Ad for ‘English for travel’ classes ( www.gaba.co.jp/ad) A few weeks ago, my family and I went to Jim Thompson’s special sales at BITEC in Bang Na, a short train…
The high price of multilingualism When society doesn’t value something you, as an individual, do, you, the individual, end up paying for society’s lack of valuation. That’s the case with…
Hungarians in RomaniaUp until a few decades ago, the academic consensus – along with public opinion – was that bilingualism is detrimental to the individual and society. Nowadays, that has…
I know some people think what I am doing with my daughters – speaking German to them one-hundred percent of the time even though German is a second language for…
Pakistan Swat Valley 2009 Ingrid briefly mentioned Zubeida Mustafa’s new book Tyranny of Language in Education: The Problem and its solution recently. Since then, we’ve had numerous enquiries about the…
Much of my research over the past decade has involved talking to migrants to Australia and overseas students about their experiences of language learning and settlement. In these conversations, I…
When I lived in Basel, a city in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, I often found myself performing an involuntary field experiment in language attitudes. As likely to speak English…
My daughter attends a public elementary school in NSW where the children are taught French for one hour each week. In 2009, she was away from her school for one…