“Read – Learn – Grow – Be Kind” – this street library says it all (Image credit: Language on the Move)

The Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge 2026 is out!

Now in its ninth year, the goals of our reading challenge have remained broadly unchanged since 2018: to encourage reading in the discipline and beyond, and to make linguistics reading fun.

These goals have become even more relevant, due to two converging trends:

On the one hand, book reading is in freefall internationally while, on the other hand, screen time is rising exponentially.

If you think this is just a case of one medium replacing another, you are unfortunately mistaken.

In its most prevalent form – social media use – screen time has negative effects on our ability to concentrate, to think deeply and critically, and to develop empathy. These negative effects are now so widely felt that their popular designation “brain rot” was selected as the Oxford Word of the Year 2024.

Book reading, by contrast, is the antidote to brain rot. Book reading challenges us to concentrate and to deeply engage with an extended argument or a narrative universe.

To train your brain you need to read long form. You can’t outsource your reading to AI-generated summaries, either.

Furthermore, many of our readers are (aspiring) researchers and Stephen King’s advice in On Writing is valid in our profession, too:

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

The Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge is here for you develop, enjoy and extend the habits and pleasures of reading, particularly in the field of linguistic diversity and social participation. For each month of 2026, we are suggesting a category and one of our team members offers a recommendation in that category.

Enjoy and feel free to add your own recommendations in the “Comments” section below.

And don’t forget that, in addition to the categories and recommendations suggested here, the Language-on-the-Move Podcast will also continue to bring you regular reading ideas in 2026.

Happy Reading!

Previous Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenges

• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2025
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2024
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2023
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2022
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

January: a book about new technologies in intercultural communication

Recommendation: Cabalquinto, E. C. B. (2022). (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media. Oxford University Press.

Earvin’s presentation about the myth of digital inclusion of older migrants in Australia was one of the highlights of our recent symposium devoted to “New technologies in intercultural communication.”
Whether you missed out on the symposium or want to deepen your engagement with Earvin’s work, (Im)mobile Homes offers a gripping exploration of the use of smartphones, social media, and apps in the family and care practices of transnational families. (Ingrid Piller)

February: a book about settler colonialism

Recommendation: Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press.

This book completely reshaped my understanding of Indigenous politics, border, nation, and sovereignty in North America. It also made me reflect on my reliance on the extensive literature on Indigenous cultures and languages – ritual speech, performances, tales, or beliefs – produced over the last century by anthropologists and linguists, most of which are dismissive of the scene of dispossession, the complicated history of places, or simply what people say about themselves and their struggles. (Gegentuul Baioud)

March: a book stirs that your social imagination

Recommendation: Bregman, R. (2017). Utopia for realists. Bloomsbury.

In this book, Rutger Bregman stirs our imagination by inviting us to re-think the way modern society is organized and by offering us a glimpse into a potentially better future for all. He calls for a new vision that would more effectively address current global challenges such as increasing inequalities or the progressing automation of labor.
But what does he exactly propose?
In short, a 15-hour work week, universal basic income and open borders. The author invites you on a journey between time and spaces with real examples of communities that have taken utopia seriously and have started to experiment with it. (Olga Vlasova)

April: A book about the philosophy of language

Recommendation: Le Guin, U. (1974). The Dispossessed. HarperCollins.

Le Guin constantly fluctuates the reader´s receptors between the old and the new, roots and progress, personal and professional, politics and philosophy. We follow the life and work of a physicist who travels back and forth between two historically connected but contrasting planets and political systems.
The protagonist commits to seeking the truth not only by understanding his own context of origin but also by defying it; how do we find our truth? And is it ever objective? The novel is considered a post-feminist utopian fiction raising discussions on whether linguistic innovation is necessary for conceptual change.
A story of intergalactic migration trying to answer the long-standing question: to whom does knowledge belong? (Mara Kyrou)

May: A book about the experience of growing up as the child of a migrant

Recommendation 1: Vuong, O. (2019). On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin.

Vietnamese-American history, language, and generational trauma come together in the form of a poetic letter with utterances such as “I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.” Dedicated to someone who will never see it: the author’s mother, who never learned how to read.
Through the eyes of a young man named Little Dog discovering his homosexuality in a space for undocumented immigrants, this book tells the story of a Vietnamese immigrant family in the US and their complex relationship with the English language. It chronicles their migration history escaping the atrocities of war, the fragile family dynamics that emerged from that experience, and the love for words that connects the writer with himself, while ironically separating him from his mother. (Juan Felipe Sánchez Guzmán)

Recommendation 2: Toxische Pommes. (2024). Ein schönes Ausländerkind. Zsolnay.

Ein Schönes Ausländerkind is a fictionalised autobiography of the author’s childhood, after her family fled to Austria due to the Yugoslav Wars. The book made me laugh a lot, as the author (who writes under the pseudonym she uses to post satirical sketches online) pokes fun at the many absurdities of migrant life. But I also found it very powerful in its depiction of a messy, painful, but loving father-daughter relationship where the adult struggles to learn the local language, leading to child language brokering. (Jenia Yudytska)

June: A book about narrative research in a migration context

Recommendation: Stevenson, Patrick (2017). Language and migration in a multilingual metropolis: Berlin Lives. Palgrave Macmillan.

This book offers a highly engaging and innovative exploration of Berlin’s multilingualism through personal migration narratives. Working ethnographically, the researcher situates his analysis in a single shared apartment in Neukölln, using the linguistic repertoires and biographical trajectories of its five residents—a Russian-speaking woman, two Polish-speakers, a Kurdish-speaking man, and a Vietnamese-speaking woman—to demonstrate how migration, identity and sociolinguistic practice intersect in everyday life.
The book portrays the apartment as a microcosm of the city’s wider linguistic landscape, tracing how individuals navigate language ideologies, negotiate belonging, and construct social relations within a complex metropolitan environment. (Martin Serif Derince)

July: A book exploring linguistic diversity from multiple perspectives

Recommendation: Aguilar Gil, Y. E. (2020). Ää: manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística. Almadia.

Language loss, resistance, indigenous literature(s), prejudice, identity, autonyms and exonyms – these are just some of the topics discussed in this collection of essays by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, an Ayuujk linguist, writer, translator, and activist. An interactive work edited by the author’s colleagues, this book presents texts written for an online magazine over several years alongside links to related social media posts, as well as a speech given by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil at the Mexican Chamber of Deputies and a closing epilogue by herself. A great read – refreshing and profoundly reflexive – for anyone interested in linguistic diversity in Mexico and beyond. (Nicole Marinaro)

August: A book about translation and interpreting

Recommendation: Shuttleworth, M., & Daghigh, A. J. (Eds.). (2024). Translation and Neoliberalism. Springer.

This book examines how neoliberalism shapes translation and interpreting across diverse regions, focusing on four themes: market-driven translation and interpreting curricula, policy impacts on language services, technology’s role in translation and interpreting markets, and intersections of translation and neoliberalism at a discourse level. It offers critical insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers into the socio-economic forces transforming translation studies, industries and curricula. (Jinhyun Cho)

September: A book about digital migration studies

Recommendation: Leurs, Koen, & Ponzanesi, Sandra (Eds.). (2025). Doing Digital Migration Studies: Theories and practices of the everyday. Routledge.

This open-access edited volume serves as an introduction to ‘digital migration studies’, an umbrella term for research on migration in relation to digital technologies. The articles examine topics ranging from migrant agency on TikTok to the use of automatic dialect recognition during the asylum procedure.
Although most contributions don’t explicitly focus on language, the breadth of topics and methodologies covered still sparked ideas for new research directions for me as a linguist. (Jenia Yudytska)

October: A book about an under-recognized diaspora

Recommendation: Bald, V. (2013). Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America. Harvard University Press.

Film and other information: http://bengaliharlem.com

Historical Harlem, New York does not conjure up images of South Asians going about their daily lives, but Bengali Harlem tells us the story of immigrants who arrived from the 1800s onwards from the Indian subcontinent.
This book focuses on migrants who were ethnolinguistically Bengalis (from what was known as Bengal) and came as merchants, seamen, or laborers to be absorbed into working class America. In the face of racism and discrimination, they built homes and lives, leaving behind generations of Americans with Bengali cultural and linguistic heritage. (Tazin Abdullah)

November: A book of migrant poetry

Recommendation: Saleh, S. M., Syed, Z., & Younus, M. (Eds.). (2025). Ritual: A Collection of Muslim Australian Poetry. Sweatshop Literacy Movement.

Billed as “evocative, unsettling, and unafraid,” this rich collection of Muslim Australian poetry offers a rich treasure trove of poems to come back to and savour again and again. The poems invite the reader to not only reflect on the diversity of Muslim identities but what it means to live on Indigenous land as a designated migrant within a White settler colony. (Ingrid Piller)

December: Cozy fiction for when you need a break from your research

Recommendation: Arden, K. (2019). The Winternight Trilogy. Del Rey.

I’m now 1.5 years into my PhD and I find that, now more than ever, I need good fiction to read after a long day of academic reading/writing. The Winternight Trilogy is set in the harsh winters of a folkloric version of medieval Russia and follows Vasya, a young woman whose difficult peasant life collides with those of chyerti, the demons and devils of Slavic folklore.
The settings and creatures described in this trilogy are nothing short of magical, and reading the prose makes me feel like I am tucked away snug in a winter cabin with a roaring fire and hot chocolate.
A lesson that I am learning along my PhD journey is that it is imperative to nourish myself while I work so hard, and reading these books is part of that nourishment for me. Knowing that I have the winter snows and rich folklore of these books to look forward to at the end of the day helps me to persevere through the daily ups and downs of PhD life. (Brynn Quick)

(Image credit: © Gert Albrecht für DIE ZEIT, Stiftung Lesen, Deutsche Bahn Stiftung)

Editor’s note: Shared reading – the practice where adults read to children – has many benefits: it improves children’s language and literacy development, as well as their interactive and communicative skills. Additionally, shared reading can be a lot of fun and, like any joint enjoyable activity, strengthens emotional bonds.

In Germany, shared reading is promoted through a dedicated annual “Vorlesetag” (“Shared Reading Day”). In this post, Larissa Cosyns explains more about the event and shares a reading recommendation.

This post was first published on the Literacy in Diversity Settings (LiDS) Research Center website.

***

This year’s “Vorlesetag” (“Shared Reading Day”) will take place today (November 21) under the motto “Shared Reading Speaks Your Language.” The initiative aims to highlight the unifying power of shared reading and show that every language and every voice counts. Let’s use our voices and read together!

If you’re still looking for a suitable book, you’ll find it in the Global Digital Library. As part of the Global Book Alliance, the digital library wants to provide more reading material in underserved languages. Whether it’s video books in Kenyan sign language or first reader books in Bahasa Indonesian, the digital library offers numerous stories.

I would like to recommend this children’s book from the Global Digital Library: “Making Tormo for the Festival“ by Buddha Yonjan Lama.

Have fun reading together!

Related content

• Multiculturalism alive and well in Austria
• Are we killing the joy of reading?
• Lessons learnt from schoolbooks
• Libraries and social inclusion
• Why are academic lectures so weird?

Book reading is an important part of individual and social wellbeing (Image copyright: Sadami Konchi)

Each year, I survey my Literacies students about their reading and writing activities. Over the years, the time these young people spend on literacy activities has been increasing steadily. In 2024, they spent an average of 8 hours per day reading. At the same time, the number of books they read has been going down. Despite spending close to 3,000 hours per year reading, the number of books they had read for pleasure in the past 12 months averaged a paltry 2.9.

Our reading time is eaten up by social media and other digital shortforms while our book reading is suffering.

This is troubling because the infinite scroll is a drain on our ability to focus. Conversely, the deep reading that comes with the long form is beneficial for our ability to concentrate, to engage critically, and to develop empathy.

As the culture of book reading and its benefits fades before our eyes, encouraging book reading is more important than ever before. And that’s where the annual Language on the Move Reading Challenge comes in. The annual Language on the Move Reading Challenge is designed to encourage broad reading at the intersection of linguistic diversity and social life.

The 2025 Language on the Move Reading Challenge is our eighth challenge in a row:

• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2024
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2023
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2022
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

Join us and challenge yourself – and your students, colleagues, and friends – to read one recommended book each month throughout the year!

For more reading suggestions, make sure to also follow the Language on the Move Podcast on your preferred podcast platform. In partnership with the New Books Network, we have brought you regular conversations about linguistic diversity and social participation for one year now, and we already have exciting new chats lined up for the New Year.

Happy Reading!

January: The Politics of Academic Reading

The crisis of book reading is connected to the textocalypse – textual overproduction that humans no longer have the time to read. In 2024, the editors of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language produced a special issue devoted to “The Politics of Academic Reading.” It is fitting that the 2025 Language on the Move Reading Challenge should start with this fantastic collection.

For full disclosure, I am one of the contributors, and Language on the Move readers might be particularly interested in this piece about our platform:

Piller, I. (2024). Can we escape the textocalypse? Academic publishing as community building [Language on the Move]. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 289-290, 123-127. https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/ijsl-2024-0132

Abstract: Rapid developments in digital technologies have fundamentally changed writing practices leading to an explosion in the number of textual products. The result is a “textocalypse” – a deep crisis in knowledge production and dissemination. Instead of pushing back, academics fuel these degenerations because their careers have become subject to the capitalist imperative to produce and consume – measured in the form of research outputs and citation metrics. Against this background, this commentary argues for a reframing of academic publishing as community building and introduces Language on the Move, an alternative sociolinguistics portal that is both a publication platform and a research community. Motivated by a feminist ethics of care, we decenter the textual product and recenter the lived experience of researchers, particularly those writing from the margins.

February: Global Communication Platform WhatsApp

Ana Sofia Bruzon recommends:
Johns, A., Matamoros-Fernández, A., & Baulch, E. (2024). WhatsApp: From a one-to-one messaging app to a global communication platform. Polity Press.

“WhatsApp provides a detailed account of WhatsApp’s growth and widespread uptake worldwide, revealing a new era in Meta’s industrial development. The authors trace WhatsApp from its inception as a chatting app to its metamorphosis into a global communication platform on which a substantial part of the Global South depends for everyday living. The volume maps the platform’s history to offer a nuanced account of its current economic (as a multi-sided market), technical (through platformization and social media features) and social dimensions (with its everyday uses and its role in public communications). Importantly, from an applied sociolinguistics perspective, the book argues that WhatsApp facilitates new types of digital literacies as it has become entrenched in the digital cultures of the world while also shedding light on the platform’s significance in civic participation and democracy. The authors brilliantly show how WhatsApp has accrued significant ‘political, economic, and cultural power’ (p. 12).”

March: How to Free a Jinn

Laura Smith-Khan recommends:
Shah Idil, Raidah. (2024). How to Free a Jinn. Allen & Unwin

“How to Free a Jinn is supernatural fantasy fiction with some refreshing twists: it follows 12-year-old Insyirah’s return to Malaysia from Australia, navigating turbulent family relationships, school and life in a new country that is supposed to feel like home. Not only that, but Insyirah soon discovers she can see and communicate with jinns, usually invisible spirits. This book offers readers a new voice and perspective, seamlessly integrating Islamic spiritual tradition and Malay and Arabic language in ways that don’t feel overexplained. As one reviewer says, this is the ‘kind of book I wish I had growing up.’”

Cover art by Sadami Konchi

Bonus info: Raidah Shah Idil is a sister of Aisyah Shah Idil, whose work has also featured on Language on the Move.

April: Life in a New Language

“A highly readable and rich account of migrant stories” (Catherine Travis)

If you have not yet done so, you must read Life in a New Language in 2025. The book, which has been co-authored by six of our team members, examines the language learning and settlement trajectories of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries.

Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Williams Tetteh, V. (2024). Life in a New Language. Oxford University Press.

You can also find a companion podcast series – with one episode with each author – on the Language on the Move podcast.

1. Episode 1: Life in a New Language, Pt 1 – Identities: Brynn Quick in conversation with Donna Butorac
2. Episode 2: Life in a New Language, Pt 2 –Work: Brynn Quick in conversation with Ingrid Piller
3. Episode 3: Life in a New Language, Pt 3 – African migrants: Brynn Quick in conversation with Vera Williams Tetteh
4. Episode 4: Life in a New Language, Pt 4 – Parenting: Brynn Quick in conversation with Shiva Motaghi-Tabari
5. Episode 5: Life in a New Language, Pt 5 – Monolingual Mindset: Brynn Quick in conversation with Loy Lising
6. Episode 6: Life in a New Language, Pt 6 – Citizenship: Brynn Quick in conversation with Emily Farrell

May: Judging Refugees

Laura Smith-Khan recommends:
Vogl, Anthea. (2024). Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination. Cambridge University Press.

“Judging Refugees examines the role of narrative performance in the procedures for assessing asylum claims in Canada and Australia. Drawing on a close and interdisciplinary analysis of hearings and decisions from the two countries, it offers extensive and compelling evidence of the impossible demands placed on people seeking asylum. The book is featured in a recent Language on the Move podcast episode.”

June: Wordslut

Brynn Quick recommends:
Montell, Amanda. (2019). Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. Harper.

“In this romp of a read, Montell guides the reader through the linguistic history of English pejoratives used to describe women. The central thesis is that, in English, contemporary negative terms for women often began neutrally – ‘hussy’ was just a term for ‘housewife’, ‘slut’ came from a term meaning ‘untidy’, and ‘madam’ was simply a term of address (not the grande dame of a brothel). But through hundreds of years’ worth of semantic change through pejoration and amelioration (new terms that I learned in reading this book!), words have been used to lift the social status of men and denigrate that of women under Western systems of patriarchy. But it’s not all bad news! Montell also discusses the concept of gender according to both language (e.g. masculine and feminine adjectives in Italic languages) and culture (e.g. Buginese people of Indonesia recognise 5 genders, the Native American Zuni tribe recognises 3, etc.), and she reflects on a hope for more equal linguistic and cultural treatment of all genders.”

July: Inspector Singh

If you need vacation reading for the Northern summer, check out Detective Singh of the Singapore Police. The author, Shahimi Flint, has created an unusual detective character – an elderly overweight Singaporean Sikh – who will take you to crime scenes in Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the UK. Each episode combines a thrilling murder investigation with a deep dive into local culture, language, and social issues.

A lawyer herself, Flint brings a keen social awareness to her novels, and I learned more about the Khmer Rouge trials from A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree than from any other source.

1. Flint, S. (2009). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder. Hachette.
2. Flint, S. (2009). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul. Hachette.
3. Flint, S. (2010). Inspector Singh Investigates: The Singapore School of Villainy. Hachette.
4. Flint, S. (2011). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree. Hachette.
5. Flint, S. (2012). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Curious Indian Cadaver. Hachette.
6. Flint, S. (2013). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Calamitous Chinese Killing. Hachette.
7. Flint, S. (2016). Inspector Singh Investigates: A Frightfully English Execution. Hachette.

August: Speech and the City

Matras, Y. (2024). Speech and the City: Multilingualism, Decoloniality and the Civic University. Cambridge University Press.

Speech and the City tells the story of ‘Multilingual Manchester’ and how an academic project succeeded in shifting the monolingual habitus. The book also offers an intriguing glimpse into the author’s distinguished career as a linguist, scholar, and activist.

Abstract: The Brexit debate has been accompanied by a rise in hostile attitudes to multilingualism. However, cities can provide an important counter-weight to political polarisation by forging civic identities that embrace diversity. In this timely book, Yaron Matras describes the emergence of a city language narrative that embraces and celebrates multilingualism and helps forge a civic identity. He critiques linguaphobic discourses at a national level that regard multilingualism as deficient citizenship. Drawing on his research in Manchester, he examines the ‘multilingual utopia’, looking at multilingual spaces across sectors in the city that support access, heritage, skills and celebration. The book explores the tensions between decolonial approaches that inspire activism for social justice and equality, and the neoliberal enterprise that appropriates diversity for reputational and profitability purposes, prompting critical reflection on calls for civic university engagement. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about ways to protect cultural pluralism in our society.

September: Multilingual Crisis Communication

Li, J., & Zhang, J. (Eds.). (2024). Multilingual crisis communication: Insights from China. Taylor & Francis.

This book is the latest outcome of out team’s focus on the communication challenges raised by the Covid-19 pandemic. Li Jia and Jenny Zhang have edited a diverse collection featuring the research of emerging researchers from China.

Abstract: Multilingual Crisis Communication is the first book to explore the lived experiences of linguistic minorities in crisis-affected settings in the Global South, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. China has been selected as a case of inquiry for multilingual crisis communication because of its high level of linguistic diversity. Taking up critical sociopolitical approaches, this book conceptualizes multilingual crisis communication from three dimensions: identifying communication barriers, engaging communication repertoires, and empowering communication justice.
Comprising eight main chapters, along with an introduction and an epilogue, this edited book is divided into three parts in terms of the demographic and social conditions of linguistic minorities, as indigenous, migrant, and those with communicative disabilities. This book brings together a range of critical perspectives of sociolinguistic scholars, language teachers, and public health workers. Each team of authors includes at least one member of the research community with many years of field work experience, and some of them belong to ethnic minorities. These studies can generate new insights for enhancing the accessibility and effectiveness of multilingual crisis communication.
This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of multilingualism, intercultural communication, translation and interpreting studies, and public health policy.

October: Critical Sociolinguistics

Del Percio, A., & Flubacher, M.-C. (Eds.). (2024). Critical sociolinguistics: dialogues, dissonance, developments. Bloomsbury.

The editors of this alternative festschrift dedicated to Monica Heller have assembled a team of 60 contributors to create an intriguing kaleidoscope of experiments in academic writing and knowledge creation.

Abstract: Providing a series of crucial debates on language, power, difference and social inequality, this volume traces developments and dissonances in critical sociolinguistics. Eminent and emerging academic figures from around the world collaboratively engage with the work of Monica Heller, offering insights into the politics and power formations that surround knowledge of language and society.
Challenging disciplinary power dynamics in critical sociolinguistics, this book is an experiment testing new ways of producing knowledge on language and society. Critically discussing central sociolinguistic concepts from critique to political economy, labor to media, education to capitalism, each chapter features a number of scholars offering their distinct social and political perspectives on the place played by language in the social fabric. Through its theoretical, epistemological, and methodological breadth, the volume foregrounds political alliances in how language is known and explored by scholars writing from specific geopolitical spaces that come with diverse political struggles and dynamics of power. Allowing for a diversity of genres, debates, controversies, fragments and programmatic manifestos, the volume prefigures a new mode of knowledge production that multiplies perspectives and starts practicing the more inclusive, just and equal worlds that critical sociolinguists envision.

November: Conversational storytelling in Spanish-English bilingual couples

Pahom, O. (2024). Conversational storytelling in Spanish-English bilingual couples: gender roles and language choices. Bloomsbury.

This meticulous study of Spanish-English bilingual couples’ conversational storytelling shows how the middle ground in intercultural communication is found when people talk and listen to each other in everyday interactions.

Abstract: For more than three decades, the percentage of people who married someone of a different race, ethnicity, culture, or linguistic background has been on the rise in the United States, but the communication practices of such couples have remained understudied. Combining bilingualism, gender studies, and conversation analysis, this book explores and describes the storytelling practices and language choices of several married heterosexual Spanish-English bilingual couples, all residing in Texas but each from different geographic and cultural backgrounds.
Based on more than 900 minutes of conversations and interviews, the book offers a data-driven analysis of the ways in which language choices and gender performance shape the stories, conversations, and identities of bilingual couples, which in turn shape the social order of bilingual communities. Using a combination of methodologies to investigate how couples launch, tell, and respond to each other’s stories, the book identifies seven main factors that the couples see as primary determinants of their choice of English and Spanish during couple communication. The use of conversation analysis highlights the couples’ own practices and perceptions of their language choices, demonstrating how the private language decisions of bilingual couples enable them to negotiate a place in the larger culture, shape the future of bilingualism, and establish a couple identity through shared linguistic and cultural habits.

December: Language Discordant Social Work

Buzungu, H. F. (2023). Language Discordant Social Work in a Multilingual World: The Space Between. Routledge.

This fascinating ethnography explores how social workers in Norway communicate with clients who speak little or no Norwegian. It is part of a growing number of studies of street-level bureaucrats in linguistically diverse societies – for another example, listen to our podcast interview with Clara Holzinger about Austrian employment officers.

Abstract: Based on ethnographic observations of encounters between social workers and people with whom they do not have a shared language, this book analyzes the impact of language discordance on the quality of professional service provision.
Exploring how street-level bureaucrats navigate the landscape of these discretionary assessments of language discordance, language proficiency, and the need for interpreting, the book focuses on four main themes:

• the complexity of social work talk
• the issue of participation in language discordant meetings
• communicative interaction
• the issue of how clarification is requested when needed, and whether professionals and service users are able to reach clarity when something is unclear

Based on the findings presented on these different aspects of language discordant talk, the consequences of language discordance for social work are presented and discussed, focusing primarily on issues at the intersection of language, communication, power, dominance and subordination, representation, linguicism, and ultimately, human rights and human dignity.
It will be of interest to all social work students, academics and professionals as well as those working in public services and allied health more broadly.

The annual Language on the Move Reading Challenge is designed to encourage broad reading at the intersection of linguistic diversity and social life.

Challenge yourself to read one book in each category throughout the year!

January: A book that is critical of the AI hype

With the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, AI hype reached new heights in 2023, including in academia and linguistics. If you have not yet done so, it is high time to educate yourself about algorithms, large language models, and generative information technologies. A great way to start is the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us hosted weekly by tech journalist Paris Marx.

Each show comes complete with show notes, which often include excellent reading recommendations. Books I have picked up based on recommendations on Tech Won’t Save Us include Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil, Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant, and Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil. I recommend all of them to you warmly.

February: A book that delves deeper into language and digitization

In a world where more people have access to a mobile phone than to adequate sanitation, it should not come as a surprise that digital technologies are fundamentally changing how we use language. This is particularly true of people on the move who rely on mobile technologies to communicate in their new environments, to learn languages, or to stay connected with dispersed family and friends.

Some excellent recent books that will help you explore the intersections of new technologies and linguistic diversity include Parenting for a Digital Future by Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross, Language, Migration and Multilingualism in the Age of Digital Humanities, an open access collection edited by Ignacio Andrés Soria , Sandra Issel-Dombert and Laura Morgenthaler García, and Mobile assisted language learning by Glen Stockwell. The latter was a runner-up for the 2023 BAAL Book Prize.

March: A book about language and magic

The prevalence of mediated content has meant that influencers have become the lodestars of people’s lives and deep fakes have collapsed the line between fact and fiction. This fundamentally changes what it means to know anything. Ontologically, belief in magic is making a comeback.

Therefore, going back to learn about language and magic becomes essential to understanding the future. Tazin Abdullah recommends Language and Magic by Toshihiko Izutsu:

This book was first published in 1956 and you might wonder why recommend this book in 2024? Written in English by a Japanese sociolinguist, it offers access to ideas about language use from outside of the European and American academic sphere. The very first highlight is the style of writing itself – strikingly personal and an insight into the writer’s philosophical orientation. Examining what language has symbolized historically in various cultures and traditions, this book offers intriguing observations on the magical functions of words and their impact on the way speakers think and behave.

April: A book about names and naming

Names and naming have always been a major part of language magic. Just think of Rumpelstiltskin, whose magic powers rest on his name not being known.

In a diverse society, names present their own challenges as different naming conventions come into contact and sometimes collide. How to use names appropriately and respectfully can become a major conundrum and that’s why a book about names and naming should go onto your reading list for 2024.

Agnes Bodis recommends Say my name by Joanna Ho and illustrated by Khoa Le:

This beautifully written and illustrated children’s book provides a journey into cultures and names, highlighting how our names express our identity through their link to people, stories, and language. The book features six children from Chinese, Tongan, Persian, Dine, Mexican and Ghanaian cultural backgrounds sharing their names and stories, accompanied by beautiful illustrations, which provide a stunning multimodal expression of cultural identity. I especially appreciate the way the book values the spatial and historical aspect of names: each name is built up by building blocks of language that were “constructed over oceans and across generations”. It also teaches readers to value the correct pronunciation of names. The publisher’s site provides a downloadable ‘teaching guide” for educators and parents to engage with the book on a deeper level.

May: A book about multilingualism in history

We’ve heard a lot about how language in the 21^st century is different from anything that has come before: it’s supposedly more multi, more metro, more trans. This narrative is starting to fray as more research about multilingual societies through the ages come out. One of the most important of these is the new collection Multilingualism and History edited by Aneta Pavlenko.

Readers of Language on the Move will have been waiting for this book for a while, as we first spoke to the editor, Aneta Pavlenko, about it in late 2021, when we asked “Can we ever unthink linguistic nationalism?” There probably is no answer to that question and Multilingualism and History does not pretend to have one, but it offers a panorama of multilingual contexts from antiquity to the 20^th century. The book will forever put to rest the idea that linguistic diversity in the present is new.

For those who read German, Historische Mehrsprachigkeit [Multilingualism in History] edited by Rita Franceschini, Matthias Hüning und Péter Maitz, promises another rich collection of historical case-studies. This open access title is due to be released on December 31.

June: A book about translanguaging

One of the conceptual frameworks that has taken applied linguistics by storm in recent years is “translanguaging.” Earlier this year, we had a chance to speak to one of its key thinkers, Professor Ofelia García, here on Language on the Move.

For those who want a more in-depth read, Jie Fan recommends Pedagogical Translanguaging by Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter:

This 2021 title in the Cambridge University Press series “Elements in Language Teaching” is designed for educational practitioners. It deals with the concept of translanguaging and pedagogical translanguaging, and explores multilingual approaches to language assessment and how it can be valuable for the preservation of endangered languages. This book contributes significantly to the fields of multilingualism and sociolinguistics by challenging monolingual ideological stances and acknowledging linguistic diversity and inclusion. It is a useful guide for novice teacher educators and researchers who may not be conversant with the the latest sociolinguistic multilingualism research.

July: A novel about linguistic diversity

Since its inception, we have regularly included works of fiction in the Language on the Move Reading Challenge. This year is no different. Fiction allows us to explore linguistic diversity holistically through art, and can produce deeper insights than academic texts alone. Also, it’s the middle of the year and you might need the excitement of novel-reading to keep going.

Emily Pacheco, a Master of Research student at Macquarie University, recommends The House With All The Lights On: Three generations, one roof, a language of light by Jessica Kirkness:

This novel is a memoir from a Goda (Grandchild of Deaf adults) explaining the cultural and linguistic  experience they had growing up with their grandparents. The book explains the navigation of Deaf and hearing cultures in Australia with grandparents who migrated and have a native language of BSL (British Sign Language). It is a great novel that shares the experience Deaf-hearing families have and showcases a perspective (Goda) that is not widely written about.

August: A book about linguistic diversity and social justice

Research related to social justice has exploded since the 2016 publication of my Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice book. Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, a PhD student at Fudan University and UNSW, still recommends the book:

Rooted in real-world instances, this book offers invaluable insights into how language shapes economic inequality, cultural dominance, and political participation. It’s an inspirational read, particularly for early career researchers, broadening their understanding of the intricate role of language in social dynamics. The book is more than an academic discourse; it’s a call to recognize the power of language, the resilience of individuals, and the richness of humanity. A truly enlightening read that sparks ongoing conversations about language’s pivotal role in social (in)justice.

2023 also saw the publication of the Arabic translation:

التنوع اللغوي والعدالة الاجتماعية, translated by Abdulrahman Alfahad and published by King Saud University Press.

A brilliant related 2023 title is Global Language Justice edited by Lydia Liu and Anupama Rao. In my blurb for the book I wrote:

By interspersing academic essays with multilingual poems, Liu, Rao, and Silverman have assembled a rich, stimulating kaleidoscope of global explorations of the complex entanglements of language, environment, and technology in the 21st century.

September: A book about discursive construction

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” as Wittgenstein told us. To understand how these limits are made in different contexts, we have added a title about discursive construction to this year’s reading challenge.

National history provides ample examples of discursive constructions that are relevant to how we see linguistic diversity, and Hanna Torsh recommends Making Australian History by Anna Clark:

Who decides what is a nation’s history? Who are the history-makers? I loved this immensely readable book by esteemed historian Anna Clark, who deftly shows us that history is made by everyone, and not only in the form of written histories but in clay, in stone, and in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. In today’s conflict-ridden world it is more important than ever to think about how our collective identities are created and whose voices contribute to that collective imagining. A beautiful journey through major themes in history-making.

October: A book about language and emotions

Books about emotions in intercultural communication have been a mainstay of our annual reading challenge, and Brynn Quick recommends Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions by Batja Mesquita.

Do all humans experience emotions in the same way? Does happiness in France look the same as happiness in Ethiopia or Japan? And what do emotions have to do with language? Is it possible to feel emotionally adept in one culture or language but not another? These are some of the questions that Batja Mesquita investigates in this fascinating book. This book is a pleasant and easy read (or listen! I recommend the Audible version), but it is packed with information about the intersection between psychology, culture, and language. Give this a read and ask yourself – Are Americans inherently fake and the Dutch inherently rude?

November: A sociolinguistic ethnography

Engaging with sociolinguistic ethnographies of linguistic diversity is the bread and butter of our research. Challenge yourself to read one of a context that may not be all that familiar to you!

Hard to recommend one because there are so many excellent titles but my favorite in 2023 was probably Multilingual Baseball by Brendan O’Connor. The book engagingly connects bilingual interactions – the focus is on English and Spanish – with wider questions of globalized corporate sports, migration, and race.

December: A migrant memoir

Like novels, memoirs provide unique insights into linguistic diversity and this year we recommend Solito by Javier Zamora. The book tells the harrowing but also inspiring story of a 9-year-old boy, who makes the journey from El Salvador to the United States as an unaccompanied minor. Also a beautiful example of bilingual storytelling.

Happy Reading!

• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2023
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2022
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

Readability scores of the two selected public service information texts by the NSW Government

This morning I googled “nsw corona/covid restrictions”. The top hits all refer to NSW Government websites, including these two: “What you can and can’t do under the rules” and “Public Health Orders and restrictions.”

Both sites are clearly structured with lots of subheadings and dot points. But they are also long and text-heavy, and the font on “Public Health Orders and restrictions” is so small that the page literally looks like small print.

In both cases, you need to be a fairly motivated reader to work your way through them, and “Public Health Orders and restrictions,” in particular, looks more like it is aimed at lawyers than a regular reader.

Readability statistics for both texts confirm this impression. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of “What you can and can’t do under the rules” is 11.0 and that of “Public Health Orders and restrictions 14.2. The Flesch Reading Ease Score of “What you can and can’t do under the rules” is 48.1 and that of “Public Health Orders and restrictions 33.2.

What is readability?

Readability essentially refers to how easy or difficult it is too read a particular text.

There are a number of measurements of readability. For English, the two most famous of these are Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and the Flesch Reading Ease measures. Both are algorithms that are now built into most word processing software.

The basic idea behind these two measures is twofold:

• The more words per sentence, the less readable a text is.
• The more syllables per word, the less readable a text is.

Consider the examples in the table.

Comparing the two sentences, it is obvious that the first is much easier to comprehend than the second. Although they have the same number of words, the multi-syllabic words of the second sentence require much more precise and specialized knowledge.

Source: Flesch, How to write plain English

In short, to easily read the second sentence, you need to have a much higher level of (a) English language proficiency, and (b) science knowledge than for the first.

The Flesch measurements of readability

The Flesch measurements were developed by Rudolf Flesch, an Austrian-American writing consultant.

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level tells us who we can expect to have the requisite knowledge to read a particular text: 1.3 means that a first grader can be expected to read “People need air.” 13.1 tells us that 13 years of formal education are required to easily read “humans require oxygen.”

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level follows the US system of school grades from 1 to 10. A number greater than 10 indicates the years of formal education required.

The Flesch Reading Ease Scale is also linked to grade levels and formal schooling. The higher the level, the easier the text. The 90.9 score of “People need air” tells us that the text is very easy. All that’s needed to easily read it is an elementary school education.

At the other end of the scale, a score of 6.5 suggests that a college education is required to comfortably read “humans require oxygen” (As an aside, don’t get too focused on the precise score. Measuring the readability of a 1-sentence text is problematic, and I’m doing it to make a point. All readability scores are useful indicators but there are also obvious problems, which I’ll discuss some other time.)

Why does readability matter?

Let’s now go back to the two public service messages from the NSW Government with which I started this post: one requires 11 years of formal education and the other 14 years of formal education. With a Flesch Reading Ease score of 48.1 and 33.2 both are considered difficult to read, at the reading level of a college student.

This means that a fair number of Australians will have difficulties reading these public service messages.

Australia has compulsory education and, by international standards, a fairly well-educated population, as findings from the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) show. Even so, these data also show that there is significant variation in the reading abilities of Australians.

While the PIAAC levels do not directly match the Flesch levels, one thing is for sure, and that is that those Australians who score at or below Level 1 on PIAAC will definitely not be able to read texts that requires more than 10 years of formal education.

In other words, at least 13.7% of the Australian population, probably more, will not be able to read the two key texts about NSW’s Covid-19 restrictions. This amounts to a total of at least 2,320,000 people.

In the interest of full disclosure: these are the readability stats for this blog post

In a crisis where the actions of each and every one of us have a huge impact on the overall course of the pandemic, this is a very large number.

Attention to inclusive communication has certainly increased over the course of the pandemic, and here on Language on the Move we have focused on public health communication to linguistically diverse populations. The same goes for the special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis,” which will be published later this week.

Despite greater attention to the important role of inclusive communication, the fact that key information about Covid-19-related restrictions are out of the reach of more than 13.7% of the Australian population – irrespective of whether English is their main language or not – is concerning.

What is even more concerning is that the two examples I have chosen are not exceptional: two recently published research papers about the readability of Covid-19 online patient education materials and public health information websites in various countries found that these materials are generally pitched at a readability level that is too difficult for significant segments of the population.

Conduct your own research

Choose an English language text about Covid-19 and assess its readability by measuring its Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Flesch Reading Ease Scale. You can do that by copying and pasting the text into MS Word. Include additional qualitative observations of readability and discuss whether the readability matches the reading levels of the target audience.

To learn more how reading is learned and why some people never become highly proficient readers, despite going through compulsory schooling, watch this lecture:

References

Mishra, Vishala, & Dexter, Joseph P. (2020). Comparison of Readability of Official Public Health Information About COVID-19 on Websites of International Agencies and the Governments of 15 Countries. JAMA Network Open, 3(8), e2018033-e2018033. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.18033
Szmuda, T., Özdemir, C., Ali, S., Singh, A., Syed, M. T., & Słoniewski, P. (2020). Readability of online patient education material for the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19): a cross-sectional health literacy study. Public Health, 185, 21-25. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2020.05.041

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for the full Language on the Move coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. The special issue of Multilingua with 14 peer-reviewed research papers about “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis” will be published later this week; in the meantime, all the papers are available ahead of print here.

My “audience” as I was recording the first online lecture for the new term

Yesterday, I spent six hours pre-recording a puny little lecture of 15 minutes for the postgraduate “Literacies” unit I’m teaching this term. The unit has gone fully online this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and I have been planning for interactive delivery in a variety of formats.

One element in the overall mix is a podcast series. I’ve taught the unit a couple of times already so have the content down pat and figured all I needed to do was sit down and deliver my lecture into a microphone. It did not turn out to be a smooth experience.

The content I was covering yesterday – features of written vs spoken language – usually takes about 40 minutes of class time to deliver. That includes asking questions, taking student responses, and summarizing those responses. A standard teacher question-student response-teacher feedback cycle.

Without dialogue, the lecture shrunk to not much more than a third of the time it would normally take but producing it blew out by about nine times.

Most of this production time is a one-off, as I needed to learn how to use Adobe Audition and spent a lot of time designing an intro and an outro, and figuring out how to overlay them with a signature tune (I chose a few bars of Vivaldi’s Spring Concerto :-). Including a signature tune is a playful option that is obviously not strictly necessary but was fun to learn.

Quite a bit of time also went to editing in order to smooth out bloopers.

Hot tip: If you are unhappy with anything you’ve recorded, don’t stop recording. Instead, pause, click your tongue three times, and repeat whatever went wrong. This way you can easily identify the bits you’ll need to cut in your voice editor.

I may have smoothed out major bloopers but the final product still doesn’t please me and doesn’t meet my usual standards of work. I’m dissatisfied with recurring disfluencies, with too much detail in some parts and not enough in others, a joke that I started and then trailed off because it seemed silly delivering it to the unmoved microphone.

Seeing how much time I invested, I’m wondering where did I go wrong?

Maybe it’s not me at all but the problem is the genre of the academic lecture?

What’s wrong with lectures?

Lectures are odd creatures at the intersection of reading and writing, as a quick look at the table listing the key differences between written and spoken language will show.

The academic lecture, including in its pre-recorded version, is obviously a form of spoken language. However, most of its characteristics are typically associated not with spoken but with written language:

• The lecture is technologically mediated (recording device at my end, audio player at yours).
• Speaker and audience are distant across time and space (I recorded the lecture yesterday in my home and students will listen to it at other times and places).
• In terms of context, the lecture sits somewhere in the middle between high and low context (it’s part of a unit taught in the Applied Linguistics program at Macquarie University but it could be taught in any Applied Linguistics program in an English-medium program).
• The recording is durable and not as fleeting as the spoken word usually is.
• The lecture is not quite as scannable as a written text but you can certainly stop and rewind if there is something you didn’t understand, or jump ahead if you get bored.
• The lecture is planned and tightly structured.
• In terms of syntactic complexity and formality, I was aiming for a simple and casual style – the desired “conversational tone” of a podcast. However, on listening back, I discovered that I used a garden path sentence to exemplify one, and I also used words such as “therefore” and “thus” – clear traces of written language.
• I don’t even need to mention that the content of the lecture is relatively abstract (“Features of written language”) and that I delivered a monologue.

These mismatched criteria produce a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” genre. For instance, I did not write up the lecture beforehand and so did not read out a script. In face-to-face teaching, I don’t need one and for pre-recordings the general advice seems to be that a script will make the lecture sound unnatural. Even so, I’m now I’m beating myself up for uneven delivery – there are a few unfinished thoughts and dysfluencies.

How did such an awkward genre become the main mode of university teaching?

Miniature drawing of a medieval lecture (Image credit: British Library)

The academic lecture has its origins in the European Middle Ages, when both literacy – the ability to read and write – and books were scarce. In a world where writing is cheap and literacy is almost universal, it is hard to imagine just how scarce they were back then. Only the most valuable information was committed to writing. Hand-written manuscripts took years to produce and books were a rare and extremely valuable commodity. Online courses, textbooks, even notebooks were still far in the future.

To teach the valuable information committed to manuscripts, early university education therefore consisted of a “lecturer” reading to an audience. A lecturer is literally a “reader”, a title still used in UK academia today for what is an Associate Professor in the Australian and US systems. The lecturer read the set text out loud, sometimes providing running commentary or explanations as they went along.

That explains why the lecture is such an odd cross-over genre between written and spoken language. It’s a written text read out loud.

What it doesn’t explain is why we are reverting to this mode of teaching as we transition from face-to-face to online teaching. The best explanation I can come up with is that technical affordances of the digital world have changed both written and spoken language in fundamental ways, and we are all still working out how to harness them best for learning.

What do you think about pre-recorded lectures? And what are your most and least favorite teaching genres? Have they changed between face-to-face and online?

As for me, I’ll try and mix genres as much as possible. Even if they make me cringe, I’ll keep podcasts in the mix for now, mainly because I want my students to experience another form of writing to learn: note taking. To commit something to memory and process it deeply, writing continues to be the medium of choice.

“To reach the mind, knowledge has to flow through the hand,” as one of my lecturers in teacher training kept insisting.

Hamburg Central Library welcomes patrons in many languages and offers free wifi

Since I was 19, I’ve often thought about a student who I’ve never met and whose name I don’t even know. I encountered that young man in the preface of the German translation of Eduardo Galeano’s book Open Veins of Latin America. To make the point how widely the book was read and how influential it had been, the preface told the story of a Buenos Aires university student who wanted to read the book so badly but couldn’t afford to buy a copy. So what he did was read the book in bits and pieces by moving from one bookstore to another: in each store, he would pretend to browse, read 5-10 pages until the manager realized that he had no intention of buying and would throw him out. Over the course of a couple of weeks and with innumerable interruptions, the young man read the whole book this way.

As someone who easily gets lost in a book and has often found it difficult to tear herself away from a gripping read – and Open Veins of Latin America certainly is – I deeply felt for the student. The story brings home the injustice of unequal access to knowledge. It also made me conscious of a privilege I had taken for granted until then: access to a library.

Throughout most of my life I have been fortunate to be affiliated with a variety of institutions that have provided me with access to well-stocked libraries.

In fact, a good part of my life has been spent in libraries. As a university student living in a crowded dorm, the university library was the place where I went to read, take notes, draft essays and prepare for exams. Also as a student, one of my many jobs was as “library assistant”, which involved checking out books to patrons and re-shelving returned books to their proper place. After I graduated and became a university lecturer myself, my regular schedule included “library days” spent on teaching preparation and research reading. When I had a child, our family routine for many years involved visits to the children’s and junior sections of our public library, and selecting a week’s worth of books to take home and read.

Another multilingual welcome sign in Hamburg Central Library, saying “Learn German, meet people – for free”

The many places in which I have lived are partly marked in my memory through the library spaces I inhabited at various points in my life. Some, like the school library in my primary school, consisted of nothing more than a little cupboard; others, major university libraries, were multi-storied buildings filled with dimly lit rows upon rows of book shelves – temples to human knowledge and material reminders of the Socratic paradox that I know that I know nothing.

Today, I rarely set foot in a library. I still read a lot, both for work and for pleasure, but I access books and journals remotely via my computer or e-reader. The transformation of libraries from physical to digital repositories has not diminished the privilege as digital access, too, is tied to affiliation.

At the same time, public libraries are some of the last remaining bastions against the privatization of public space. The experience of the 1970s Buenos Aires university student who could not learn about the ways in which colonialism and capitalism had shaped his country without the money to buy the book has not lost its currency. Enjoyment of life’s simple pleasures – sitting back comfortably to chat with friends, enjoy a book, surf the internet or watch the world go – is ever more tied to one’s ability to consume. Even fundamental necessities such as using the toilet have been privatized and may be restricted to those who can pay.

Against this tide of privatization, libraries have been holding out as ever-smaller islands of public space. Today, most patrons no longer turn to libraries (exclusively) for books but in order to enjoy a free and inclusive public space.

How do you use libraries? And what kinds of inclusive and exclusive practices have you encountered in libraries?

My Grade 2 Reader and my primary Song book

When I was a child, I eagerly anticipated the start of each new school year. The first week or two were magical. There were new teachers, new subjects, new routines, and, above all, new books.

In the first week of each new school year, we were issued our textbooks. These belonged to the school but a copy was entrusted to each student for a year. In Year 1 of primary, there was only one such book – a reader. Each year, the number of schoolbooks increased and by the time I was in high school, a dozen or so would be handed out to each student.

Receiving the books involved some trepidation. Each of us hoped that we would get copies that the previous custodian had taken good care of; that there would be no scribbled notes, stains or dog-ears. Of course, the school had a system in place designed to prevent such abuse: each copy contained a little slip where we would have to sign our name and enter it into the list of custodians. Still, being allocated a copy whose previous custodians included A-students or anyone you admired was a good omen.

Once the books had been handed out, we would schlep them home and spend the afternoon covering them neatly in protective paper.

And then the real fun could begin: reading the books. I loved that initial read of the Literature book with its stories and poems; the Geography book exploring far-away places; the History book enabling time travel; the Biology book explaining the natural world; Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, Political Science, Religious Studies, Latin, English, French – I browsed all these textbooks with awe and read as much as I could. And with eager anticipation I looked forward to the point in the school year when we would study each lesson in detail and fully unravel the treasures they promised.

Throughout the school year, the books became our regular companions. We would carry them to and from school at least once or twice a week (some, like the Maths book, every day). And we would read them over and over again and use them to prepare for tests and exams.

At the end of the school year, the textbooks had to be returned to the school so that they could be passed on to the next student cohort. By then, the books had yielded all their secrets and new riches could be expected one grade up when school would return after the summer break.

When handing in the books, each copy was closely inspected by the teacher in charge and woe to the student who had not taken good care of their books; or, heaven forbid, lost their copy. Like most students, I was terrified that the inspection might find flaws for which I would be held responsible.

Sometimes, we were the last group of students to use a particular edition and, if that happened, we were allowed to keep them. Even today, I have those copies in my library.

The practices surrounding our textbooks taught us that books are precious and need to be treated with respect. They taught us that we are part of the great chain of human generations and that we are responsible for the legacy we leave to those who come after us. They taught us that books are guides and constant companions that help you grow and mature. And they gave me the gift of a lifelong love for reading and learning.

My experience with my schoolbooks was specific to a particular place and time. What lessons did your schoolbooks teach you? I don’t mean what their content was but what the practices surrounding their use taught you about books, life, and knowledge?

Reading is emotive, linked to storytelling and interaction, to intergenerational communication, and identity development. While not all reading is related to books, books do indeed feature in a significant number of stories families tell me about their reading.

But how do you get hold of the books you know and cherish when you live in a country where your language is not widely spoken? How do you maintain some sort of equilibrium in the availability of reading resources, and how do you take the step from “reading together” to “child learning to read (and enjoying to do so!) in the home language”, when formal schooling is stacked against that goal?

The answers are, of course, different for different families, depending on many factors, such as availability of heritage language schools, script and syntax of the home language, etc. But there is one thing that helps all families – the availability of reading material. And while reading material goes beyond books, they remain the one resource parents are most likely to turn to, with 64% of families using them on a daily or near-daily basis.

How can we access books for our children, books which are interesting, motivating, and relevant? Not all languages have equally vibrant publishing industries, of course: in some languages, there is virtually no track record of children’s publishing, for reasons of financial viability, a lack of children’s authors, or lack of infrastructure.

If families are locally connected, books may be swapped and borrowed, increasing access, but let’s face it – keeping your multilingual child in books corresponding to all their languages is a complicated, and potentially expensive, business.

When, as part of a recent research project funded by the UK Literacy Association, I began working with families to explore how children engaged in multilingual reading over extended periods of time, the status of the language became a topic of discussion. English books are written into the school’s “read at home” diary, English books can be found in the library, English books can be discussed with friends, teachers, etc., and English literature and story-telling events are accessible to the public. The tide, as is so often the case, is relentlessly anglophone.

The families’ experiences sparked a series of public engagement events around multilingual storytelling – the first with PhD students from the University of Sheffield, the follow-ups with participation from Sheffield’s heritage language schools, and, increasingly, volunteering parents. A loose schedule would allow for a new language every half hour or so, with impromptu readings taking place in-between. The last event, held in March in Sheffield Children’s Library, was so well-attended that the library was at full capacity.

Families of different language backgrounds stayed well beyond “their own language time”, listening to stories in Lithuanian, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and many more. A monolingual English-speaking father stated: “I’d never heard Punjabi before – it’s a beautiful language”, while one mother exclaimed “this is the first time my daughter has heard her language in a public context, outside the immediate family”.

After the event, the library’s bilingual picture book shelf was decimated. There was clearly a need for more books, more stories, in more languages – what to do?

When I asked whether the library would be willing to open a multilingual section in the children’s library, the answer was an immediate yes. Funding, however, was a problem: in the UK, libraries have been under immense financial pressure, many have closed.

What the library could do was to host a pilot of 500 multilingual books, providing space, staffing, cataloguing, etc. The books themselves had to be provided. We put out calls to the community, asking for book donations. Through Twitter and email, I approached authors and publishers, asking them for “spare” translated copies – when a publisher sells translation rights, they (and the author) typically receive a number of translated copies. We offered to give these copies a new home, and a number of wonderful publishers and authors agreed, giving the library boxes and boxes of brand-new editions. Heritage language schools organised book collections among parents. Over the summer holidays, a #bringabookhome hashtag on Twitter encouraged people to buy a children’s book from the country they were on holiday in and then to donate it to the library after their return.

The result, as one can imagine, is not a perfectly balanced library. Certain books are more easily to get hold of than others, picture books have a higher representation than chapter books, and certain languages are disproportionately represented. Nevertheless, the side effect of a “community-built” library is that it gathers momentum along the way – if you have worked to help make something happen, you have a vested interest in its survival. And so, Sheffield’s multilingual library is very much a community effort, a fitting tribute to the “City of Sanctuary”.

The multilingual library has received further support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council: as part of the Open Worlds Research Initiative’s Cross-Language Dynamics strand. The funding enables a research strand alongside the pilot, facilitating both qualitative and quantitative data collection on how families engage with the library, and an accompanying reward scheme. One of the project outcomes will be a clear set of guidelines, hints and tips for other libraries seeking to run similar projects – these should be available in the first half of 2019.

Related content

• In search of myself
• Are we killing the joy of reading?
• Multiculturalism alive and well in Austria

References

Little, S. (2018, Online First) ‘”Is there an app for that?” Exploring games and apps among heritage language families’. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2018.1502776 (Gold Open Access)

Little, S. (2017, Online First) ‘Whose heritage? What inheritance?: Conceptualising Family Language Identities’. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, DOI:10.1080/13670050.2017.1348463 (Gold Open Access)

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 technical term but that is actually really hard to pin down. When I asked the new students in my “Literacies” unit last week what they thought “literacy” meant, they came up with quite a variety of definitions.

The most popular definition of “literacy” was that it is simply a cover term for “reading and writing”. That understanding of literacy contrasts with spoken language. Closely related to this first understanding of literacy is a second of literacy as “the ability to read and write.” Students with a background in language teaching readily referenced the “four skills” – speaking, listening, reading and writing – that make up language proficiency.

The latter understanding of literacy has spawned a significant expansion of the use of “literacy”: today, “literacy” is no longer exclusively about language but may be used to refer to all kinds of knowledge and competences: financial literacy, computer literacy, digital literacy, media literacy, news literacy, environmental literacy, ethics literacy, health literacy, spiritual literacy, artistic literacy, emotional literacy, etc. etc. While the connection with written language is more obvious in some of these literacies than in others, the reason for the extension of the meaning of “literacy” to “competence” is clear: in the contemporary world, the acquisition of most competences is mediated through the written word and at least some reading and writing is involved in the vast majority of learning.

The multiple meanings of “literacy” from “written language” via “ability to use written language” to “all kinds of language-mediated competences” make the link with social practices obvious and give us yet another perspective on literacy: literacy is a way to do things with words. Literacy practices are intricately linked to the way we manage our social affairs and organize our social lives. In short, literacy is a tool of power.

While some people like to pretend that literacy is a neutral technology and that “the ability to read and write” will be equally beneficial to everyone and have the same consequences for any individual and in any society, nothing could be further from the truth.

One simple way to start thinking about the power relationships inherent in literacy practices is to consider its semantic field. A semantic field is constituted by all the words in a language that relate to a particular subject. In English, the key terms in the semantic field “literacy” are obviously “reading” and “writing”. Both words have Germanic roots: “read” derives from Old English “rædan”, which meant “to advise, counsel, persuade; discuss, deliberate; rule, guide.” Its German cognate is “raten”, which means both “to advise, counsel, guide” but also “to guess.” So, reading was associated with thought and cognition early on.

“Write” derives from Old English “writan” meaning “to carve, scratch.” Well, writing started out as a way to scratch marks on bone, bark or clay, or to carve them in stone or wood. So, it’s not surprising that the word for “write” originally meant something like “to carve or scratch” in many languages. Latin “scribere” is no exception.

You may wonder why I’m bringing up Latin here. Well, it is not to show off my classical education but to draw attention to the fact that – apart from basic “read” and “write” – most English words in the “literacy” field are actually derived from Latin.

The Latin verb “scribere” has given us “ascribe”, “describe”, “inscribe”, “prescribe” and “proscribe”, to name a few. The latter two in particular point to the fact that the written word is closely connected to the enactment of power: so close, in fact, that the written word may be equal to the law. The expression “the writ runs” makes this connection obvious: where a particular written language is used, a particular law applies.

English words that make the power of literacy obvious are usually derived from Latin (and, of course, “literacy” itself is another example). This demonstrates the strong hold that not only the written language per se but Latin writing in particular had over Europe for almost two millennia. Latin was the language of the law and the language of religion – two domains that took a long time to separate from each other. The close association of writing with religion is also obvious from the word “scripture” – where a word for “writing” generally has come to stand specifically for religious writing.

There are many other fascinating associations to explore in the semantic field of “literacy” but I’ll close with an example from German, which makes a neat point about the fact that the relationship between written and spoken language is also a power relationship in itself. The German word “Schriftsprache” literally translates as “written language” but specifically refers to the standard language. The expression “nach der Schrift sprechen” (“to speak according to writing”) means to not use a regionally marked dialect but to speak the national language in a standard manner.

As linguists we like to insist on the primacy of speech but “nach der Schrift sprechen” reminds us that power usually runs in the opposite direction and, in literate societies, the power code is either written or writing-based speech.

What does the semantic field for “literacy” look like in your language? What is the etymology of the translation equivalents of “read and write” or of “literacy”? And what do they tell us about literacy as a social practice embedded in relationships of power?

Reference

Details of the vice-presidential transgression in the image are available in this Time article.

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 weekend going through some of my diaries for observations on literacy practices. I was particularly interested to look back at my notes from the early 2000s when I frequently visited library spaces designed for pre-school children. One surprising observation that stood out from those notes was the heavy use of baby wipes and hand sanitizers in those spaces.

For instance, in October 2004 I observed a mother sitting in the children’s section of a Sydney bookstore on a tiny children’s chair with a one-year-old on her lap. Mother and child had the display copy of a touch-and-feel book in front of them. The mother dragged the child’s hand over the textured item and repeatedly pronounced the adjective that went with the texture (“soft”, “rough”, “bumpy”). After each stroke, the mother wiped the baby’s hand with a wet wipe. I observed the activity for around ten minutes but it had begun before I arrived and still went on when I left. As the touch-and-feel book only had four or five pages, the activity seemed extremely tedious. The scene is still etched in my mind because of the mother’s serious dedication to this activity which, to me, seemed boring, contrived and ill-considered. I’ve never been a fan of touch-and-feel books because I don’t think they are a good way to experience texture and to hone the sense of touch; much richer experiences are available in “the real world”, both in the home and, even more so, in nature. To overlay books over nature in this way diminishes the joy of both.

This was not an isolated observation; and I have a fair number of records of dutiful but joyless interactions between carers and young children in the children’s sections of bookstores and public libraries. Many carers seemed to regard it as their duty to bring their young children to such spaces. Once there, they would go into “teacher-mode” and try and get their children to engage with books in a very narrow way resonant of formal teaching: usually making children look at a book while trying to get them to sit still on the adult’s lap or in a stroller. And wherever toddlers and preschoolers got to touch books, baby wipes and hand sanitizers never seemed far away. Did these adults think the literacy bug is a germ?

Marketing a school-like approach to early literacy

These observations provide evidence that a discourse about the importance of early reading for children’s schools success is readily available and imbues contemporary parenting. Many parents in the middle-class suburbs of my observations are evidently keen to set children on the path of reading and formal literacy learning from a very young age. But what will children actually learn from practices such as those described here? That reading is a matter of duty but also something dirty?

My – admittedly unsystematic – observations are not unique to Australian libraries, as a recent study in a public library in a small town in the UK demonstrates (Smith, 2017). There, the researcher found that the children’s section of the library was designed as an extension of a school space. Support for children’s school work was the key aim of the space, as the librarians explained and as was evident from the presence of reading scheme books, educational posters about the benefits of reading or workbooks.

Mothers dutifully seemed to bring their children to that library, too, but – maybe in a point of difference from the Sydney tiger mothers I described above – had little interest in engaging with children’s literacy practices themselves. Instead, they focused on their smartphones or chatted with other mums and left the children largely to their own devices. The children, perhaps unsurprisingly, preferred the toys available in the children’s corner over the books. Apparently, a favorite activity was to place books in a toy oven and to “cook the books”.

The idea that early literacy is beneficial to children and they need to be exposed to books as early as possible is now ubiquitous. In addition to librarians, teachers and parenting experts, the idea is also promoted by retailers: most supermarkets now sell all kinds of learning toys intended to promote early reading, school-readiness and “the joy of learning.”

The catch is that the activities I have described above and those examined by Helen Victoria Smith are not joyful. Having one’s little hand dragged over some random surface while hearing isolated vocabulary items and having the same hand wiped down every few seconds must seem more like a punishment than like fun.

What books do best is open up our imagination, they expand our minds and they allow us to travel across time and space. Above all, they allow us to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Are we making it harder for our children to discover the joy of books, the joy of reading and the joy of learning precisely by turning literacy practices into a utilitarian duty that is all about school-readiness and learning the alphabet?

Related content

• Multiculturalism alive and well in Austria
• Serendipity, Cyberspace, and the Tactility of Documents

Reference

Smith, H. V. (2017). Cooking the Books: What Counts as Literacy for Young Children in a Public Library? Literacy, n/a-n/a. doi: 10.1111/lit.12121

So much hot air: the character for “meeting” consists of the one for “cloud” under a roof

Before my recent visit to Wuhan and Hong Kong I was planning to accept the Esperanto challenge that a number of readers had recently thrown at us and use the upcoming holidays to try and see whether it’s really possible to learn Esperanto in 100 hours. However, in China I got so fascinated by Chinese characters that I’ve now thrown myself into a Chinese character challenge instead.

I’d been intrigued by Chinese for a long time but up until about three weeks ago, I was of the opinion that life was too short to learn Chinese characters. They seemed like a huge set of haphazard lines and occasional efforts by my students to teach me this or that character just reinforced the idea that it was an unsystematic mystery that could only be mastered through years of rote learning at a young age.

Not so! Now I’ve discovered that learning Chinese characters makes the most intriguing pastime I’ve come across in a long time.

In Hong Kong, I picked up Alison Matthews and Laurence Matthews’ book Learning Chinese Characters. The book draws on James Heisig’s technique of teaching kanji (and more recently hanzi) through visualisation and thus links each character to a memorable story. I don’t always like the stories and association chains in Learning Chinese Characters but it is a lot of fun to make up my own.

Once you have a visualisation, it’s easy to remember the character. For instance, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the character for meeting会: it consists of the character for cloud云 placed under a roof. Hot air under a roof – it’s the perfect image of many a meeting I’ve attended!

In other cases, it’s easier to remember association chains as in the old party game where players compete to remember the longest chain. The chain one – earth – drop –mouth, for instance, gives you the characters for king, jade and country.

一 one + 土 earth = 王 king

王 king + drop = 玉 jade

玉 jade + 口 mouth = 国 country

So, connecting the meanings of basic characters to memorize the meanings of composite characters is a lot of fun once you get the hang of some basics.

Learning Chinese Characters is a great book to get you started on memorizing the meanings of characters but it doesn’t do much to help you acquire a muscle memory of the stroke order. This is where an iphone application called Chinese Writer published by trainchinese.com comes in handy.

Designed like a tetris game, the player has to trace Chinese characters in the correct stroke order as they rain down on your screen and get them right before they disappear. As addictive as the original tetris game, it feels much more educational and the 47 characters in their first pack already feel automatic to me.

The free version of Chinese Writer comes with a total of 384 characters in four packs. For now, that’s plenty for me but it’s possible to upgrade to the full version with more than 2,000 characters.

Both Learning Chinese Characters and Chinese Writer claim to be starting with the most frequent characters but, unfortunately, there is not much overlap between the two resources in their first 100 characters. I wish the two resources were coordinated because together they offer an incredibly entertaining way to learn Chinese characters.

Language learning meets gaming! For me that’s new territory and I’m blown away by the potential. I haven’t had much time to do a literature search and haven’t discovered much of a concerted research effort. I would love to hear from any of our readers who are into language learning games to find out what the state of the art is.

In the article, the principal shares a sad story about the cultural bias of the 5^th-grade reading test, which will from now on become a stock of my intercultural communication teaching. Oscar, a recent arrival to the Vermont school from a refugee camp in Africa, took the same test as all the other kids around the country who have grown up in the USA and spoken English all their lives:

Oscar needed 20 minutes to read a passage on Neil Armstrong landing his Eagle spacecraft on the moon; it should have taken 5 minutes […] but Oscar was determined, reading out loud to himself.

The first question asked whether the passage was fact or fiction. “He said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Irvine, man don’t go on the moon, man don’t go on the back of eagles, this is not true.’”

Oscar had understood the text and he understood the difference between factual and fictional writing. However, his lack of exposure to (American) media, meant he got the first question and, subsequently, all the other five questions, which were based on the first one, wrong.

Oscar got penalized for the fact that his knowledge of the world was quite different from that of the middle-class native-born “standard” (?) child the test designers had in mind. In the policy context of No Child Left Behind the school and the principal were penalized, too.

Cultural bias has been a concern for assessment researchers and practitioners since the emergence of IQ tests in the first half of the 20^th century. The evidence is there that standardized assessment disadvantages even among native-born students those from non-middle class backgrounds (Mac Ruairc, 2009, is a recent study in the Irish context well-worth reading). Students from migrant backgrounds and from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds are further disadvantaged. Despite all the evidence and all the research, standardized assessment and the idea that it means quality spreads like a cancer from one educational system to the next.

Dear readers, share Oscar’s story widely! Many adults in the developed world believe the moon-landing is not fact but fiction, and it’s plain to see that the fact that Oscar thought it was a story tells us nothing about his reading ability nor about the quality of the instruction he received in his school. There are thousands of such testing stories out there. How can so many wrongs add up to a right – the imagined standardized high-quality education system?

Ruairc, G. (2009). ‘Dip, dip, sky blue, who’s it? NOT YOU’: children’s experiences of standardised testing: a socio-cultural analysis Irish Educational Studies, 28 (1), 47-66 DOI: 10.1080/03323310802597325