Language on the Move 2023

The Language on the Move team hosted members of the Next Generation Literacies network in June

Where has 2023 gone?! Unbelievably, it’s time for another annual report.

In terms of research blogging, 2023 has been the leanest year since we started this website. This is because we have brought more of our activities back into the real world as the virtual world is being overwhelmed by the looming textocalypse. One thing that ChatGPT sadly has achieved is to devalue all digital writing.

Without concomitant community and capacity building, writing is quickly becoming meaningless. Therefore, our efforts have been directed at balancing the two.

Thank you for being part of Language-on-the-Move!

I want to express my gratitude to all team members, contributors, readers, students, and fans for supporting our research, teaching, and team efforts. Your commitment to creating and sharing knowledge about language in social life and to striving for a more inclusive world makes it all worthwhile.

As we look back on 2023, we are guided by hope for 2024.

Ways to keep in touch!

If you have not yet done so, start 2024 by subscribing to Language on the Move in the ‘Newsletter subscription’ box in the footer below.

Dr Abdulrahman Alfahad translated “Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice” into Arabic

In previous years, we also used the annual report to encourage readers to join our Twitter followers @lg_on_the_move, but considering the direction in which that platform is headed, we are not sure how much longer we’ll be on the site.

We have already significantly scaled back our Twitter presence, similar to the minimization of our Facebook activities some years ago. We’ve started a BlueSky account, but unsure whether we’ll really hang in there. For now, feel free to follow us on any of these platforms. If you are not yet on BlueSky but would like to be, feel free to ask us for invite codes.

And in case you need a reminder, Language on the Move also hosts a YouTube channel.

January

Ingrid Piller, How do universities decide whose English needs to be tested for admission?

January is summer break in the Southern Hemisphere, but we did get to put out one research blogpost, a general audience version of an academic article in Language in Society that came out just around Christmas 2022:

Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2022). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 1-23. [open access]

February

Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, Vera Williams Tetteh, Scholarly sisterhood: Collaboration is our academic superpower

Much of our summer break was devoted to finalizing the book manuscript for Life in a new language. In 2024, the book will finally be published by Oxford University Press. Watch this space!

March

Vera Williams Tetteh, Triumph over trauma: new migrant memoir
Event: Multilingual students in monolingual universities. A recording of this departmental seminar is available here.

Regular reading group meetings are the lifeblood of the Language-on-the-Move team

In March, team members also made a submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Inquiry into ‘Migration, Pathway to Nation Building.’ Our submission was published on the website of the Parliament of Australia and can be retrieved here.

We argue that the problem of systemic migrant exclusion must be addressed for migration to work as a strategic enabler of vibrant economies and socially sustainable communities.

April

Two new Language-on-the-Move PhDs

Huge congratulations to Dr Agnes Bodis and Dr Liesa Rühlmann, who graduated from their PhDs this year, and Ms Tazin Abdullah, who graduated from her MRes!

Liesa’s PhD thesis was published as a monograph later in the year: Rühlmann, L. (2023). Race, Language, and Subjectivation: A Raciolinguistic Perspective on Schooling Experiences in Germany. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43152-5; and she also won the Karl H. Ditze Prize 2023, an annual award carrying a cash prize of Euro 3,000 and honoring the best postgraduate thesis in the humanities in northern Germany.

Dr Yining Wang, who finished her PhD thesis about heritage language maintenance among Chinese families in Australia in 2020, never got to have a graduation ceremony due to Covid, so we celebrated in April.

Pia Tenedero, Lent, language, and faith work
LI, Jia & HE, Bin, Hallyu and Korean language learning
This was our 2^nd most popular blog post in 2023, testament to the popularity of Korean cultural exports. Interpreting the Korean show Squid Game was also the topic of an article by Jinhyun Cho over in the Conversation: From Squid Game and Physical: 100 to K-pop and BTS, translation is central to tectonic shifts in global cultural consumption.
Tazin Abdullah, New ways to answer old questions about Ramadan

Never miss an opportunity to share cake! Dr Loy Lising’s famed pavlova was the cherry on top of Dr Yining Wang’s PhD

May

Annmaree Watharow, Monika Bednarek, and Amanda Potts, Labelling people with disability in Australian newspapers
Agnes Bodis, Studying abroad is amazing, or is it?

In May, I had the privilege to spend a month as a visiting fellow at the Passau International Centre for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies (PICAIS). During this time, I spoke with the online magazine of Passau University about linguistic diversity and democracy.

Four years after the Persian translation, May also saw the publication of the Arabic translation of Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. Translated by Dr Abdulrahman Alfahad, it was published as التنوع اللغوي والعدالة الاجتماعية by King Saud University Press.

June-July

Xingxing Yu, Nashid Nigar, Qi Qian, Translanguaging the English language curriculum in Tibet [Chinese translation]
Event: Linguistic Inclusion and Good Governance in Multilingual Australia. A recording of this talk by Dr Alexandra Grey for the Linguistic Justice Society is available here.

The June highlight was the International Symposium of Bilingualism (ISB 14) hosted at Macquarie University. A recording of Ingrid Piller’s keynote lecture is available here. It was a special pleasure to welcome so many of our international colleagues to Macquarie University, particularly fellow members the Next Generation Literacies Network.

The conference also offered an opportunity to interview key international scholars about their research, which we published as part of our lose series Chats in Linguistic Diversity.

Hanna Torsh, Linguistic diversity in education: Ingrid Gogolin in interview
Loy Lising, Translanguaging: Ofelia García in interview
Laura Smith-Khan, Intercultural communication in migration law practice. A recording of this talk is available here.
Jeffrey Gil, Competing visions for the global promotion of Mandarin

August

Students created some of the content we published in the 2^nd half of the year, including this informative video about the Thai language in the Australian diaspora by China Fukuda, Choltita Mukdahan, and Jankamon Salasuta, a project they undertook for a unit about “Languages and Cultures in Contact” as part of their Macquarie University Masters degree in Applied Linguistics and TESOL.

September-November

Alexandra Grey, Linguistic Inclusion in Public Health Communications
Ingrid Piller, Meet the people behind Life in a new language. This post collates tweets in which we featured each of the 130 research participants behind our forthcoming book Life in a new language.
Laura Smith-Khan, Refugee credibility assessment and the vanishing interpreter
Emily Bailey, The Complexities of Simplifying Language
CfP: Conceptual and methodological challenges in linguistic inclusion
Linguistic Inclusion Today

Throughout the year, our main activity is our fortnightly reading group, which brings together researchers based at Macquarie and other Sydney universities, Higher Degree Research students, and visitors. This year, we welcomed three international visitors for periods of 6-12 months, namely Professor Yuanbing Duan (Yunnan Normal University, Kunming), Professor ZHANG Jie (Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan), and Ms Yixi (Isabella) Qiu, a joint PhD student at Fudan University and UNSW.

A topic that regularly comes up during our meetings is the effects of English hegemony on education, employment, health, and all facets of life in a linguistically diverse society. How English hegemony plays out in new technologies was the topic of this piece over in the Conversation: ‘Your United States was normal’: has translation tech really made language learning redundant?

December

Sarah Hopkyns, Seeing the linguistic landscape through the eyes of Barbie and Ken
Rizwan Ahmad, Is Arabic under threat on the Arabian peninsula?
Undarmaa Munkhbayar, How to maintain Mongolian in Australia?
Natalie Davis, Auslan in Australia: Fighting for a voice
Ingrid Piller, Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2024
Jasna Novak Milić, Why Australia needs Croatian Studies. Recording of one of the keynotes at the Linguistic Inclusion Today

This stimulating and engaging day with 50 attendees allowed us to close the year on a high note 😊

Happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year!

Previous annual reports

For an even deeper trip down memory lane, here is the list of our full archives:

Thank you for being part of Language-on-the-Move!