February 27, 2010 | Finalist for the best social sciences blog 2010

Our blog is a finalist for the Research Blogging Awards 2010 in the Social Sciences or Anthropology category! We are so proud to have been short-listed, particularly as we really haven’t been around in the world of (research) blogging for very long. Look up the list of finalists on researchblogging.org

February 27, 2010 | Push for multi-lingual mindset

Listen to Ingrid Piller speaking about multilingualism and monolingualism in the tourism industry on ABC radio’s PM show. [Listin to the interview]

February 20, 2010 | Language on the Move in the Sydney Morning Herald

February 20, 2010 The Sydney Morning Herald is today running a feature about the experiences of Japanese tourists in Australia. The article draws on Ingrid and Kimie's research project on linguistic challenges in the Australian tourism industry to make the point that language has become a key component in destination marketing.

February 01, 2010 | Ingrid Piller returns to Macquarie University

Ingrid Piller, one of the founders of Language on the Move, has returned to Macquarie University from her year at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. In first semester, she will be teaching an undergraduate course on Language, Culture and Communication while continuing to supervise her PhD students and carrying out research projects. (From the left: Kimie, Laura, Xiaoxiao, Ingrid, Vera, Jenny and Joanne)

January 18, 2010 | Three months on: Language on the Move in numbers

January 18, 2010 Language on the Move is a bit over three months old and so we are taking the opportunity to roll out some stats. To date, more than 4,000 visitors have visited our front page and more than 7,000 have come to our blog. Visitors have come from 72 countries and territories and we are thrilled with this international readership! The top three countries of origin are Australia, Japan and the UAE, which we like to consider as our home turfs ;-) Followed by USA, UK, Germany, Iran, China, Slovenia and Peru. A particularly big živijo and hola to our readers in Slovenia and Peru :-)

We’ve posted 28 blog posts to date and have already well exceeded our initial goal of one post per week. We are now aiming for 10 posts per month! To make that possible, we’ll need guest-bloggers and our first guest-blog, by Emily Farrell from Berlin, was posted only today. Since December our blog has been syndicated with researchblogging.org and one of Ingrid’s posts even made it on the weekly editor’s selection there.

We’ve put our Forum on a new platform and Language on the Move is now on Facebook! Our Network section will remain work-in-progress for another little while. In the meantime, submit your entry for the ALMA award if you haven’t done so yet, read and comment – we love your feedback! – or just enjoy!

December 26, 2009 | Language Training for Social Inclusion: Recordings now available for download

The presentations from the recent Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) Forum, which was devoted to “Language training for social inclusion,” are now available for download from the AMEP Research Center website. Click here and listen to the  plenary addresses by the Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs and Settlement Services, the Hon. Laurie Ferguson, Professor Janet Holmes and our very own Ingrid Piller as well as many more.

December 13, 2009 | Fostering Multiliteracies through Education: Middle Eastern Perspectives

The American University of Sharjah and Zayed University’s Research Excellence Center “UAE Center for Bilingualism and Bilingual Education” are co-organizing an exciting multilingualism conference this week. Together with Professor Fatima Badry, American University of Sharjah, Ingrid is co-chairing the conference with the theme “Fostering Multiliteracies through Education: Middle Eastern Perspectives.” In addition to the two keynote speakers, Professor Suresh Canagarah, Pennsylvania State University, and Professor Nancy Hornberger, University of Pennsylvania, we’ve got an impressive line-up of speakers from the UAE and the region! Further details are available from the conference website.

October 26, 2009 | Language Training for Social Inclusion

The next Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) Forum is devoted to “Language training for social inclusion” and will be hosted at Macquarie University’s MGSM Conference Centre on November 12 and 13. There will be plenary addresses by the Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs and Settlement Services, the Hon. Laurie Ferguson, Professor Janet Holmes and our very own Ingrid Piller.

Ingrid will be speaking about “Language training for the workplace in a global perspective.” She will show how labor markets have changed drastically since the inception of the AMEP, both domestically and internationally, including the role of language in the workplace. Language needs of the production sector, which has shrunk significantly in Australia, are minimal while communication skills often play a central role in the service jobs of the new economy. She will argue that, against this background, the role of the state lies much more in the regulation of labor (key concerns include the segmented labor market for migrants; and the “living wage” debate) rather than language training for “the workplace,” which as such doesn't exist. This means that the AMEP will be best able to achieve its social inclusion mission by concentrating on basic English instruction for the purposes of social, civic and democratic engagement.

A full program of this exciting event will be available on the website of the AMEP Research Center some time soon.

October 12, 2009 | Sociolinguistics 2.0

Ingrid and Kimie are thrilled with the positive echo to the launch of the L.CoM portal! We are tickled pink by the fact that one blogger has gone so far as to call it “hope for a generation of sociolinguists.” To live up to the challenge, we’ve got a new blog post, which challenges the discipline to re-invent itself in response to the way our subject matter has changed. We are looking forward to your feedback and lively debate!

October 04, 2009 | Welcome to Language on the Move!

Language on the Move is the new online portal dedicated to language and communication in multicultural and transnational contexts. It is open to anyone interested in language learning, multilingualism and intercultural communication, in short, in Language on the Move! If you are interested in language and communication in society, you will always find something useful, interesting or even funny on Language on the Move.

The founders of Language on the Move are Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi. We are both applied sociolinguists, who live, work and play in different languages. We are very excited about Language on the Move because it is designed as a forum to explore and discuss language and communication-related issues from multiple perspectives!

By making our publications and conference presentations available here, we want this portal to be useful for everyone, particularly students, teachers, researchers, transnational families, policy makers, industry representatives, and anyone else speaking another language, learning another language or trying to communicate with speakers of other languages.

Let us know what you like about or wish to see on Language on the Move. Happy browsing!

Ingrid and Kimie

October 04, 2009 | Language learning, multilingualism and social inclusion

Ingrid gave a plenary address on "Language Learning, Multilingualism and Social Inclusion" at the 11th International Pragmatics Association Conference at the University of Melbourne, 12-17 July, 2009. She and Kimie also co-organized a panel on “Language Learning, Multilingualism and Social Inclusion,” which featured 12 international presenters.

Language on the Move was originally inspired by our desire to share these presentations with a wider audience. We would like to thank the presenters who generously gave us permission to allow open access to their conference papers and recordings on Language on the Move. So, even if you didn’t get a chance to be there at the conference in Melbourne, you can still listen to our talks or even just look at some of the pictures of the meeting. (Click to download audio recordings of the event, ppt presentations and view pictures)

October 04, 2009 | Social and linguistic challenges in tourism workplaces in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)

Ingrid has just been awarded a research grant by the Emirates Foundation for a 15-months’ project to investigate the social and linguistic challenges in UAE tourism workplaces. This project aims to investigate language practices and language ideologies in tourism-related workplaces in the UAE. An understanding of the language practices and ideologies of a particular workplace can show us how certain employees are excluded from such workplaces and can thus inform language policy and planning to facilitate Emirati access to workplaces in the tourism sector.

Tourism is a major sector of the contemporary global economy and of increasing importance in the UAE. It is also an industry in which language and communication skills are of very high importance, i.e. a large proportion of tourist work is language work. However, language aspects of the UAE tourism industry have not been considered to date and this project will thus serve to increase empirical knowledge about language use in and the language needs of an important industry in the UAE.

October 04, 2009 | Living together in a multicultural society

Ingrid and Kimie contributed to a recent Japanese publication devoted to immigration policy. Ingrid’s contribution highlights the role of the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) in the social inclusion of migrants to Australia. Kimie’s contribution explores the role of gender in migrants’ language learning trajectories. Two of our students also have articles in the volume: Emily Farrell writes about language and citizenship and Vera Tetteh explores the case of Australia's African migrants. If you read Japanese, you can download the full text of Ingrid’s paper from our resources section. Copies of the other three papers are coming soon.

Kawamura, C., Kondoh, A., & Nakamoto, H (2009.), Living together in a Multicultural Society: Approaches to Immigration Policy [Iminseisaku eno approach: Raifusaikuru to tabunkakyousei]. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten Publishing Co., Ltd. [Amazon Website]