The conversation delves into ideological issues involved in the widespread use of machine translation and the real-life impact for those who may rely on machine translations in various situations. Esther’s research and the wide variety of contributions to the book highlight the need to open a discussion about instilling an ‘ethics of care’ perspective into the use of technology to make AI generated translations more inclusive and relevant for the communities using 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.

Transcript (coming soon)

A wonderful companion read to this episode is Distinguished Ingrid Piller’s Can we escape the textocalypse? Academic publishing as community building.

If you liked this episode, check out more resources on technology and language: Will technology make language rights obsolete?; the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us; and Are language technologies counterproductive to learning?

(Image credit: EduResearch Matters)

If you enjoy the show, 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.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added on February 21, 2025)

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. My guest today is Dr. Sue Ollerhead.

Sue grew up in multilingual South Africa, a country with 12 official languages, where she learned English, Afrikaans, Isizulu, Isikosa, and French at school and university. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Languages and Literacy Education and the Director of the Secondary Education Program at Macquarie University. Her expertise lies in English language and literacy learning and teaching in multicultural and multilingual education contexts.

Her research interests include translanguaging, multilingual pedagogies, literacy across the curriculum and oracy development in schools. Sue is currently Editor of TESOL in Context, the peer-reviewed journal of the Australian Council of TESOL Associations. She serves on the Executive Board of the English as a Medium of Instruction Centre, EMI, at Macquarie University.

Today, Sue and I are going to chat about an article that she’s recently written for the Australian Association for Research in Education, entitled, Teachers Truly Know Students and How They Learn, Does AI? We’ll discuss the emergence of AI platforms like ChatGPT and how they are affecting teacher training and student learning. Sue, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Ollerhead: Hi, Brynn. Lovely to be here today.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and about how you became an educator in the English as an additional language space?

Dr Ollerhead: Thanks, Brynn. As you said, I grew up in what you would call a super diverse country, South Africa, which is also very multilingual with 12 official languages. So as well as you said, I learned English, Afrikaans, Isizulu, Isikosa, and French at school.

I would also hear a plethora of language mixing or translanguaging by people all around me all the time. And when I finished university, I began my teaching career at a TESOL Medium Primary School and then went on to teach Zulu-speaking factory workers in South Africa’s Adult Migrant Literacy Program. I’ve also spent a large part of my working life teaching English and working in educational publishing in Sub-Saharan Africa and the United Kingdom.

So always within very multilingual and multi-cultural context. And I guess what surprised me when moving to Australia in my mid-30s, was the monolingualness of the schools and working environments that I was working in, which seemed to be at odds with what I knew to be a significant proportion of people living in Australia, speaking languages other than English at home. It was almost as though those became invisible in the public sphere and English seemed to dominate everything.

So, I guess that questioning of monolingual public spaces and how they include or exclude people has driven a lot of my research work. I think particularly how children who speak languages other than English at home can be excluded within classrooms that adopt an English only approach to learning. I guess the focus of my academic career over the past 10 to 15 years has always been to train students to become knowledgeable, reflective, and responsive teachers of learners from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Brynn: That’s amazing. You really did have a lot of multilingual experience. That’s so cool that you were able to be in an environment with so many different languages like that.

And I think that that must be really useful for you as an educator for not just students like primary or secondary school students, but now that you teach future teachers how to teach. So, let’s talk about this article that you’ve written called Teachers Truly Know Students and How They Learn, Does AI. So, this article discusses the use of AI and platforms like ChatGPT in this teacher training, which you do.

And one important part of learning how to teach is learning how to write effective lesson plans. I mean, I remember doing that for my own teacher training course that I went through when I became a TESOL educator as well. So, talk to us about, I guess, the importance of lesson plans and also about this emerging use of AI in lesson plan creation and what we know about the percentage of teachers who are actually using AI to create their lesson plans.

Dr Ollerhead: I think I heard a statistic the other day that teachers have, on average, about eight minutes to plan lessons over and above the other duties they have. So, we know that teacher workload is a very big issue. And there’s no surprise then that busy teachers are turning to GenAI models like ChatGPT or Perplexity to streamline lesson planning.

I certainly am no expert on AI, but it’s very much part of the landscape now in teacher education. And we know that for teachers, simply by entering prompts, like generate a three-lesson sequence on maybe something like Agricultural Innovation in Australia, they can quickly receive a detailed teaching program tailored to the lesson content, compete with learning outcomes, suggested resources, classroom management tips, and more. So, this is fantastic.

It represents a pragmatic solution to busy teachers, to overwhelming workloads. And it also explains why they’re being taken up quite readily by school teachers and also in places of higher education and teacher training environments. And as far as how many teachers use AI for lesson planning, I suppose a useful survey would be one that was run by the Australian Association of Independent Schools in 2023, where they reported over 70% of primary teachers and 80% of secondary teachers were using generative AI tools in their work.

And the lesson planning or learning design was rated as the top AI assisted task. Now, granted the survey dates back to August 2023, but one could assume that uptake is even greater by now. And in my work as a secondary teacher educator, my observations of AI use amongst teachers across government, independent and Catholic sectors generally support these findings.

Brynn: I can understand why, honestly, because, I mean, we are both educators and I get it, our workloads are huge, and especially if you think about teachers who, I guess, are working in the primary and the secondary school levels, they are not just working from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day. They are putting in so many more hours that people don’t actually see happening.

And then to have to create, not just create lesson plans, but I think maybe people don’t realize that various departments of education or different sectors require you to document these lesson plans in a very specific way and you need to map them onto learning outcomes and objectives and things like that.

So, it’s not just quote unquote creating a lesson plan. You have to really put a lot of effort into it. And if you’re saying that teachers are only getting something like eight minutes to do that, that’s unfathomable. That’s untenable.

Dr Ollerhead: Absolutely. Very, very overwhelming. And we know that lesson planning is really, really important.

A well-planned lesson is really fundamental to classroom management, to effective differentiation, to really, really considering the accessibility of the content. But it is a big task on top of, as you say, all the other tasks that teachers are having to fulfill on a daily basis.

Brynn: You just mentioned something called differentiation. And I think that this is a really important point to talk about. So, talk to us about this concept of differentiation in teaching.

What does it mean? And why is it a concept that teachers need to keep in mind when they’re planning their lessons?

Dr Ollerhead: The D word, yes, differentiation. It’s probably one of the most important and most challenging things to learn when training to become a teacher. And it really, Brynn, it really lies at the heart of Australian Professional Teaching Standard 1.3, which is “know students and how they learn”.

And especially knowing about how to differentiate for students from different cultural, linguistic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds. Differentiation in general refers to the practice of tailoring instruction to meet the varied learning profiles, backgrounds and abilities of each child or student in your class. And it starts with really understanding the diversity profile of your class.

So, for example, I said in the article that let’s say you teach a class where 95% of your class comes from a language background other than English. And you might think, well, that’s unrealistic. Actually, in Sydney, it really isn’t.

There are many areas where that would be the norm rather than the exception. In fact, in New South Wales, one in three students comes from a language background other than English. And in your class, your class comprises a mix of high achieving, gifted and talented individuals, some of whom are expert English users, while others might be newly arrived in Australia and they might have been assessed as emerging on the ELD Learning Progression, which is a tool that we use to measure where students are in their English language learning trajectory.

Now, these students need targeted language support to be able to even access the content of the curriculum. And let’s say your students come from various backgrounds. Some might be Aboriginal Australian students, others might come from countries as diverse as Sudan, China, Afghanistan, Bangladesh.

Some might even have spent three or more years in refugee camps before arriving in Australia, with no access to formal education at all. Others live in Sydney without their families. So, yeah, some are highly literate.

And while others have yet to master basic academic literacies and literacy skills in English. So given this diverse scenario in one class, and as I said, that is actually often the norm, rather than the exception. Differentiation can include things like the types of teaching strategies that you use.

So, using a variety of teaching strategies to engage students at different levels. So, for example, your highly proficient English users might work on extension activities that challenge their critical thinking. New arrivals who are still coming to grips with English as a medium of instruction could benefit from visual aids, graded texts, interactive group work to help them grasp key concepts.

We could also differentiate in terms of the assessment that we use. So, we might implement diverse assessment strategies that allow students to demonstrate their understanding in ways that align with their language proficiency and educational background. So, this might include allowing students to present their knowledge through oral projects or visual representations rather than traditional written assessments.

I always give the example of the water cycle. A child doesn’t necessarily come to the classroom not knowing anything about the water cycle. It’s just that they’re not able to understand it.

They’re not able to express that knowledge in English. So, giving them another mode through which to express that knowledge is really, really important. Of course, language support is very important as well.

So, for those students who are especially new arrivals, who are emergent on the EAL/D learner progression, we can provide targeted language support to scaffolding techniques that can involve using sentence starters, graphic organisers, active vocabulary acquisition activities, specifically designed for the content being taught. You know, in second year, we have a lot of technical vocabulary that is very specific to the field in which you’re teaching. So, for example, the word culture in science means something very different to the way it’s used in society and culture, for example.

And we actually need to think, well, this needs to be, these differences need to be made explicit for our learners, especially those who come from EAL/D backgrounds. But I guess one aspect that’s often overlooked is cultural differentiation. And this refers to modifying lesson content to be culturally relevant and accessible to all students.

So, it’s not just a sink or swim situation where we expect students to come to Australia and understand everything about Australia and its culture. What it means is integrating examples and materials into your lesson that reflect the backgrounds of your students and the various cultural contexts they come from and connecting your curriculum to their experiences. So, Robin Maloney and Leslie Harbin and Susan Oguro have written an amazing book that actually encourages teachers to teach for linguistic responsiveness.

And they encourage teachers to ask questions like, before you teach content, it’s really helpful to ask yourself questions such as, what are my own biases and blind spots related to the subject matter? What insights might my students have that I’m unaware of? So, for example, we know in maths, all countries have mathematical systems that are very particular to their cultural context.

And those can be very rich learning opportunities for all students in the classroom. Also important is what sensitivities could arise in discussions about this content with concerning values, knowledge and language. And I think most importantly, how can I teach this material in a culturally and linguistically responsive manner that promotes my students’ well-being and achievement?

So, do my students see themselves reflected in this content? Or is it presented in a very sort of Australian, monocultural, monolingual way? That is the challenge that I always set for my students to master as teachers who are going into contexts where they’re going to be teaching in very diverse settings.

Brynn: And what I’m hearing in that explanation is that teachers are not just planning this, you know, one lesson plan, saying, okay, everybody in the class is going to be able to do this skill and they’re all at this level. Because even if we had a classroom of monolingual English Australian born students, there is no classroom in which every single student is at the same level on particular skills or in particular classes. So, teachers are already having to do this work constantly, even if they’re in this sort of more monolingual, monocultural environment.

But what I’m hearing you say, and it’s true, is that our reality, as people who live in Sydney and the surrounding suburbs, is that we are becoming more and more and more multilingual, multicultural, and that this is just reality, that teachers are having to now have these additional thoughts and these additional considerations as they plan lesson plans. And the thing is, with this expectation of, well, can teachers just use AI to plan lesson plans? Now we have to think, well, can AI actually take these things into consideration?

Dr Ollerhead: That’s exactly right, Brynn. And it really gets to the heart of what we know about teaching. We know that teaching is not just a science.

It’s not just a process of knowing a series of principles, a series of methods and applying them. It’s actually also an art in terms of that element of, I always say that I think the most important material for success as a teacher is the ability to listen well. So, a teacher that’s in tune with their students will really by default be able to differentiate because in the moment they’re hearing, OK, I’m not sure if my class has actually been taken along with me in this lesson.

I think I might have lost them somewhere. So, I’m not going to ask the question, does everybody understand? Because of course, you’re going to get the answer, yes, of course.

Nobody wants to say they don’t understand. It’s really about the art of listening in, of asking the right questions. And then based on the answers you get to those questions, saying, OK, how can I tailor my delivery to respond to the needs of my learners?

So, I can do many things really, really well. And there’s no doubt there’s a role for it in lesson planning. But I think I guess what I was hoping to explore in that article is that there’s an essential element of listening that is very human, listening and responding with empathy in the moment contingently, that at the moment is still very human, I think.

And I would like to think that with the rise of AI, and we’ve seen it just completely overtake all our expectations, instead of trying to compete with AI, I think what we need to do is to get better at what we do, and that’s being human. And I think that very human empathetic element of listening to our students, finding out more about who they are, where they come from, how they’re feeling today, are they actually even in a space to be learning about equations when they’re still trying to understand the new culture that they found themselves in. So, I guess that’s my biggest hope is that we’re going to graduate a generation of teachers who are really checking in and attuned to the wonderful diversity we have in our classrooms.

Brynn: I think that the whole concept of differentiation in teachers is inherently human. And another part that you talk about in the article that I think is along the same lines is thinking about lesson plan creation in conjunction with the concept of the quote virtual school bag, which I love.

So, what is a virtual school bag? And why is it something that teachers need to think about when planning their lessons, especially when considering linguistic and cultural diversity within a classroom? And then there’s this question of can we expect AI to be able to consider a student’s virtual school bag?

Dr Ollerhead: I’m so glad you asked about that, because that to me has always been a really powerful visual metaphor. And that’s the concept of the virtual school bag comes from Pat Thompson and the work that Barbara Koma has done from the University of Queensland. They’ve done amazing work on looking at the rich cultural and linguistic resources that students from language backgrounds other than English come with to the classroom.

And they conceptualize it in the form of a visual metaphor. And they say that many children come to school with their virtual backpack that’s filled with things like cultural knowledge, geographical knowledge, practical knowledge of cultures and customs and skills from their own context. We call those funds of knowledge.

But what happens is that often they’re asked to leave that schoolbag at the classroom door and not to unpack it. And it’s only really the mainstream resources that are unpacked in the classroom. And so, they say it’s very dehumanizing if children are prevented from showing others what’s in their backpack, what they have to bring to learning, what they have to bring to the teacher.

You know, as teachers, we’re constant learners as well. So, I find that a very powerful metaphor. And you can only really discover what’s in students’ or children’s virtual backpack if you create a space in which all knowledges and cultures are valued in the classroom.

Now, AI is a tool, but it’s not an environment, it’s not a climate, it’s not an ecosystem where children feel safe. That is the teacher’s role. And so, I work a lot with a concept, a theory and a practice of full translanguaging.

And we call that a translanguaging space or a stance where the teacher does not have to be proficient in every single language of the classroom but makes space for the articulation of those languages and cultures throughout certain aspects of their teaching.

Brynn: I think that it gets to this point that I do think that we’ve been seeing more and more in education in general over the last even just decade, which is that we can’t expect every student in a classroom to fit into this one mould. I’m thinking of even just different neuro types or different learning styles, let alone linguistic and cultural backgrounds. And I do think that as a society, we’re getting better at making space for all of those differences.

But I think that we have to keep in mind this long educational tradition of almost trying to force the mainstream that we saw happening, you know, kind of since the beginning of education, really. You know, I’m thinking back to like one room schoolhouses and things like that. And we have to think, okay, we know that that did not work.

You know, we’ve, I mean, I’m a millennial, and that was still very much the education system that I grew up with, was trying to fit all of these kids into this one mould. And so, what I can almost hear is people saying, well, but if we’ve got these multilingual, multicultural students, shouldn’t they just have to learn English? Shouldn’t they just have to assimilate and fit into Australian culture?

But you mentioned the humanity of the teacher and the teacher really recognizing the humanity of the students. And, you know, some people might say that actually, you know, using AI to create these lesson plans, it’s fine, because AI can be more objective. It can almost, you know, force this mainstream.

So, tell me what you would say to those people that are saying, like, well, shouldn’t we all be sort of fitting into this one mould?

Dr Ollerhead: Yeah, that’s a great question, Brynn. And I think it kind of taps into some very powerful discourses at the moment about things like explicit teaching and, you know, being very clear about what the outcomes are for lessons. And there’s definitely merit to explicit teaching and making, you know, making visible the things that students need to achieve in a lesson.

What I want to emphasize is that including students’ cultures and language in the classroom is not antithetical to teaching them how to learn in English. In fact, what we find is that it supports their English learning. And you know why it does that?

It’s because it validates students’ identities. It sees what they come with as a strength and it gets them engaged in lesson content and lesson activities. If you come to school and you don’t see a place for yourself in learning, you’re going to disengage.

And we know that that is a big barrier to successful learning. So these things do not actually necessarily that they don’t preclude each other. So we need to remember that the complete understanding of a student’s unique cultural background, their personal experiences and their emotional needs is complex and often requires human empathy and insight.

And if you’re ever in a classroom, I’m really fortunate to work with some incredible teachers. And I see so many teachers who have been in the field for a very long time. They might not even call what they say differentiation, what they do as differentiation, but they do it instinctively because it’s second nature to them to just tap into where students are, to listen intently, to quickly in the moment tweak their instruction or their strategies to meet their students’ needs.

But we can’t expect new teachers to understand that. We can’t expect new teachers to have the wherewithal to immediately differentiate, especially because our classrooms are becoming more multicultural and multilingual, because of globalization, because of migration. But strangely enough in Australia, that hasn’t actually meant that our teaching practices have become attuned to that increasing diversity.

And it’s something we can’t shy away from. It’s actually something that needs to be dealt with not just in early childhood or primary or secondary, but also at universities. And we really need to, I guess, rethink this “it’s simpler if everybody learns English” because that just doesn’t cut it anymore. We know that it benefits everybody when we have plurality in classrooms where we can learn from each other, where there’s genuine intercultural sharing and understanding. And I guess what we want to do as teacher-trainers and teacher-educators is to say teaching is an ongoing learning process.

But if you understand from the outset that the key to being an effective teacher is actually exercising that empathy, exercising that insight, I think that sets you up for success and it certainly sets your learners up for success. We know that even though AI is amazing in the way that it can analyse and recommend resources related to a student’s virtual school bag, teachers still play a crucial role in ensuring that those resources are integrated in a way that is thoughtful and responsive to each student’s needs.

Brynn: I love that idea of not denying the fact that we have AI, AI is here, people are using it. I mean, this is a whole other episode, but we see students use it as well in their writing.

It’s not something that we can close our eyes to and say, “No, no, this doesn’t exist. Let’s just pretend like it’s 25 years ago.” So, I love that you’re acknowledging, yeah, it exists, it can be a tool for certain things, especially for those busy, busy teachers who have so much that they have to accomplish in such a short amount of time.

But I just really love this idea of fundamentally, teachers have to tap into their humanity and their empathy, and they have to recognize the humanity in their students in order to create a more meaningful and productive classroom, because it’s really only going to be a net positive when we have that integration of cultures and languages and students working together, because in our globalized world, that’s what they’re going to have to do when they’re grownups anyway, you know?

So, you said that you can see AI being used as a tool. Where do you see it going? Where do you think it’s heading in the education and teacher training sectors, for good or for bad?

Dr Ollerhead: Yeah, I mean, you’ve summarized it so well Brynn, but I think it’s, I guess my hope is, and again, I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball, and you know, there’ve just been such rapid changes within the last two years. But my hope is that it will become a symbiotic relationship, where, I mean, for sure, the educational sector will not simply adopt AI, it will embrace it as a catalyst for enhancement. But I think the key there is the word enhancement.

It augments things. It’s really amazing at generating big data sets. And you know, that’s what it does.

I don’t think we could ever hope to compete with that. But again, getting back to the hope that there can be a relationship between AI and education that is symbiotic. So I guess what I mean by that is sort of a balancing act where technology supports, not just supports, but actually amplifies the irreplaceable human qualities that drive effective teaching and learning.

And as AI continues to evolve, I’m excited about the possibilities it presents, I guess, for enriching education and empowering students and teachers. But I’m very much aware that we can’t deny that it’s here. But I’m also very wary of outsourcing crucial things like differentiation for control and linguistic diversity to AI, without actually understanding the fundamental knowledge on which we have to base our judicious use of lesson planning.

Brynn: I love that answer. I think that that’s a perfect summary of where we’re at and where, hopefully, we are headed. So, Sue, thank you so much for talking with me today, and thank you for being on the show.

Dr Ollerhead: It’s been a pleasure, Brynn. Thanks so much.

Brynn: And thank you for listening, everyone. If you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move Podcast, 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.

“Giant Head” installation at the Gentle Monster store at Sydney Airport

One of the goals of graduate education is to empower students to reach their academic and professional goals by developing their communication skills. For example, one of the learning outcomes of a class I teach in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University is to enable students to “communicate advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.”

To achieve that learning outcome, students undertake a series of writing tasks throughout the semester on a public forum, namely right here on Language on the Move.

Although moderating around a thousand comments per semester is a huge workload, I’ve always enjoyed this task. The series of responses to writing prompts (aka comments on blog posts) allows me to learn more about my students’ backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. It is also rewarding to see that student comments become more sophisticated and engaged over the course of the semester and that their confidence in their academic writing increases.

Has ChatGPT ruined writing practice?

While I used to enjoy supporting students to develop their communication skills in this way, the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the rapid adoption of other generative AI platforms since then has changed things.

A not insignificant number of students now submit machine-generated writing tasks, and I’m saddled with the additional task of catching out these cheaters.

Submitting machine-generated text obviously has no learning benefits. Therefore, my task descriptions and syllabi now contain an explicit prohibition against the use generative AI:

Use of generative AI is prohibited
Your response must be your own work, and you are not allowed to post machine-generated text. Use of machine-generated text in this or any other unit tasks defies the point of learning. It is also dishonest and a waste of your time and my time. […] If I suspect you of having used generative AI to complete your writing task, your mark will automatically be 0.

In 2023, this prohibition took care of the problem, but in 2024 it no longer works. This is because machine writing has become virtually indistinguishable from bad human writing.

Machine writing and bad human writing now look the same

Most commentators note that machine-generated text is getting better. This may be true. What has received less attention is the fact that human writing is getting worse as people read less widely. Instead, more and more people seem to model their writing on the bland models of machines.

The feedback loop between reading and writing is breaking down.

The Internet is drowning in an ocean of poor writing, whether created by humans or machines – a phenomenon Matthew Kirschenbaumer has described as the looming “textocalypse:” “a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in any digital setting.”

Instead of developing their communication skills through audience-focussed practice, my students’ regular writing practice may now be contributing to this tsunami. If students use generative AI, it certainly no longer meets its stated aim – to practice communicating advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.

Where is the line between outsourcing learning to tech and using tech to support learning?

To my mind, the line was clear-cut: to use generative AI is to outsource learning to a machine and therefore pointless. I was not concerned about the use of other language technologies, such as spell checkers, auto-complete, grammar checkers, or auto-translate.

But then I received this student inquiry, which I am reproducing here with the student’s permission:

I am writing to inquire if using the grammar check program for writing tasks is also prohibited.
I’ve been aware that AI generation is prohibited, and I did not use AI for my writing task. I [used all the assigned inputs], and I tried to organize ideas in my first language, then translated them by myself (without using any machine translator).
However, I always use a grammar check program, and sometimes, it suggests better words or expressions that I can adopt by clicking, as I am a paid user of it. I use it because I am unsure if my grammar is okay and understandable. I was wondering if this is also prohibited?

The easy answer to the query is that (automated) translation and grammar checking are allowed because they are not covered by the prohibition.

The more complicated question is whether these practices should be prohibited and, even if not strictly prohibited, whether they are advisable?

Dear reader, I need your input!

Translation as a bridge to English writing?

Let’s start with translation as a form of writing practice. The inputs for the task that triggered this question (Chapter 3 of Life in a New Language, and Language on the Move podcast series about Life in a New Language) were all in English.

After having perused all these inputs in English to then draft the response – a short reflection on the job search experience of one of the participants – in another language is a lot of extra work. You have to process input in English, write in another language, and translate that output.

This extra work may become manageable if it is done by a machine. A generative AI tool could produce a summary of the input in no time. An auto-translate tool could translate the summaries into the other language, again in no time. The student then drafts their response in the other language.

It’s technically the student’s work. Or is it? And, more importantly, is this process developing their English writing and communication?

Grammar checkers, suggested phrasing, and auto-complete

Like the student who posed the question, most of my students are international students, most of whom are still developing their English language skills, at the same time that they are required to learn and perform through the medium of that language.

To avail themselves of all kinds of learning tools is important. I myself use the in-built spell-check, grammar-check, and auto-complete features of MS Word. However, I can evaluate the advice provided by these tools and readily reject it where it’s wrong or inconsistent with my intentions.

Judgement needed: Until recently, the MS Word auto-correct tool incorrectly suggested that the spelling of “in-principle” was “in-principal”

I worry that, for a learner using these tools, these nuances get lost. If the machine is perceived to be always right, language changes from something malleable to form and express our ideas into a right-or-wrong proposition.

Similarly, learning synonyms is important to improve one’s writing. To this day, I regularly look up synonyms when I write with the intent to find the best, the most concise, their clearest expression. However, looking up synonyms for an expression and evaluating the various options is different from receiving automated suggestions and accepting them. One seems like an active, critical form of learning and the other like a passive form of learning. The writer’s sense of ownership and autonomy is different in the two instances.

How best to use language technologies to develop academic literacies and communicative competence?

In sum, most use of language technologies for the kinds of learning tasks I have described here strikes me as counterproductive. Yet, I can also see its uses. Where is the line between using tech to support one’s learning and using tech to avoid doing the hard work of practice, the only way that leads to fluency?

How do you use tech in your university assignments and where do you draw the line? How would you deal with these dilemmas as a teacher?

The conversation addresses community and heritage language schooling research and practice, and our guest’s long history of important language policy research and activism, as well as the interconnections between the two.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel 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.

Reference

Cruickshank, K., Lo Bianco, J., & Wahlin, M. (Eds.). (2023). Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges, and Teaching Practices. Taylor & Francis.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 29/05/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dr Torsh: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

I’m very pleased today to say that my guest is Joseph Lo Bianco, a foundational figure in linguistics here in Australia. I could say many things, but I will introduce him as Professor of Language and Literacy Education at Melbourne University. Today, we’re going to talk about his new book, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. It was co-edited with Ken Cruickshank and Merryl Wahlin and published by Routledge.

Welcome to the show, Jo!

Prof Lo Bianco: Thank you very much, Hanna.

Dr Torsh: Now, for those who don’t know your very impressive body of work or, perhaps, are new to this field, could you just start by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Prof Lo Bianco: Ok, well thank you for the invitation. I’ve recently retired from the position at the University of Melbourne in Australia which I’d had for 20 years. Prior to that and even during that period of time at the university, I worked in language policy studies. I started off my academic life as an economist. I was very interested in the integration of migrant populations, particularly migrant women.

I worked in that focus of work in Victoria. But I became less interested in it when it started not to focus on culture and not provide any kind of focus on people’s language. I retrained as a language person and educator and linguist, and then I became slightly uninterested with the descriptive tendencies of a lot of linguistics. I’ve always really been interested in public action probably more than anything. So, I started to research policy around language. I became actively involved in those things myself directly.

Then, during the late 1970s, early 1980s in Melbourne, Victoria and other places, I was very involved in activism around these things. There were some political changes which meant that I was invited to put my money where my mouth was. I was basically demanding that governments do better for minority populations and they said, “Well, let’s see what you would do.” So, I was invited to draft policies. I did write these, and I became extremely interested in the traction of ideas.

The policies were accepted. The National Policy on Languages in 1987 was the peak. Really, it was the first multilingual policy, some people say the first one ever anywhere, but certainly in English speaking settings. Then I became very heavily involved in the implementation of this. I developed a very acute interest in problems of making change real. This moved me away from academic research considerations. I had always loved research, but you can’t do so many things at once. So, I became very actively involved in that.

Because the policy was adopted by government and launched and funded, there was a lot of interest in it internationally, and the early successes that we had. Languages started to boom. We had extraordinary growth in research and interest in translation and interpreting and in the approach that we took in the policy, which was comprehensive.

Most policies, if you look at them, on language tend to be just the policy on behalf of the official dominant language of a country. Country X protects Language Y. That’s typically what language policies do. Or they tend to be some concession to a minority population, but they don’t go very far.

We were trying to do very ambitious things, you know. Think about public discourse, how people spoke to each other, inclusion of minorities, social cohesion, but also justice and rights questions. Naturally, a lot of opposition grew up against this from people who didn’t like what we were trying to do. So, the politics of language became my life, really, for many years.

Then, because of what we were doing, it got noticed by people like Joshua Fishman in the United States, who invited me over there. I’ve never done what I promised him I would do, actually. At one point he said I really should document this as an experiential process, and I will do that in my retirement at some point as a reflection on how to do language policy from the inside. Even though language policy is something that is studied by applied language scholars, they still tend to theorise it a lot. So, its practicality is lost, I think, and I want to reinject that.

But anyway, this was noticed around the world, and I got lots and lots of invitations to work in different places, including with international organisations like UNESCO and UNICEF and the Council of Europe. So, I started to do assignments on invitation in Southeast Asia – Samoa, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu. And in South Asia – Sri Lanka for the World Bank, Myanmar for UNICEF and other Southeast Asian settings. Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines. I went to many assignments in Europe.

So, this has been my career since then, working on practical language policy things, which always raise questions of literacy and language study but also the linguistics of these problems. Who describes what language is? How do they do them? What happens with the work that linguists do? How does it get taken up or not get taken up within practical contexts? That became my obsession.

Recently, we’ve just submitted for publication a book on Tunisia that I’ve done with a colleague. We’ve looked at language, ideological discourses. Arabic, French, the two kinds of Arabic, English and Berber and other language issues there. So, it became a kind of reverberating set of discussions. I’ve had a very wonderful career of working all around the world in different settings on practical problems.

In some places, we’ve produced significant change. In Thailand, we produced the first language policy in that country that wasn’t just about the protection of the national language. In Myanmar, we did 45 public discourses around language rights for minority populations, the learning of the main language by minority populations, which is often also a grievance. This kind of thing. I did a trilingual policy in Sri Lanka in 1999 and submitted this and worked with the President’s office on the implementation on it. Then it got thwarted by conflicts there.

So, I’ve had this wonderful opportunity and in this part of my career I want to think about putting down some reflections on this experience.

Dr Torsh: Oh, thank you. That’s so interesting. I’m thrilled to hear that you’re going to write a reflection about that process of putting together the National Policy on Languages because that’s something that continues to be important in the work of myself and other scholars in Australia, so that’s really exciting.

Ok, but we’re here to talk about your new book at the moment, so congratulations on that new edited book. Before we talk about it, the book is called, as I said, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. For our listeners who aren’t really across the community languages sector in Australia, could you just give us a brief overview of it? Obviously, it’s also connected to your own policy activism, and how did that happen? How did it come about that it was established in Australia, and how has it changed? How has the policy focus and the sector changed since that time?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it’s a long and convoluted story, and I can only tell a tiny fraction of it. Suffice to say that in really nearly every society that I’ve worked in, I’ve visited and worked with community language schools in Nagoya in Japan, these kinds of processes of a community generating institutional structures to support and maintain and transmit their languages to their children is really universal.

In some cases in some societies, it’s heavily repressed, and in other societies they’re actually encouraged. But the phenomenon is practically global, I would say, and it tends to be ignored. Most of what focuses the attention of researchers in relation to language education is mainstream or official or dominant schooling. We’ve had this third sector, you might call it, third sector schools. The two sectors other than that are the public government school and then the independent or private schools, and in Australia there are large Catholic school sectors. So, they’re the two other sectors and then you have these parttime schools in the main, although some of them are also full time, that are schools whose primary purpose is the transmission of language and culture to immigrant children, but also increasingly indigenous children in our society.

Now, traveling around the world and the kind of work that I’ve done that I described before, I noticed at meetings and other places there would be community representatives, or even academics who would come and say, “Look, I’m working with Chinese schools in Malaysia” or something or other. And that can be mainstream government schools or that can be the parttime schools.

So, with Ken and Merryl we decided that we would hold an international conference to try and do some proper comparative work. This had never really been done. And we had this very successful conference in Sydney, much affected by Covid and restrictions on travel, but nevertheless it was a very successful conference. And we realised there’s a huge unaddressed agenda there, well we suspected that. So, we thought we’d produce a volume that started to map out the territory. There’s a little bit of a taxonomy that I started to produce in my own chapter, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done into this.

But also, what needs to be both theorised and then developed in a practical way, is what do we want of these schools? If we’re adopting a pluralist position where we believe in language rights, what role would we hope for these schools? Then, in practical terms, what could be done?

Now, in my policy work, right back to the really early 1980s, late 1970s, I worked for government in Victoria. We promoted all sorts of things like cooperation and integration between these schools. Sometimes these schools use the premises of a mainstream school on a weekend or after hours. So, we used to do very practical things. We did this in 1981, you know, facilitating the writing up of contracts, of meetings between the two sectors. Often, the teachers are not trained, or they can be trained teachers in another system but it’s not recognised here. We would facilitate collaboration.

You can imagine the kinds of problems that would be there of a practical nature. Of people not understanding each other, even mistrust. Sometimes much worse things than that. All of these things were there and in spades, which is a colloquialism of saying in large quantity. So, we started to do lots of facilitation of this.

In 1982, actually from your university, Macquarie University in Sydney, Professor Marlene Norst, who has sadly passed away, she was commissioned partly from some of the pressure we had been putting on the federal government, to do a survey of these schools as a preparation to some kind of systemic support for them. She produced a wonderful report (which) unfortunately got repressed by forces who didn’t want this report. It wasn’t just a survey. She produced a really interesting guide to what could be done. She went beyond the brief in a very helpful way.

There’s always resistance to any kind of progress. We know this. Unfortunately, her work got marginalised. But I promote it a lot because I liked her a lot. She was a good scholar and tried to do a great thing, but it’s got ignored.

I took that up in my 1987 National Policy on Languages and promoted it, and we got some extra funding for these schools, so they started to be incorporated into the system. So, this is what we wanted to do in the book, is to think, “Well, what do other societies do? Are they marginalised? Are they given municipal level support, but not state or federal government support, depending on the governance structures in different countries? Are they actively repressed? Are they underground schools?”. This happens in very repressive systems. This can be very dangerous to the lives, actually, of people, to engage in this kind of activity. So, I think there’s a call for solidarity with people who struggle against repression, but also to learn from systems where more substantial work is done.

In some systems, government and public education, or mainstream schooling, only supports prestige foreign languages and these community languages tend to be marginalised and they might get some token support or acknowledgement or given a license to continue to teach, but they’re not actually encouraged. And all the community language teaching and language maintenance, as distinct from second language learning, would happen only in those marginal settings.

Well, in Australia and many other countries in the world we have a much more integrated approach. Our mainstream schools teach multiple languages, including many community languages. Many students study the language at school, at mainstream school, that they might also study in an after-hours system. So, I think, and we can go onto this with another question, but I think we need to think imaginatively and in a future-oriented way about cleaning up this mess, as it were.

Having principles that start from a different basis, not a toleration basis, but a basis of learning, for having a different way in which all of these – I mean, children just have one brain. The learning goes on in that same one brain, and if that one brain is shopped around different systemic structures, those structures ought to get their act together rather than the child and the family having to continually have to adjust to different forms of provision.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, great, thank you. I think for those who are outside of the sector and aren’t that aware of it, can you just explain what that discontinuity actually can look like for those who haven’t experienced it?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it can look like a child studying whatever language it happens to be, let’s say Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, in a school in Sydney during the week. They might do a one- or two-hour program during the week, so it’s not a huge commitment of time. And then, because their family might come from Malaysia and be an ethnic Chinese family but they might not speak modern standard Chinese, or Mandarin, in their home, the child goes to a Saturday morning school run by the community, or an after-hours school two days a week. And sometimes that after-hours teaching happens in the same physical premises as the week program.

Now, there’s a lot of issues here. One of them is about the coherence of the pedagogies that are used in the two places and the wastefulness of the lack of any collaboration between the two systems. Wouldn’t it be much better if it were possible for this to be maybe not seamless, that would be an ideal aspiration, but at least less jagged and disruptive if it were coordinated in some way, pedagogically as well as in other ways. If there were shared knowledge among the different teachers about individual children.

It would have to start from a child’s focused look and also be informed by good pedagogical language learning processes and also of the affordances. Different systems afford different possibilities. Imagine a highly literate mother tongue speaker teaching on a Saturday or Sunday but who isn’t necessarily a trained teacher. This might be a perfect input for colloquial, continuous communicative language. Then you might have a more structured grammar-centred approach in the school system. These are just some ideas that I’ve had that we could work on, and we’ve put them into action in some places.

But I feel like systems, governments, run away from this. It seems to them like an immense problem, a very messy problem. But as I argue in my chapter in the book and at the talk I gave at the conference, I think they’re going to have to deal with this at some point because of the radical changes that are happening in the world of communication and learning anyway that are going to overwhelm all these structures. We’re going to be forced to think about these things differently. I always think if you can predict a change happening, prepare for it. Start talking about it. Get intellectuals in to start theorising what’s involved. Literacy scholars have got a lot to contribute here, and people who think about the semiotics about the representation of language with communities.

I love partnerships which involve these kinds of interactions. I’ve always found them very productive, and I’ve always tried to set them up. That’s what we did in Myanmar (with) all those dialogues.

Sticking with the community language schools which, in some countries, I have to clarify, are called heritage language schools, or heritage languages, and I and other people have resisted that encroachment of that terminology here. Not because it’s bad terminology but because typically in English, I think, “heritage” has a connotation of something that’s in the past, like a heritage façade of a building. Or the heritage which might be the historical memory of a community. I’m not saying that it’s inevitable that it has that connotation, but I think it often does. Whereas a “community language” suggests that it’s something that is present and vibrant and vital within an existing alive community now. So, I’ve preferred it from that point of view.

In the book, we say “community/heritage” because obviously other people use the other terminology. And of course, we can inject new meaning into terms. We don’t have to be defeated by past ways in which words work. So anyway, there’s that kind of issue there.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, that’s great, thank you. I’m now rethinking my use of “heritage language” in my own work, so that’s great to think about that.

I’m really interested in this argument that you make in your chapter, as you said, about changes in our understanding of what literacy is. So, you have a chapter in the book which is based on a talk that you did at the conference. The chapter, which introduces the volume, is called “Community/Heritage Language Schools Transforming Education: Beyond complementary, more than integration”. And you’ve already said systems need to grapple with this idea that you can’t have these two sectors not talking to each other, that it’s not in the interest of the learner. You argue that in part because of this idea of the way we understand literacy is changing as a result of technology, of the fourth industrial revolution.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that, for our listeners? I realise they have to go read the chapter, but just a little bit of a summary for them, to draw them in?

Prof Lo Bianco: It’s an immense topic, of course. If you look at any organisation that has worked in literacy for a long time, you can’t fail to notice that they have adjusted their definition of what it is. One organisation whose definitions I have studied is UNESCO. Of course, they are a very important organisation in this because when they were founded, from the very beginning, they were given the world mandate I would call it for kind of a global agenda for literacy in the world. That’s how I’ve described it in a publication.

If we look at how they understood literacy in the late 40s, early 1950s, and compare it to how they understand literacy today, it’s cheese and chalk. Two very, very different notions. Teachers and researchers have done this. I mean, there have been many movements in this. One of the most important ones was the new literacy studies of the 1990s which started to inject social understandings of literacy and move away from a pure and psychometric or cognitivist approach. Of course, it’s moved on even a lot since then.

So, what we know is that what is taken to be literacy has expanded beyond simple capacity to read and write a language to multiple other dimensions of what’s involved in being a literate person in a society that penalises people who are not literate. This is the really important social consequence of this, that we have the social cost. It shouldn’t be like this, but it is. The social cost of low literacy even understood in traditional ways of understanding literacy is very, very high. There is a high risk of unemployment. It’s no accident that a really high proportion of prisoners in jails are low literate people. There are multiple explanations of this. It’s not a predictor, it’s a consequence of the social punishment.

I’m very committed to this because both of my parents were very low literate people. Neither of them had any serious formal education. And yet, they were both very intelligent people. So, we can’t make any kind of connection between intelligence. This is an enormous discourse, and I’ll just leave it planted there, but what I did want to say about this is that what’s changed in our understanding about literacies from the 50s to now has been this social dimension.

What’s changing increasingly now is a massive technological injection in which multimodality is the principal characteristic of literacy. I mean, anything we do online cannot be reduced to language-centred semiotics. It involves manipulation of multiple semiotic resources that are not just linguistic anymore. Colour, movement, image – there’s any number of things that go into a very complex meaning-making practice. This is going to continue to accelerate in what some people call literacy 4.0. My colleague Professor Lesley Farrell at the university uses that term. (This) mirrors industry 4.0, the 4^th industrial revolution, which is not just computers but artificial intelligence beyond computing as a practice that people are in charge of. It’s absurd in a way, to call them machines anymore, but machines which learn and can learn independently generate their own kind of knowledge and then project that into the space of meaning. So, we’ve got something really radical going on. That’s going to change how language works.

I think one of the reasons we have a crisis in language study today, and this is very true, sadly in English speaking or dominant countries in particular. We have the biggest struggle for language teaching and learning that we’ve had for many years. People misunderstand the technologies as obviating the need for language study. That’s because they’re very reductionist about what’s involved. People used to take literacy in this very reductionist simple way. They take language to be very reductionist, and they tend to think it’s just basic communication. So, we can inject that stuff with voice retrieval. You can ask your little pen to say something in Japanese and you’ll hand that to someone and it’ll say “good morning” in Japanese.

This is completely possible. It exists. There are very sophisticated technologies that will even do lip syncing, so that you’ll look like you’re speaking the language when you take a video of yourself speaking German or Italian or whatever it happens to be. So, this is going to be a battle that we have, to persuade administrators and other people that language learning is not this. This is forms of communication. Let’s welcome them. Let’s adopt them. Let’s embrace them. We can’t deny them. They’re there. They’re going to grow. Elon Musk wants to inject probes or whatever they are, implants in people’s brains. All of these things are going on at a very rapid rate, and some of them might be ethically very, very questionable. But I can’t see any way that they’re going to be stopped or slowed down until we get on top of what they mean for people.

So, we have to understand them. What they mean is that people’s learning will be occurring in places other than in schooling. It will be self-generated and generated by outside forces including machines. It’s going to be massively challenging to everything that curriculums, official curriculums, require and prescribe in schooling.

This is going to create, I think, for indigenous populations, and especially for dispersed, small populations – I worked with the Tigrinya community in Melbourne many years ago with a very small population in Melbourne but who had other members in Brazil and in Africa and in Italy and other places. You can aggregate numbers in communities with the technologies that you can’t do otherwise very easily. So, there are multiple benefits that we can point to. Individualisation, aggregation, personalisation, learner control and pacing. There’s lots of pedagogical impact that a learner can govern in this.

The challenge for schooling is absolutely foundational, almost existential I would say. Therefore, we have to embrace it. In my chapter, and I only just make a small dent into the problem, we have to think about a new way to imagine learning and start from there. The school systems that currently are the principal institutional ways of delivering learning have to be redone, and they have to be seamless. Teachers have to be managers of the educational experiences of learners. That’s how I call them. Rather than the exclusive input to the learner. So, they have to understand the principles of the acquisition of language knowledge.

I see a bigger role for professional language specialists in this, to interact with practitioners directly, but also curriculum writers and others. We have to rethink these things. And then communities who own community or heritage language schools and who are the repositories of the communication in these languages, you know, the Arabic, Tamil, Vietnamese and Greek in Sydney and everywhere else in Australia and other countries. A large part of what’s involved in learning is interaction with speakers, so we have to make sure that there’s seamless connection there.

So, I’m just touching on the outlier of this, but that’s what I’m trying to do with this, is to get people to imagine more creatively, pushing ahead, but not that far. These things are imaginable within a decade. Many of them exist now. Instantaneous translation, voice to script, I mean all of these things challenge all the separations we’ve ever had. What is literacy going to be when it’s possible to have no division between spoken language, signed language and their representation in a written form or some other form?

They’re really important questions to ask and to be asked by people who are interested in multilingualism.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, so much to think about. And I guess this kind of question that you sort of answered, but I want to make sure I understood and maybe you can elaborate a little bit. For mainstream teachers, this is the question you pose at the end of your chapter and that somebody asked you, and I really was interested in this. What can mainstream teachers do in order to support the learning of community languages? It sounds like you’re saying they are also a really important part of this process, of this existential crisis that we’re seeing in education when it comes to both language and literacy and what they mean.

Prof Lo Bianco: I’m often asked this question by mainstream teachers when I give talks. As I said before possibly, I’m speaking to Indonesian teachers in Victoria tomorrow. One of the anticipated questions is exactly this even though their specialist teachers of Indonesian are mainstream teachers.

When you look at students who drop out of language programs – I did a study once in the western suburbs of Melbourne in working class schools. I interviewed and discussed and did subjectivity analysis with large numbers of kids. I published it in a book in 2013 out of Multilingual Matters. One of the things that we found (is that we) classified students according to whether they were going to continue or drop language study. We classified them as “waverers” or “committed” kids and then we worked heavily with the waverers to think about what was it that was going on in their minds.

One of the things that came up repeatedly is something that mainstream teachers have got an enormous amount of influence on, and not just the language teacher. That is the attitude or ideology that is attached to the practice of language teaching and learning.

We found that lots of students had imbibed a negative, sometimes quite racist construction of what they were engaged in. This was not coming from the language teacher. This was coming from systemic imagery and systemic, often not even openly, hostile – anyone who’s had children or raised children or been around children, little children I mean, knows quickly that they are semiotic sponges. They pick up signals from multiple sources. They know when something is half-hearted. In the book I called it half-heartedness. When schools are just half-hearted about something, kids get it. They know it’s less important than something else. You’re not actively saying that learning Japanese or Italian, the two languages in that particular volume, is less important than doing something else like sport. But I see the way the school is arranged, and I can work out that’s exactly what you’re doing. One of the girls I interviewed said this to me. She said, “They don’t really, really mean it. We can tell. So why are they pretending?”. So this is something mainstream teachers can do, be enthusiastic supporters.

I helped introduce a CLIL program in a Japanese school where the boys, it was a boys’ school in this particular case, had had a mostly grammatical or formal syllabus. They were doing fine. And as soon as the Japanese teacher started to teach content that was about the Fukushima earthquake, really interesting material in which the kids had to research online and the teacher had to teach technical language ahead of time so they could manage to read these complex texts and stuff like that, the first thing that happens is pushback from the mainstream teachers. Oh, geography, that’s my space. Or, oh science and physics, that’s my space. You’re just the language teacher. That was all resolved beautifully when the teachers understood that the purpose of the CLIL was for the language teacher to enrich the content in the Japanese program. It wasn’t the exclusive teaching of the science or geography. Then they started to see the benefit of additional focus on the content they were teaching as specialists. So, the collaboration was brought about.

These conversations between the mainstream and specialist language teachers are essential. Mainstream language teachers can either choose to be an innocent bystander, an active supporter or at least an encourager. Again, it’s this same one mind that these children have. One mind, one heart that gets shipped around to different classes. The multiple messages that they pick up about the choices they need to make are significant. So that’s something I would say in relation to that question.

Dr Torsh: Great, thank you. Yeah, I know that study well. I’ve used it in my own research. It’s fantastic. I think that it’s really helpful to teachers, and I know we have education students who listen to the podcast, so really helpful to know what they can do.

That was really my last question, but before we wrap up, I just want to know – you’ve talked a little bit about your next project on Tunisia, which is a fascinating context. I’m excited to hear about that. What else is up next for you?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, that one’s in press, or it’s under review. I’m working with a dear colleague in Sri Lanka. I’ve lived and worked in Sri Lanka, and my colleague and I are putting together a volume on bilingual education there. Bilingual education means, typically, English plus either Sinhala or Tamil. That’s a project that will come out next year. I’ve got a book coming out with some colleagues from Hong Kong Uni on supporting learners of Chinese. There’s a lot of other work. I’m much less efficient than I used to be because of illness and old age, both of which have made me slow down.

But I really, really want to go back into the theory of language change and deliberate language change. Language always changes. Everyone knows that language is a dynamic process and changes. But language policy and planning is deliberate language change, and even deliberate language change can happen unconsciously. But planned deliberate language change, which is what I call language policy, and as I said, Joshua Fishman, when I first met him, said that I should document this, a kind of insider account of policy writing, and that’s what I want to devote some time to.

But unfortunately, I was trained as an academic in an era in which you made a distance between yourself as a scholar and the subject matter. I know I haven’t done that for years, but that’s still my predilection. I have to overcome that a great deal to speak personally in this way in writing. I need to do that. That’s something I ought to do. I’ve got a huge amount of documents from, like, 45 years of engagement in language policy, agitation and writing and stuff, and criticism.

You can’t just criticise if you want to – I mean, a lot of language scholarship is dominated by a critical disposition these days, especially sociolinguistics. That’s been important to uncover and expose a lot of injustices and hierarchies in the world. But I don’t think we should overstate the agentive power of our disciplines to really affect change. You have to engage with processes of concrete change, and you have to not set aside criticism, but make criticism productive. I find that, unfortunately, a lot of critical scholarship, maybe not a lot, some critical scholarship is not so productive. If you want to be productive, you have to engage with people whose views are different from your own. You have to compromise on things. You have to find conceptual categories that unite differences.

When I was working in Myanmar and south of Thailand where there’s been a conflict for many years in which language and script and bilingualism are implicated, it’s really really indispensable. It’s not just a methodological, I think it’s an ethical requirement to adopt a different set of understandings and practices. Criticism is something that has to be understood as being particular to some purposes and not others. So, I do think that there’s too much mindless criticism. Too much of a disposition to begin activity with a critical air.

Having said that, I don’t want to be assumed to be anti-critical. Criticism is critical to civil life, to decent life, to social improvement. I just think that there are moments of productive participation in shared creation of new things in which criticism can be a problem. I’ve seen that to very bad effect. I’ve seen it from people who have been trained just in the critical tradition who don’t know when to stop.

So that’s something I’d like to do. I’m going to think about that a lot. I haven’t written enough about that. I read other people’s writing on this and I’ve learned from it, but I feel as someone who has tried to write language policies and be engaged with concrete productive change and not just analysis or critique, that that’s something I want to think about more carefully.

Dr Torsh: Oh, that’s a really wonderful place to end, I think, on that. What do we do beyond criticism, especially for emerging scholars and research students? So, fantastic. Fantastic.

Look, I would love to keep going, but I have to wrap up. So, thanks again, Jo! 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 our Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time!