Language and migration workshop

The program for the “Language and Migration” workshop in Parramatta on Friday, December 11, 2015 is now available. The workshop is part of the 46th annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) at the newly rebranded Western Sydney University.

Organizers: Ingrid Piller, Macquarie University, and Donna Butorac, Curtin University

The artwork featured here is by Sadami Konchi, who will be hosting a solo exhibition “People of Parramatta” at Riverside Theatres Parramatta from Monday, 16 November until Sunday 13th December, to coincide with the conference dates. The exhibition features, inter alia, the original sketches of the images shown here.

Overview

International migration is widely perceived to have reached levels of complexity unprecedented in human history (Czaika & de Haas, 2014). A few international migration magnet destinations (Australasia, the Gulf States, North America and Western Europe) have been transformed into ‘super-diverse’ societies in the past few decades (Vertovec, 2007). Consequently, social questions related to migration (how to ensure social cohesion and sustainability; how to safeguard the rights of old-timers and newcomers; how to manage migration economically and ethically; etc.) have become pressing and hotly contested political issues in many societies around the globe, including Australia. Language is central to many of these debates.

While the social importance of migration can hardly be overstated and needs little justification, migration raises equally pressing theoretical questions for the discipline of linguistics: we are currently witnessing a paradigm shift from language understood as an object in space towards an understanding of language as a process in motion. Developing a new ‘sociolinguistics of mobility’ is widely considered as constituting the current frontier in (socio)linguistic theorizing (e.g., Blommaert, 2010; Dick, 2011; Heller, 2007).

The workshop is intended to showcase current Australian research exploring the relationship between language and migration and contributing to the sociolinguistics of mobility.

The workshop is organized in two blocks, one devoted to ‘Public discourses’ and the other to ‘Family repertoires.’ Each block will contain four featured speakers. The workshop will be highly interactive, with short presentations and panel discussions.

The key questions to be addressed are:

• How do public and private discourses of language, identity and belonging intersect?
• What are the policy challenges raised by the research presented here, particularly with regard to education?
• What can applied linguists do to positively influence media and institutional migration discourses?

Public discourses

Angus Stirling, Representations of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Australian Print Media: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis

Utilising corpus linguistics, this research examines representations of refugee and asylum seeker identity within Australian newspapers. It analyses dominant and competing discourses, revealing how identity is constructed and contextualised. As media representations may influence broader discourse, there is value in establishing which representations are commonly formed (thus enabling them to be investigated for accuracy) and which representations are silenced.

Building on recent British research led by professor Paul Baker of Lancaster University (Baker et al, 2008), this study melds the socio-political contextualisation of Critical Discourse Analysis with the methods of corpus linguistics to analyse language within 40,000 articles sampled from an eight year period. Findings indicate there are two major competing discourses: that of plight and illegitimacy. Asylum seeker and refugee identities are constructed differently, with refugees receiving a mixed yet comparatively favourable representation. Implications include the potential to now challenge key sites of problematic discourse and possible grounds for reform of press practices.

Laura Smith-Khan, Fair go? Communication and credibility in Australian asylum procedures

Almost 60 million people are forcibly displaced around the world today. Those who seek asylum in countries like Australia meet increasingly restrictive government policy. Often lacking documentary proof of persecution, asylum seekers must construct a credible refugee narrative. Yet they face many challenges: Intercultural communication or interpreting errors can create inconsistencies or misunderstanding; language use may clash with institutional expectations. These issues can damage credibility, fatally undermining the claim’s success.

This presentation draws on my ongoing doctoral research. Analysing decisions of the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal, I critically examine how decision-makers assess credibility, comparing this with government policy instructions. I consider the ways in which institutional and individual beliefs about language may influence these decisions. While policy explicitly promotes fairness, credibility assessments involving apparent clashes of language beliefs and misunderstandings still disproportionately disadvantage applicants. Revising the role and nature of credibility assessments in Australian asylum decision-making would help ensure fairer outcomes.

Maria Chisari, Learning English and becoming an Australian citizen: A sociolinguistic study of migrants preparing for the Australian citizenship test

This paper explores how the relationship between language, national identity and belonging is negotiated by migrants and refugees who want to become Australian citizens. The work is based on an ethnographic study which investigates how migrants respond to official citizenship policy that promotes learning English as a way of securing social cohesion and constructing Australian national identity. The study, conducted among recently-arrived NESB participants from a range of countries, reveals that migrants experience ambivalence towards developing English competency in order to be considered ‘integrated’ and ‘suitable’ for the conferral of Australian citizenship. They identify with multiple ways of being ‘model’ Australian citizens that are enriched by their cultural and linguistic differences and transnational desires. This research makes a useful contribution to understanding the complex and fluid relationship between language, citizenship and belonging and has the potential to inform future scholarship on language ideology and language testing policy.

Alexandra Grey, Urbanisation and minority language in China: a case study of urban, upwardly mobile and language-less Zhuang people

This research concerns the impacts large-scale internal migration has on maintaining minority languages in China, given state structures and public discourses locate languages within specific regions. This matters in assessing the Chinese model of minority language protection and examining the applicability of migration studies scholarship, which largely concerns international migration (e.g. Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004), to social studies within China.

The project analyses ethnographically-oriented interviews with 43 university students (Zhuang members/speakers) and 18 adults doing Zhuang “language work”; observations; law/policy corpus; and semiotic landscapes within China, undertaken between 2014-15. It finds, under conditions of mobility, Putonghua is replacing Zhuang as a vehicle for social inclusion. The “tolerability” (Grin 1995) of this is produced through public and private discourses rationalizing non-speaking of Zhuang, underpinned by ideologies about the suitability of Putonghua for public discourses and functions, and about Zhuang failing to “grow” in cities. Despite this, a Zhuang grouping retains social and political meaning.

Family repertoires

Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families

This paper reports on a qualitative study investigating bidirectionality in second language learning in migrant families in Australia. The study, drawn from newly-arrived Persian migrant families, explores children’s experiences of English language learning and use as well as their intersection with parental language learning and use. Additionally, this study explores the impacts of such interactions on familial relationships. ‎In this presentation, I will discuss some of the findings, focussing on the ways in which children may affect parental English learning, their influential role in family language policy (FLP) decisions, and the impacts of children’s agency on familial relationships. Findings have implications for understanding the important role of children in family processes of language learning and use in migration contexts, which can be used for the development of appropriate language educational policies and services for migrant families.

Sabina Vakser, Authenticity in superdiversity

This paper reports on an ethnographically-informed study of Russian speakers in Melbourne which explores the question of authenticity in transcultural family life. In an era of ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec, 2007), former models of language and society are now shifting to reflect more dynamic realities. Conceptualisations of authenticity, however, seem to lag behind.

Drawing on audio-recorded interactions from one multilingual household, this paper explores polycentric social alignments (Blommaert, 2010) that give rise to tensions around ‘authentic Russianness’. It demonstrates how ‘authenticity’ is construed as different histories interact (Lacoste, et al., 2014), resulting in attempts at linguistic and cultural revisionism in order to accommodate disparate norms. The work contributes to developments within a broader sociolinguistics of mobility by providing a case analysis of the lived experience of superdiversity.

Hanna Torsh, Unequal beginnings: linguistic intermarriage between locals and migrants in Australia

As a focus for understanding language practices in the context of global migration linguistic intermarriage is of significant interest. However, the focus of linguistic intermarriage research is almost always only on language maintenance (De Klerk 2001, Ishizawa 2004, De Houwer 2007). This research focuses on the language beliefs and feelings of monolingually raised English speakers who are married to migrant partners and seeks to contribute to the debate about language learning and use in the family in multilingual and multiethnic Sydney. I interviewed thirty participants over a period of eighteen months, designed and collected a questionnaire and compiled a media corpus of articles on couples and bilingualism from Australian media sources. One of the early findings is that very few of the English-speaking background (ESB) participants had any consistent opportunities to study foreign languages (FL) in their schooling in Australia, which is typical for Anglophone countries where FL learning is weaker.

Vera Williams Tetteh, African linguistic repertoires in migration contexts: The experiences of African migrants in Australia

This paper explores African migrants’ lived experiences of transnational migration, highlighting the relationship between their diverse sociolinguistic backgrounds and their settlement and social inclusion in Australia. The paper argues that African migrants arrive with diverse sociolinguistic backgrounds, derived from a range of pre-migration language experiences, but how these inform their settlement trajectories is poorly understood and often neglected in Australian settlement policy. The paper presents data from sociolinguistic ethnographic research conducted with 47 newly arrived adult African migrants. It examines data from in-depth interviews and the research participants’ self-reported evaluations of their linguistic competencies and English proficiencies. The resulting analysis draws on the notion of “linguistic repertoires” (Gumperz, 1964; Blommaert & Backus, 2012) to interpret the data and illuminate how these play out for participants’ choices and decisions in their post-migration language socialisation processes. Findings complicate mainstream ideologies of the second language learners, who are often constructed in homogeneous and deficit terms. In addition, the paper outlines implications for language-in-migration policies and migrant language training programs.

References

Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., Khosravinik, M., Krzyzanowski, M., McErery, T., & Wodak, R. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse and Society, 19(3), 273-306. doi: 10.1177/0957926508088962

Blommaert, Jan. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blommaert, J., & Backus, A. (2012) Superdiverse repertoires and the individual. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, Paper 24.

Czaika, Mathias, & De Haas, Hein. (2014). The Globalization of Migration: Has the World Become More Migratory? International Migration Review, n/a-n/a. doi: 10.1111/imre.12095

De Houwer, A. (2007). “Parental language input patterns and children’s bilingual use.” Applied Psycholinguistics 28(3): 411.

De Klerk, V. (2001). “The Cross-Marriage Language Dilemma: His Language or Hers?” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 4(3): 197-216.

Dick, Hilary Parsons (2011). Language and Migration to the United States. Annual Review of Anthropology, 40: 227-240.

Grin, F. (1995). Combining immigrant and autochthonous language rights: A territorial approach to multilingualism. In T. Skutnabb-Kangas and R Phillipson (eds.), Linguistic Human Rights: Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter, 31-48.

Gumperz, J. (1964). Linguistic and social interaction in two communities. American Anthropologist, 66(6), Part 2: The Ethnography of Communication: 137-153.

Heller, Monica. (2007). Bilingualism as Ideology and Practice. In M. Heller (Ed.), Bilingualism: A Social Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-22.

Ishizawa, H. (2004). “Minority Language Use among Grandchildren in Multigenerational Households.” Sociological Perspectives 47(4): 465-483.

Lacoste, V., Leimgruber, J., & Breyer, T. (Eds.) (2014). Indexing Authenticity: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter.

Levitt, P. and Glick Schiller, N. (2004). ‘Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society’. International Migration Review 38 (3): 1002-1039.

Vertovec, Steven. (2007). Super-Diversity and Its Implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6): 1024-1054.