American society places little value on meaningful multilingualism for young people, or for adults for that matter. Nowhere is this lack of valuation more apparent than in the U.S. public…
I wasn’t sure of the best way to enter the Language-on-the-Move community. I’ve decided simply to start by telling you a little bit about me and my ongoing quest to…
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…
When I first started teaching in Australia, I had a Korean-Australian student in one of my undergraduate classes who sounded like most of the other students in my class, like…
Yoshiko Nakano's essay in Yomiuri Newspaper “Young people in Japan no longer want to go abroad.” This news reached me in Australia last year and formed part of the background…
This is the first in a series of blog posts about my experiences undertaking an ongoing research project. In this series I will be detailing some of the methodological challenges…
Earlier this term I intercepted a note my 7-year-old had written to her teacher: “Ger Ger Ger; Don’t be so rude.” She was objecting to a reading comprehension exercise about…
Michael Clyne with Emi Otsuji, the 2009 winner of the Michael Clyne Prize I was saddened this morning to read the Australian Linguistics Society’s news about Michael Clyne’s passing! Australian…
Commemorative stamp, German Federal Post, 1989: 300 years French School Berlin I’ve been teaching about bilingualism for more than a decade and when I speak about bilingual education and dual-immersion…
Space challenged Shinjuku, Tokyo (September 2010): Photo by Kimie Takahashi Tokyo is getting more and more linguistically diverse every time I go back there. During this trip, I was really…
Lotus Pond (part of Shinobazu Pond) in Ueno Park “There are so many stupid Japanese women around, huh? Many Westerners are coming to our country and the stupid women love…
I had been led to believe that Japan was a very monolingual place interspersed with Engrish ads, commercial signage and T-shirts. Well, that has turned out to be just another…