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,…
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…
Teacher expectations produce self-fulfilling prophecies in student performance: high teacher expectations result in students’ higher academic performance and low teacher expectations result in students’ lower academic performance. The positive effect…
Albanian-Greek border crossing at Kakavijë (Source: greece.com) Our understanding of the role of language in social life suffers from a particularly intractable problem: the terms we use to speak about…
Grace Chu-Lin Chang has completed her PhD thesis entitled “Language learning, academic achievement, and overseas experience: A sociolinguistic study of Taiwanese students in Australian higher education”. The thesis is now available…
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…
Benz, Victoria. 2015. Dynamics of bilingual early childhood education: Parental attitudes and institutional realisation. PhD. Macquarie University. Victoria Benz recently completed her PhD thesis about “Dynamics of bilingual early childhood education: Parental…
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.…
Preschool in Karlsruhe, Germany (Source: DW) Ever since my research for my 2002 book Bilingual Couples Talk I’ve regularly been told by people – or been asked to confirm their…
"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…
'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…
Children of migrant cotton field workers from Oklahoma (Source: Library of Congress) I’ve just come across a fascinating article about the schooling of migrant children during the Great Depression era…
Nanai/Hezhe children (Source: Wikipedia) We have often examined here on Language on the Move how ‘English for all’ educational policies entrench inequality rather than alleviate disadvantage (e.g., here or here).…
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…