Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) Some contemporary sociolinguists love to hate an 18th century educator, philosopher, theologian, translator and general polymath by the name of Herder. Hardly a week goes by…
Ingrid PillerMarch 4, 2016
"How bad is your cultural cringe?" (Source: Jenna Guillaume, BuzzFeed) Keith: I’m still really shit at pronouncing Lisa’s surname. With the umlaut o. Hanna: What is Lisa’s surname? (laughter) Keith:…
Hanna TorshJune 10, 2015
2014 NAPLAN Year 3 Numeracy test results by language status In Australia the results of last year’s round of student and school performance on national standardized testing have just been…
Ingrid PillerMarch 11, 2015
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…
Ingrid PillerFebruary 4, 2015
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?…
Lg_on_the_moveNovember 25, 2014
Livia and her classmates at a crossroads the year before entering (or not) Gymnasium (Switzerland, 2004) Secondary education as a monolingual fork in the road Let me bust a prevalent…
Livia GerberNovember 16, 2014
PASCH Schools: Partners for the future Last week I was privileged to attend the 3rd Conference of School Principals of PASCH Schools in Southeast Asia. A ‘PASCH school’ is a regular…
Ingrid PillerOctober 21, 2014
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,…
Ingrid PillerAugust 20, 2014
German International School Sydney It is one of the great narratives of our time that the market will fix everything. In education this means that parental choice is assumed to…
Ingrid PillerJuly 31, 2014
Auburn parking ticket (left: quadrilingual on back; right: city logo on front) In Australia with its persistent monolingual mindset coming across any kind of official institutional multilingual communication always feels…
Ingrid PillerJuly 7, 2014
Many people would agree that English is the language of globalization. English is almost always adopted as the official language of international events, including the Olympic Games. It does not…
Kimie Takahashi 高橋君江February 26, 2014
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