Life in a New Language, Part 5: Monolingual mindset

This episode of the Language on the Move Podcast is Part 5 of our 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 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.