As we prepare for the “Bridging Language Barriers” Symposium to be hosted at Macquarie University next week on March 16, we take a step back and ask how language barriers…
Who of the three women in this image do you think German employers are most likely to consider as a potential employee and call for a job interview? Obviously, the…
Piller, I. (Ed.) (2016) Language and Migration. London: Routledge. Humans are a migratory species. Although in modern society the dominant imagery we have created about ourselves is that it is…
From inside Jaume Plensa's House of Knowledge, Bordeaux, France (Photo by Shirley Yeung) In much of Western and Northern Europe, we find ourselves in the wake of a widespread retreat…
Kifibin’s workplace was a big event centre, which was open to the public only once a week Let me at once introduce you to the main character of this blog…
Asylum seekers practicing German (Source: Schwaebische.de) Germany has discovered a new social type that is causing grief in modern diverse societies: the “Integrationsverweigerer;” literally someone who refuses to integrate, a…
Language and migration: the workshop presenters and organizers On December 11th, Ingrid Piller (Macquarie University) and Donna Butorac (Curtin University), organised a workshop on Language and Migration for the 2015…
Australia: The White Man's Land (Source: NLA) Australia has a proud national narrative of migration and multiculturalism. It also has an equally prevalent history of exclusionary and discriminatory migration policy.…
Who is a real refugee? The refugee crisis in Europe has caught a lot of global media attention. Countries at the entry points and their official actions, as well civil…
Condemned to consume My migration newsfeed in the past few weeks has been dominated by news about the Syrian refugee crisis and the various European and international responses. But there…
"The English" migrated to their "ancestral homeland" in the first few centuries of the Common Era (Source: Wikipedia) “Indigenous languages” and “immigrant languages” are much discussed in language policy research,…
Churchill Square Shopping Mall, Brighton, UK (Source: Wikipedia) In a shopping mall in the city of Brighton, UK, a tourist was arrested on terrorism charges last week for taking a…
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…
Meat workers, Fletcher Abattoir (Source: SheepCRC) One of the most famous research subjects to ever have participated in second language learning research is a man known in the literature as…
Website of the German Club Montevideo, founded in 1866 The current issue of Begegnung (“Encounter”), the magazine of German International Schools, has a feature about the German School in Montevideo,…