"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…
Bilingualism has a gender A while ago, I reported on the findings of a US study that demonstrated that children of immigrants who achieve high-level bilingual proficiency in both English…
Panel on Representing Culturally Diverse Clients Cultural Diversity and the Law: Access to justice in multicultural Australia was a conference held in Sydney on the 13th and 14th of March.…
Children of migrant cotton field workers from Oklahoma (Source: Library of Congress) I’ve just come across a fascinating article about the schooling of migrant children during the Great Depression era…
Meat workers, Fletcher Abattoir (Source: SheepCRC) One of the most famous research subjects to ever have participated in second language learning research is a man known in the literature as…
Annastacia Palaszczuk and members of her family (Source: Couriermail) Would Kirk Douglas be a Hollywood legend if he had kept his birth name Issur Danielovitch? Would Bob Dylan have achieved…
This tweet says: "CSU issues correction: its proposal was translated into German incorrectly" Germany is currently witnessing a delightful language ideological farce. It all started when the conservative Christian Social…
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken (Source: quotesnpoems.com) It is not unusual for bilingual parents to experience a sense of bewilderment when it comes to language choice in the family.…
2012 workshop on 'Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion in Australia' at Macquarie University How does language intersect with social inclusion in contemporary Australia? Do social inclusion policies address linguistic diversity?…
Christmas party at an International High School in Yunnan Over the past few decades, an increasing number of Burmese international students have enrolled in high schools in Yunnan, a province…
A locutorio shop front in Barcelona (Source: El Periodico) There is now a well-established body of work exploring the language work provided by service workers in call centres and tourist…
Linguistic diversity in Sydney (Source: Sydney Morning Herald) The media in Anglophone countries regularly engage in a bit of a bragfest about the linguistic diversity of their cities. In Sydney,…
Website of the German Club Montevideo, founded in 1866 The current issue of Begegnung (“Encounter”), the magazine of German International Schools, has a feature about the German School in Montevideo,…
Success levels of different candidate groups in job interviews for low-skilled jobs (Source: Roberts 2013, p. 89) A common explanation for the un- and underemployment of migrants is that their…
Excerpt from "The Haunted Lotus" by Australian-Hazara artist Khadim Ali (Source: Milani Gallery) An objection that is commonly raised against Esperanto and other auxiliary languages is that they are “invented.”…
The challenges of providing equitable services in linguistically diverse societies A few years ago, emergency service provision to speakers of languages other than English in Australia came under scrutiny when…