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.…
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…
Linguistic diversity is valued in this school (Photo Courtesy of Angela Turzynski-Azimi) ‘What’s your nash, miss?’ Plurilingual pre-service teachers preparing to teach in Sydney schools What is it like to…
In my own research, I have frequently run into difficulty in talking about a ‘native speaker’. What criteria must be met to be ‘native’? How can I, as a researcher,…
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?…
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…
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…
The researcher wearing a Zhuang employee's work uniform at the Black Clothes Zhuang House in the Ethnic Minorities Village, Nanning, China, 2014 I was surprised, frankly, during my recent fieldwork…
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,…
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…
Language needs in the hospitality sector in Pallars Sobirà, Catalonia (Source: paddleinspain.com) Multilingualism means business. The more foreign language skills are availalble to a company, the better it will be…
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…