"Velcro on one pocket coming away at the edge. Please repair and bring back tomorrow for checking." This was the note I had dreaded from my son’s teacher. The Velcro…
I’m not a big fan of what I call “breathless academic postmodernism,” or what I view as the often naïve valorization of, among other things, hybridization, creolization, liminality, polysemy, multiplicity,…
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…
In the past three decades attention has shifted from communicative competence to discourse as a frame for understanding the challenges faced by language learners. Yet, the question of how stereotyping…
Having lived and taught English in Japan for more than fifteen years, until last night I’d thought I’d seen it all. That was until I stumbled across the もし彼氏が外国人だったら英会話 (What…
“PR” is probably one of the abbreviations I have heard most since coming to Australia. Despite the fact that PR – “permanent residence” for the non-initiated - is the much-coveted…
I recently returned to China from graduate study in Australia and soon reestablished my old habit of reading the newspaper over breakfast. One Sunday morning, this color flier was enclosed…
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…
Over the past year or so I’ve started to make my daughter do daily arithmetic practice in German. My reason for doing so stems from my dissatisfaction with the ways…
One’s name is one of the most salient features for one’s identity. Some parents suffer from extraordinary indecisiveness when giving their newborn a wonderfully auspicious and proper name, all with…
Have you ever been curious what it feels like for Saudi women to be part of polygamous families? I wouldn’t be surprised if many readers of Language-on-the-Move admitted to such…
Mother Language Day in East Timor International Mother Language Day is celebrated annually to promote linguistic and cultural diversity. In East Timor, Mother Language Day 2011 provided the perfect opportunity…
I’ve recently come to Sydney from Taiwan to pursue a PhD in Applied Linguistics under the supervision of Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi. They’ve encouraged me to write up my…
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…
Many of the people close to my heart are transnationals such as myself. Belonging is a frequently discussed topic in my circles, and often a topic that is surrounded by…