As a parent you know how complicated it is to find a childcare centre for your children: you have a mental list of must-haves and no-goes; you browse the web;…
In today’s world, “literacy” is strongly associated with competence: the ability to read and write is the pre-condition for the acquisition of all kinds of knowledge and skills. The basic…
U.S. Vice President Pence ignores NASA "DO NOT TOUCH" sign. Would anyone else get away with such illiterate behavior? “Literacy” is one of those words that everyone uses as a…
In this library, children like to "cook the books" in the toy oven (Source: Smith, 2017) In preparation for a course on “Literacies” I’m teaching this semester, I spent the…
NAIDOC Week 2017 Logo Every year, the first week of July marks NAIDOC Week - a time to celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and recognise the achievements of…
The Muslim holy month of Ramadan has just come to an end. Like Christmas, Diwali or a wedding, the closing holiday, Eid al-Fitr, constitutes a massive occasion for gift-giving. In…
Something has been nagging at me recently. I read a lot of tech news, and it seems automated translation is about to get a whole lot better, and a whole…
Grade 2 Oral Tetun class Editor's note: As the Language on the Move team is busy preparing for the "Bridging Language Barriers" Symposium to be hosted at Macquarie University on March 16,…
Ingrid Piller's "Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice" wins Prose Award Language on the Move is finally back from our summer break. The New Year has started well for us with…
A couple of years ago, I mused here on Language on the Move what linguistic theory would look like if its dominant cultural ideas had not been shaped in 1950s…
ESL teachers play an important role in home language maintenance (Image Credit: Macquarie University) Learning the host country’s language is important for migrants but we should not forget that maintaining…
Demand action from our politicians to make a LOTE compulsory! The state of language learning in Australian schools is dire. This weekend the Sydney Morning Herald carried an article entitled “Why students are…
The Linguistic Ethnography Forum’s e-seminar devoted to Ingrid Piller’s recent book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics is currently running. Some discussions so far are concerned…
Alex spent a stimulating summer centered on child multilingualism away from the leafy Macquarie campus Macquarie University campus seemed to sleep in the summer sun once the semester ended last…
Children in a bilingual program in Hamburg (Source: AlsterKind) It is a key finding of contemporary educational research that the children of migrants experience educational disadvantage vis-à-vis their native-born peers.…
"Naughty boys" in the media: image from the Channel 4 gangs and drugs drama "Top Boy" Teacher expectations can constitute a self-fulfilling prophecy: teachers behave differently towards children depending on…