Grade 2 Oral Tetun class Editor's note: As the Language on the Move team is busy preparing for the "Bridging Language Barriers" Symposium to be hosted at Macquarie University on March 16,…
Ingrid Piller's "Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice" wins Prose Award Language on the Move is finally back from our summer break. The New Year has started well for us with…
A couple of years ago, I mused here on Language on the Move what linguistic theory would look like if its dominant cultural ideas had not been shaped in 1950s…
ESL teachers play an important role in home language maintenance (Image Credit: Macquarie University) Learning the host country’s language is important for migrants but we should not forget that maintaining…
Demand action from our politicians to make a LOTE compulsory! The state of language learning in Australian schools is dire. This weekend the Sydney Morning Herald carried an article entitled “Why students are…
The Linguistic Ethnography Forum’s e-seminar devoted to Ingrid Piller’s recent book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics is currently running. Some discussions so far are concerned…
Alex spent a stimulating summer centered on child multilingualism away from the leafy Macquarie campus Macquarie University campus seemed to sleep in the summer sun once the semester ended last…
Children in a bilingual program in Hamburg (Source: AlsterKind) It is a key finding of contemporary educational research that the children of migrants experience educational disadvantage vis-à-vis their native-born peers.…
"Naughty boys" in the media: image from the Channel 4 gangs and drugs drama "Top Boy" Teacher expectations can constitute a self-fulfilling prophecy: teachers behave differently towards children depending on…
Bilingualism has a gender A while ago, I reported on the findings of a US study that demonstrated that children of immigrants who achieve high-level bilingual proficiency in both English…
'Soaking up English like a sponge:' The researcher's young son engrossed in a Thesaurus If someone cannot now learn their native language, adding a couple of foerign (sic) dead languages…
Diversity in early childhood education: valued or silenced? (Source: easternct.edu) Bilingual education presents a major conundrum in contemporary diverse societies: on the one hand, bilingualism and diversity more generally are…
2014 NAPLAN Year 3 Numeracy test results by language status In Australia the results of last year’s round of student and school performance on national standardized testing have just been…
Linguistic diversity is valued in this school (Photo Courtesy of Angela Turzynski-Azimi) ‘What’s your nash, miss?’ Plurilingual pre-service teachers preparing to teach in Sydney schools What is it like to…
Australia-China Youth Dialogue 2014 I recently returned from the Australia China Youth Dialogue in Beijing, my head buzzing with new ideas. The Dialogue promotes “more sophisticated cross-cultural understanding among Australian…
2012 workshop on 'Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion in Australia' at Macquarie University How does language intersect with social inclusion in contemporary Australia? Do social inclusion policies address linguistic diversity?…