so great and Sydney is so boring and provincial by comparison.

And anyways, after we’d done that interview, Sheila and I, we looked at each other and it was like, we found the Holy Grail. We found a second language speaker who started to learn English actually in his early 20s and, you know, who’s indistinguishable from a native Australian speaker. Doesn’t have an accent.

And it was like, oh, wow. So, you know, so this is going to be like our focal case. And we’re so excited.

Next thing we did, we transcribed the interview and looked at it on paper. It was actually, I mean, it wasn’t good at all. Like, I mean, there was so many like grammatical errors.

You know, if you look at it like in terms of grammar, in terms of syntax, anyway, it wasn’t high level actually. So, there was a complete mismatch in a sense between the performance, the oral performance of this person, which was like, you know, as I said, indistinguishable. We both agreed and we then, you know, got other people to kind of assess him as well.

Everyone sort of agrees, you know, no, wouldn’t have realized that he hasn’t grown up in Australia. If you actually sort of look at it from like a grammar perspective, no, that is really, really fascinating. And in many ways, I didn’t do enough with that case study because I went on to do other things.

But the kind of embodied performance, the way you behave, the things you talk about that is really, really important. And as language teachers or in, you know, in TESOL, we often think so much about accuracy. But in many ways, accuracy isn’t really so important in language.

And so, language is never only about language. I guess that’s one of the key messages of this book and also of my research. I mean, language is OK, we’re linguists, but language is never just about language itself is not interesting.

What is interesting is what people do with it and how they become different persons in a different language or how people react to them and how we kind of organize our society as a linguistically diverse society. So, it’s really the sideways looking, the social aspect that interests me as opposed to like what’s going on with the grammar.

Brynn: Yeah, and I think that’s so important to keep in mind, especially when we think about people who are doing all of these things with language in maybe a new place, especially in this participant’s case, being in their early 20s, starting to learn English and something that you have to face in your early 20s is the idea of work. And that’s something that is a big topic in the book, Life in a New Language is the idea of settling in a new place and finding work. So, can you tell us about what you found about the participant’s employment trajectories in the book?

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, so that was a really, really big topic and employment work came up really across the data, even if the initial focus of data collection or of the study had not been about employment. Like, I mean, as I told you, the focus of the data I brought to it had been high performance and high-level proficiency. Employment came up for everyone is really, really big topic.

And that, of course, relates to some. I mean, it’s not entirely surprising. It relates to something we know from the statistics that amongst migrants, there are much higher levels of unemployment and underemployment than there are amongst the native born.

And underemployment means you have work at a lower level than for which you’re qualified or you work fewer hours than you want to work. And both unemployment and underemployment are really high. We know that in the typical explanation that is given for that is that we find like in the business literature, the migration literature is, you know, migrants.

English isn’t good enough, so they’re struggling with language. That’s a barrier to their employment. Their qualifications aren’t good enough.

You know, they’re not as strong or as high as qualifications of people trained in Australia. So essentially, the explanation is migrants have a human resource deficit. To me or to us as the authors of the book, this has never been entirely convincing.

And the reason I don’t find that convincing is that in Australia in particular, the migrants have a particular, bring relative high human resources to Australia. And to understand that I need to say a few things about Australia’s migration program, because Australia’s migration program is essentially organized in re-streams. And that’s a real simplification because at any one time during the 20 years we did this study, there were like close to 200 different visa types on the books.

But all these different visa types essentially fall into three categories. One category is related to skills. So, you get a visa to Australia because you bring something to Australia.

So usually that’s your professional skills, work skills. You can apply as an individual migrant, like many of our participants came from Iran. So, let’s say you are an IT engineer in Iran.

You are like in your late 20s or early 30s. You have a bit of professional experience. You’re interested in migrating to Australia.

You put in an application and you get points for your qualification and also for your English. So, in order to come in under the skills program, most of the skilled migrants need English. And the skilled migration program takes up, and that can be temporary or permanent, so lots of variations.

But essentially everyone in that program needs English. There are a couple of exceptions. Like if you bring a lot of money, you do not necessarily have such great English.

But overall, we can say like around 80% of our migration program are people who come in for their skills. And part of that skills is actually they need to show they have high levels of English language proficiency. Then the other two groups and they are much smaller are family reunion migrants and humanitarian entrants.

So, these people get their visa because for family reasons, so because they are the spouse of an Australian citizen or the parents of an Australian citizen, or for humanitarian reasons because they deserve our protection and chief refuge in Australia. Now for these two groups, they don’t need to demonstrate English language skills because they are assessed on something else. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t speak English necessarily, right?

I mean, so it’s true that, you know, many family reunion migrants do not speak English, but at the same time, they may have learned English already, right? And the same for refugees. I mean, one thing that we found amongst the refugees in particular was that many of them were really, really highly qualified, spoke English, had been educated through English, particularly from various African nations, post-colonial nations.

And still they were always seen like they’re refugees. They haven’t got any qualifications. They don’t speak English.

So that’s not the truth at all. Now, to go back to the original point that I was making is that we have these people who come in under these different visa categories. For most of them, they need to demonstrate English to even get into Australia.

So why then, once they’re here, they don’t actually find jobs because their English isn’t good enough. Something doesn’t add up there. And so, what we found was that English actually becomes like this global criterion on the basis of which you read people are excluded from the job market just because you don’t want them or it becomes like every employer, every person who has anything to say takes it upon themselves to pass judgment on the English language proficiency of newcomers, regardless whatever their qualifications are. I mean, they usually have no qualifications whatsoever, but still they go, Oh, your English isn’t good enough.

And so, we found things like, I mean, one participant, for instance, from Kenya, she was applying for like receptionist jobs. And so, she was having an interview with a small business and small business owner goes, Look, I love you. You’re fantastically qualified, but I can’t really have you as a receptionist because my customers won’t understand your English. Now her, I mean, she’s been educated through the medium of English. Her English is like Queen’s English, British English, very, very standard, very easy to understand.

I mean, maybe a bit of an East African little, that’s it. You know, this is fairly clearly a pretence for something else, right? And she was actually offered then kind of back-end work in the same company where she didn’t have, where she didn’t need that good English, but in reality, I think where she wasn’t in a customer facing role.

So that’s one thing you can, it’s illegal in Australia to discriminate against anyone on the basis of their national origin, their ethnicity, their race, but it’s not illegal to discriminate on the basis of language. And there really is no recourse. I mean, I can always tell you your English isn’t good enough, right?

And what can you do? I mean, that’s one issue there. Another issue around English language proficiency as this exclusionary criterion is that it’s simply applied holus bolus regardless of the job you’re applying for.

And so, we had a couple of fairly low educated people in our study who objectively didn’t speak a whole lot of English. And they weren’t aspiring to like, you know, language work. They were looking for like cleaning work and couldn’t get cleaning work because people told them or employers told them your English isn’t good enough.

And so, what was going on there essentially is in order to… And they were going like, you know, I’m like one participant, she was from South Sudan and had sort of a complicated migration story, had lived in transit in Egypt for like a decade. And she was saying, look, I mean, in Egypt, I lived like the Egyptians. I was cleaning houses. I was looking after children and it wasn’t difficult. I can do that. And that’s all I want to do here. I want to clean people’s houses. I want to be a cleaner. I want to maybe look after children. But really, she was aspiring to cleaning. But wherever I go, they tell me, your English isn’t good enough.

And she was like, part of that is that you actually in Australia, you need certification, right? Like if you’re cleaning, you need some certificate that you’re not going to mix up the various cleaning products so that you know how to do that hygienically. And that’s really difficult to do if you have low levels of literacy.

And so there were these like really artificial barriers where English kind of becomes an intermediary artificial barrier to doing work you’re perfectly qualified for and you have the right language for. And so, I mean, I’ve spoken a bit about cleaning now, but we sort of also have that at the other end of the spectrum, like another of our participants. She was really, really highly proficient.

She had studied English all her life, had an English language teaching degree from Chile, then had been on Australia for quite a while. And she was retraining as a TESOL teacher and trying to get an MA in TESOL to become an English language teacher. And that was like 20 years ago.

So, it may have changed now. But anyways, she needed to do an internship as part of her degree. And she just couldn’t get a practicum place.

And she tells the story that, you know, she was calling up one. I mean, it’s just like, I called up every TESOL and every ELICOS and every language school in Sydney. And they’d always say things like, oh, yeah, we don’t have a place at the moment.

Or, you know, can you call back again like next year or whatever? And she had this one story where she said, on a Monday, I called this particular school and, you know, I asked, can I do my practicum there? And the person in charge told her, no, we are full for this term or whatever. Call back again next year, next term. And on Wednesday, she spoke to a classmate and the classmate said, look, I’ve just called this particular school this morning and I’m going to do my practicum there. And so, it was like two days later, there was this space.

And the only difference between these two people was that, you know, our participant was from Chile, spoke with a bit of a Spanish accent. And the other participant was, she called it Australian. And when our participant said Australian, it was always native-born Anglo-Australian.

So really the absence of this accent was the, and so that’s the only explanation. So she gave up on the TESOL degree because she kind of said, look, if I can’t even get an internship to graduate, how am I ever going to find a job, right? And so, yeah, language is this really, so in a sense, we, it’s not migrants who have an English language deficit.

It’s actually that we create artificial barriers through making language proficiency, this kind of global construct that is this big barrier, and then apply it whenever we sort of have any kinds of concerns or prejudices or just don’t need that person, whatever. It becomes the explanation for everything, but that really doesn’t do anyone any favours. And I think that’s where one of the important lessons of the book is we actually need to unpack what it means to speak English well, to speak English so that you can do a particular job you’re aspiring to, because that is beneficial, it’s beneficial for the economy. It’s beneficial for everyone, right?

Brynn: And that’s what is so interesting to me is when you talk about “we” in that context, you know, we need to remove this artificial barrier. And a lot of times I think about that in two different ways.

One is sort of the more policy driven. So, like, people in the government, you know, things that we can do policy-wise that would remove those barriers. But then another thing that I think about is just kind of your average person, especially your monolingual English speaking, in this case, Australian, all of these things that these participants have had to go through sounds so difficult. How can we, and this could be, you know, either or, the policymakers or sort of your average Joe on the street, how can we improve things to make it easier for migrants to come to Australia, whether they have this high level of English or not, but to find work and to begin to settle?

Dist Prof Piller: Look, that’s a good question and it’s of course a difficult question and one that our society has been struggling with for years and decades. And overall, I guess we also need to say that Australia is actually doing things pretty well in international comparison. I think that’s always important to keep in mind.

I think it’s a lot harder in North America, a lot harder in Europe, but in different ways, I guess. And so, what’s the lesson for us here? I guess in terms of policy lessons, one thing would be that we need a better alignment across different decision makers, because one thing that we found is particularly with those independent, skilled migrants, once they received their visa to Australia, because they’d gone through that process, you know, they put in their application, they demonstrated their qualifications, they’d done their IELTS test and sometimes, you know, a number of times and kind of should I’ve got the right IELTS score.

So, they’ve done all these things and then they received the visa and they kind of felt like, you know, the Australian government is now telling me I’m ready, I’m good to go, I’m welcome, I can make a contribution to this society. And then they arrive and it’s nothing like that, because all of a sudden there are different bodies that make decisions over their qualifications. And so, for instance, like with all the medical professionals we spoke to, that’s a huge barrier.

So, they get their visa and then they come here and then they need to be re-accredited. And the re-accreditation process is independent from the government visa process. And so all of a sudden, it’s actually not so straightforward.

So, one of our participants, it’s a really interesting story. So, she was a midwife from Romania and she had like 30 years of experience delivering babies. And so, she had the qualification from Bulgaria.

I think it was actually Bulgaria, but it doesn’t matter. So, she had like, you know, this four years training qualification. But in Europe, most of continental Europe, midwives are actually not trained at universities.

Like they’re here, they’re sort of hospital trained, but it’s also a four-year process. And, you know, they do a lot of theory at the same time. And so, she had that training and then she had experience for like 30 years working not only in her native country, but also overseas through the medium of English in the Gulf, somewhere in the UAE.

And there she met her husband an Australian, and they together moved to Australia when she was in her 50s. And she was totally optimistic that, you know, she would go on to deliver babies for another 10, 20 years until her retirement. And before they moved, she had looked up like job ads and seen, you know, there was a real midwife – I mean there is a midwife shortage and has been a midwife shortage in Australia for quite a while. They were moving somewhere regional in Western Australia. It was like, should be easy, very straightforward, and benefit both for the personal career of this woman, but also for Australia’s society. I mean, for our health care system, right? But that’s not how it turned out.

So, she arrives and they go like, I know your four years of hospital training, they’re not equivalent to what we do here. So, you need to do, and the 30 years practice experience, they don’t count. And so, you need to redo your midwife training. And that’s three years.

But because in Western Australia, every midwife is also a registered nurse, you first need to do your nursing degree. And so that’s like six years. And she was like, I’m in my mid-fifties.

I’m not going to study for six years also. My English is good enough to work, but it’s not the kind of English that I can write a big essay. I can’t necessarily go and study and be successful at university.

I can perfectly do the work. I have all the experience, but she ended up doing a phlebotomy course and now in a blood collection unit somewhere. And I’m just sort of happy that she’s still back in the hospital.

But of course, it’s a huge demotion. It’s extremely frustrating for her personally and such a loss for our society. And so that’s really where policy can do something, where you can actually create a pathway that you align the visa decision processes with the various professional qualification processes and also simplify professional qualification processes to the degree that you actually identify, like, what is the gap here?

I’m not saying, you know, everyone can work in whatever, not everything is equivalent. I mean, there’s no doubt about that. But like, what is the gap?

So, you’ve got this kind of level of training, you’ve got this kind of experience. So, maybe you need to learn something, something that is specific to Australia or that is specific to the way this role works here or, you know, whatever. But we really need to create those pathways.

And it’s not very difficult to map these things. But it shouldn’t be that we’re saying, like, you need to do all of your midwife training again and then on top of that, you need to become a registered nurse. And that’s just not feasible for people who are in middle age and, you know, who’ve done all their studies and all their qualifications.

Most people also needed to, you know, support their families and make a living and, you know, life is short. So, you just can’t redo something that you’ve already done. So, we really need to be much smarter about identifying the gaps and aligning decision-making processes.

So that’s one thing. You also asked about, like, what can individual people do? And I think, I mean, that’s where our book comes in, in a sense.

I mean, what we’re trying to create, I guess, is empathy for the challenge and the extreme courage it takes to actually make a new life in a new country at a time when, you know, your socialization, if you will, has already been largely completed in another place. So, to pivot to another world, it really takes a lot of courage, a lot of resilience. These are very bright people.

And so, yeah, empathy for this dual challenge. And just because someone doesn’t speak English all that well, that doesn’t mean they are stupid, right? I think that’s one of the things that we often see.

You just sort of feel, going back to this thing that we said earlier, people don’t necessarily understand what it means to learn a new language. If you have an adult who doesn’t speak English or your language well, you just see them as this deficit person, and you just see what they can’t do in English. You don’t think, well, they’re actually a whole other person in their other language, and they’ve got skills and knowledge, and they’re funny and interesting and whatever.

It may just be that they need a bit of help to express that in English as well. And so, we really need to treat people with a bit more compassion and empathy, I think.

Brynn: And I think that’s what this book does so well, is in pulling together all of these different participants from across so many different years, it really paints this picture of what we, as the English speakers in a dominant English-speaking country, what we need to keep in mind when we are interacting with these migrants. And on that idea, I think that this is a good time to mention that you co-authored this with five other people. So, there were six people total that did this, and you all brought your own studies and your own participants and your own research to kind of paint that picture.

But what I want to know is what was that like to work as a group of six? What were the ups and downs of the writing process? How did you even go about doing that?

Dist Prof Piller: Look, I mean, one thing, in addition to everything else we brought, in addition to our research, we also brought our lived experience. So, four of us actually have this experience of moving to Australia as adults. And so, I think that’s another dimension that we brought to it as people who had also been on that journey and rebuilding our lives here.

So, what was it like to co-author? It was a lot of fun. It was also a lot of work.

So, I guess these are the two things. So, one thing people might think like, you know, you have six people to author a book. So that’s like, you know, a sixth of the work.

And so, it should have been really quick. That’s not true at all, I would say. And I mean, I’ve written a couple of books as a sole author.

I would say this was more work. On me as an individual, I contributed more and that’s true for all the other five authors. So, it’s hugely inefficient in a sense.

But at the same time, it’s not at all because, you know, none of us individually would have been able to write this thing. So it really needed the collaboration. And that’s another that’s a reason I’m really proud of that book, because I think it does something that we don’t do often enough in our field, where you sort of have this collaboration and joined.

You know, you share your data, obviously, but do your analysis together. You do your writing together. And that really is much more than the sum of its parts.

And I mean, one decision that we made, like right at the beginning of this is we don’t want this to be like an edited book or we don’t want this to be just, you know, each of us writes a chapter and then we kind of all go over it and adapt it a bit. We made a decision that we wanted this to be our combined voice, if you will, that we write in a particular voice. But we do this really together as, you know, you couldn’t say like, oh, this part is written by Ingrid and this part is written by Vera or something like that.

So that’s not how it works. And what we’ve achieved in the process is something that, you know, I think is a real advance or a real innovation in qualitative research, that we’ve actually been able to kind of add generalizability to ethnographic research, because, you know, usually you don’t expect ethnographic research to be generalizable. And that’s how it works.

But by actually pooling all these resources and redoing the analysis, based on new codes and new research questions, we’ve been able to paint a much broader picture. And I think that’s, you know, that’s actually quite fantastic. And I’m really, really happy with that.

And in terms of fun, it really, I mean, it took a long time. It was hard work. But it’s also great, actually, to work on something together.

Like if you have the Sisyphus Project where you always feel like, you know, you need to push and push. If you do this together and celebrate things together and kind of be able to laugh about things and kind of end the day on a little WhatsApp chat about like, what have we achieved? What haven’t we achieved? Where have we gone backwards? That’s actually good. So, it really keeps you motivated and it kept us going and was actually, I mean, it took longer than expected. And I think that’s fair enough.

Brynn: And I really do too. I think it’s so important in our field of academia to encourage that collaboration and to celebrate that collaboration, because it’s not something that tends to get done that much in academia. And it’s just so nice to see that sort of positive collaboration happening because then that could happen more.

That could happen more between more authors, more researchers to give us these more generalizable ethnographic studies, which I think are really important, like you said, to paint that picture for people. And this book is really readable. You don’t have to be a linguist to enjoy this book or to learn something from this book.

And I think it’s important to say that because it is something that even monolingual English speakers can really learn from through all of these stories that come together. And just before we wrap up, can you talk to us about your next project? What are you working on now?

Are there going to be more books? What are you up to?

Dist Prof Piller: I’ve always got too many things on the boil. But one thing I really want to keep going is this kind of collaboration, I guess, and doing things together. And one more, one more harking back to your previous question, like, what was this like?

I think academia can be quite hard on people, particularly on early career researchers. And there’s always this pressure to perform. And, you know, how many articles have you published?

And how often have you been cited and whatnot? And by actually building a community. And I think, you know, we’ve built an author community and a community of practice with this book.

But Life in a New Language is also part of this broader community that we’ve built with Language on the Move and the various PhD projects and research projects and collaborations and all kinds of directions that are going on there. And so that really is important for me to keep going, to continue all these various joint projects that we are doing. And, you know, this podcast is, of course, another one of these projects that I’m very excited about that, you know, you are taking forward in such wonderful ways and that we’ve only just started quite recently.

In terms of my individual writing, the next thing I’m working on is actually the third edition of Intercultural Communication. So that’s this textbook that I originally wrote in 2011, and that’s been doing really well. And so, the third edition is almost ready, and it will include a new chapter on health communication and sort of the lessons that we’ve learned for intercultural communication from the pandemic.

Brynn: That’s very exciting to me, particularly, because as you know, as my supervisor, that is what I’m working on on my PhD. So, I’m very much excited to hear that. That’s awesome.

Ingrid, thank you so much for chatting. Really, really appreciate you taking that time and talking to us about the book today.

Dist Prof Piller: Thanks a lot, Brynn. It’s been a lot of fun. Thank you.

Brynn: And thanks for listening, everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time!