I recently returned to China from graduate study in Australia and soon reestablished my old habit of reading the newspaper over breakfast. One Sunday morning, this color flier was enclosed…
Zhang Jie 张洁July 22, 2011
When I lived in Basel, a city in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, I often found myself performing an involuntary field experiment in language attitudes. As likely to speak English…
Ingrid PillerMay 20, 2011
Amoo ('Uncle') Poorang Persian version of my recent post about "Ridiculing accents" Translated by Behnam Keimasi (بهنام کیماسی) آیا مایه گذاشتن از اقلیتهای زبانی برای سرگرم کردن کودکان کار درستی…
Manouchehr KouhestaniApril 25, 2011
Amoo ('Uncle') Poorang Is it ok to entertain children at the expense of linguistic minorities? That was the question I asked myself a couple of months ago when I was…
Manouchehr KouhestaniMarch 28, 2011
A most amazing book has just landed on my desk: Do you speak Swiss, edited by Walter Haas, is the final report on a Swiss National Research Project devoted to…
Ingrid PillerFebruary 14, 2011
Thai alphabet Learning Thai has its many challenges but one of the great joys for me has been encountering the Thai script. At the start I felt like a five-year-old-child,…
Sheila PhamFebruary 11, 2011
Divine linguistic diversity I’ve spent the past two days convening the first-ever Language-on-the-Move workshop at the University of Tehran. The idea was to explore language contact and multilingualism in the…
Ingrid PillerDecember 23, 2010
Earlier this term I intercepted a note my 7-year-old had written to her teacher: “Ger Ger Ger; Don’t be so rude.” She was objecting to a reading comprehension exercise about…
Ingrid PillerNovember 6, 2010
Commemorative stamp, German Federal Post, 1989: 300 years French School Berlin I’ve been teaching about bilingualism for more than a decade and when I speak about bilingual education and dual-immersion…
Ingrid PillerOctober 26, 2010
Lotus Pond (part of Shinobazu Pond) in Ueno Park “There are so many stupid Japanese women around, huh? Many Westerners are coming to our country and the stupid women love…
Kimie Takahashi 高橋君江October 11, 2010
The latest issue of Cross-Cultural Studies (published by the Center for Cross Cultural Studies, Kyung Hee University, Korea) includes an article about the dark side of TESOL authored by Ingrid Piller,…
Kimie Takahashi 高橋君江September 13, 2010
I’ve just run a search for the terms “multilingual” and “multilingualism” in the National Library of Australia’s archive of Historic Australian Newspapers, 1803-1954. In the process, I have learnt that…
Ingrid PillerAugust 16, 2010
The monolingual myth This critique has been an important one but it runs into a problem when we consider the idea of monolingualism itself. At the same time that this…
Alastair PennycookAugust 10, 2010
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