I have always been fascinated by the human voice. When you speak on the phone with a stranger, it can reveal so much about them. You can often tell whether it’s a man or a woman, estimate their age, and sense their attitudes and emotional state — whether they sound polite, distant, nervous, happy, or sad.

And, importantly, you can almost immediately recognize whether the person speaking has a foreign accent or not. Pronunciation is never just about sounds: it reflects the social meanings attached to language.

A different kind of accent training

In my phonetics and phonology classes, I usually deal with a familiar scenario: students ask me how they can improve their pronunciation in their L2 Italian or L2 Spanish and sound more “natural”. How to avoid a foreign accent — or at least minimize it.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with having a foreign accent. It simply shows that you grew up speaking another language. But many students want to refine their pronunciation, and I am a happy companion on that journey.

This time, however, it was different. A friend asked me to do a favor for one of her friends — an actress. In her new movie production, she had to play a German woman speaking Spanish with a strong German accent.

She told me: “Well, I know I have to do the German R sound, which is very different from Spanish. But I feel there’s more.”

Exactly. There are even native Spanish speakers who have difficulty pronouncing the rolled R — this phenomenon has a name: «rhotacism» or «the French R» (la erre francesa). But even speakers who don’t “roll” the R can still sound perfectly native-like.

(Image credit: Andrea Pešková)

So, what is it all about?

What makes Spanish sound German

Let’s take a closer look at some of the most distinctive features of “German” Spanish.

German speakers don’t only struggle with R sounds. One of the most noticeable characteristics is the aspiration of the voiceless stops /p t k/: pala ‘shovel’ may sound like [ˈp^hala], tono ‘tone’ like [ˈt^hono], and cosa ‘thing’ like [ˈk^hosa]. The aspiration should remain subtle and light — otherwise it may begin to sound more “English” than “German”.

Another typical feature is that the final [o] may sound overly close, almost like [u], turning perro ‘dog’ or loco ‘crazy’ into perru or locu in Spanish ears.

German speakers also tend to pronounce the Spanish approximants [β ð ɣ] between vowels as full stops, so la bodega ‘the wine cellar’ [laβoˈðeɣa] becomes something like [laboˈdeɡa] rather than the softer Spanish version.

They also often insert a glottal stop before vowel-initial syllables or words. El auto ‘the car’ becomes [elˈʔawto], and otra ‘other’ turns into [ˈʔotɾa]. This gives Spanish a slightly “choppy”, segmented rhythm.

Orthographic influence plays its role too. Speakers may pronounce the normally silent h, voice the s between vowels as z (casa ‘house’ [ˈkaza]), or mispronounce <eu> as [ɔɪ̯] instead of [ew]. And the infinitive ending -er may shift towards something like -a in the word comer [komˈea] ‘to eat’.

Prosody contributes as well. Stressed open syllables may sound unusually long, unstressed vowels may be reduced, stress placement may shift, and intonation patterns often diverge. For example, the end of neutral statements may sound exaggeratedly emphasized, lacking the subtle falling contour typical of Spanish.

Making the accent sound real

We worked on all these phonetic features, and my student did an excellent job. We wanted the accent to sound authentic and recognizable, but never exaggerated or comical.

While we focused mainly on pronunciation, I also pointed out that in real-life speech, grammatical transfer phenomena often accompany a foreign accent. In many movies, accented speech is portrayed with perfect grammar but an overdone pronunciation, which feels unnatural.

In reality, small deviations are common in second-language speech — for instance, occasional omission of articles (Me gusta pizza ‘I like pizza’ instead of Me gusta la pizza ‘I like the pizza’), overuse of subject pronouns that are usually dropped in Spanish, or transfer of verbal tense and aspect.

These subtle grammatical influences, combined with pronunciation, shape the overall impression of an accent and make speech sound more believable.

From correction to creation

What we both found most fascinating in this experience was the shift in perspective: instead of trying to eliminate a foreign accent, we tried to recreate one. It was a playful reminder that accents are not errors but expressions of our identity, multilingual experience and authenticity.

We often see how accent becomes a marker of belonging — or of difference.

But when we learn to listen closely, every accent tells a fascinating story about who we are, where we come from, and the paths our languages have taken.

Additional resources

If you want to explore more accents in Spanish, visit this page that my students in Osnabrück (Germany) created: https://andrea-peskova.com/archivo-de-los-acentos-l2/. There you will find examples of Czech, Italian, Slovak, Greek, and American English accents in Spanish.

Cindy is passionate about inclusion, helping other educators develop leadership in EAL/D and cater for the academic and wellbeing needs of multilingual learners, including students from refugee backgrounds. She is an author of professional publications, served as President of the Association for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ATESOL) NSW and is Member of the Board of Directors of Primary English Teaching Association of Australia known as PETAA.

Cindy Valdez teaching in Cambodia (Image credit: Cindy Valdez via SBS)

Additional materials

• “They changed me”: Filipina educator on helping refugee students survive peace, SBS Filipino (2023)
• Valdez Adams, C. (2022) “Including” English as and Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) Learners in Your Classroom. Journal of Professional Learning 2

If you liked this episode, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript (to follow soon)

Have you ever listened to a language you don’t know and thought you recognized a word—only to realize later that you were completely mistaken? Our ears play tricks on us.

A while ago, I ran a small experiment with my German students. I played them two short sentences in Czech, my native language, and asked them to transcribe what they heard. The results were fascinating.

For example, about 90% of the forty students wrote down the Czech word malí [maliː] ‘small’ as mani [maniː]. To me, this seems puzzling—there is no n in the word! But for my students, the Czech l-sound somehow resembled the German n-sound. None of the Czech speakers I consulted ever had this impression.

This little classroom experiment shows something important: we don’t all hear sounds the same way. Our ears—or better said, our brains—are tuned by the language(s) we grow up with.

Why do we hear differently?

Image 1: Oscillogram and spectrogram of the Italian words papa ‘Pope’ and pappa ‘porridge’

Long before we speak, we are already great language users. Research shows that newborn babies can already distinguish speech sounds from noises. Even more surprisingly, they are able to recognize the rhythm of their native language from a non-native one before birth.

After birth, infants are surrounded daily by an enormous amount of speech input. Step by step, they build categories for the sounds of their native language. Up until around 8 to 12 months they can distinguish nearly all of the world’s speech sounds, even those that never appear in their environment.

A Japanese baby, for example, can hear the difference between r and l just as well as American or German babies can. But this ability does not last. As children grow, their brains focus on the categories that matter in their own language and ignore the rest—like the difference between r and l. This is why many Japanese adults often find it notoriously difficult to distinguish the two consonants in languages like English. What was once easy for the baby can become very challenging for the adult.

We perceive foreign languages through native filters

Learning the sound system of a language doesn’t stop with vowels and consonants. It also includes rhythm and intonation. And even for individual sounds like a or o, it’s not only about how you articulate them but also how long you hold them. This brings us to segmental quantity, or length. It refers to the use of duration (short vs. long) of vowels or consonants to distinguish lexical meaning. Quantity shows remarkable cross-linguistic variation.

The case of long consonants in Italian

Image 2: Soundproof cabins at the Free University of Berlin (left) and University of Helsinki (right)

What feels natural in one language may not exist in another. Take Italian. It belongs to just 3.3% of the world’s languages that distinguish short from long consonants (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996).

This contrast appears in more than 1,800 Italian words, such as papa /ˈpapa/ ‘Pope’ versus pappa /ˈpapːa/ ‘porridge’ (Image 1). To be understood and to speak well, learners must get long consonants (called geminates) right—although it can be very challenging (e.g., Altmann et al. 2012).

Cross-linguistic differences in learners

In our project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language”, we examine how Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish learners acquire this feature.

The selection of these languages is not random. They all handle consonant length differently. German, for example, has no consonant length but contrasts short and long vowels in stressed syllables (e.g., Stadt [ʃtat] ‘city’ vs. Staat [ʃtaːt] ‘state’). Czech, like German, distinguishes vowel length, but unlike German, it does so in both stressed and unstressed syllables (e.g., nosí [ˈnosiː] ‘(s/he) carries’ vs. nosy [ˈnosɪ] ‘noses’). Finnish is the most similar to Italian, since it has both vowel and consonant length (e.g., muta [ˈmutɑ] ‘mud’ vs. mutta [ˈmutːɑ] ‘but’). And finally, Spanish has no length contrasts at all.

This diversity allows us to test how a learner’s native language shapes the way they hear and produce length in Italian.

How good are learners at perceiving length in Italian?

In a laboratory setting (Image 2) and by means of a perception experiment, we tested and compared 20 Czech, 20 Finnish, 20 German, and 20 Spanish learners of Italian.

We used 45 short nonsense words that followed Italian spelling and sound rules but had no meaning. Each word had two versions, differing only in whether a consonant was short or long (e.g., sàpolo vs. sàppolo; milèta vs. millèta).

The words covered different consonants and stress positions and were recorded by a native Italian speaker. In every trial, participants had to answer the question: “Does the audio pair you hear belong to the same or different word?”

What we found

Image 3: Learner accuracy in perceiving Italian consonant length in comparison to native listeners

First language has great impact! Finnish learners, whose native system is closest to Italian, were the most accurate in hearing the difference between short and long consonants.

Czech learners followed, while German and Spanish learners struggled more (Image 3). Other factors also played a role. Learners heard contrasts more easily when the crucial sound appeared in stressed syllables, and some consonants were easier to notice than others.

Proficiency helped too—advanced learners did much better than beginners.

However, it is unexpected that the German group scored lower than the Spanish group—sometimes research simply surprises us!

Many factors could explain this, since every learner has their own story. Things like previous language experience, weekly study time, exposure to Italian, time spent in Italy, Italian friends, motivation, and personal talent can all play a role.

In our case, German learners had spent fewer hours per week learning Italian and had less experience studying or staying in Italy. Immersion—the experience of being surrounded by a language in real-life settings—seems a plausible factor behind their performance.

Why perception matters in language learning?

Why does pappa sometimes turn into papa in the ears of Italian learners? Because we all hear foreign languages through the features we are familiar with.

Our experiment showed that perception is difficult—but it can be improved. The key is to notice what is different and to train your ears. This means: Pronunciation training must start with perception (e.g., Colantoni et al. 2021).

In the end, learning a language is not just about new words—it’s about learning to hear differently.

References

Altmann, H.; Berger, I., & B. Braun (2012). Asymmetries in the perception of non-native consonantal and vocalic contrasts. Second Language Research 28(4), 387–413.
Colantoni, L., Escudero, P., Marrero-Aguiar, V., & J. Steele (2021). Evidence-based design principles for Spanish pronunciation teaching. Frontiers in Communication, 6, 639889.
Ladefoged, P., & I. Maddieson (1996). The sounds of the world’s languages. Oxford: Blackwell.

Acknowledgement

This blog post was written as part of the DFG-project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language: Czech, Finnish, German and Spanish learners in contrast”, funded by the German Research Foundation (Project number 521229214) and executed at the Free University of Berlin. Project website: https://italiangeminates-project.com/

In this video, I discuss the example of bilingual signage in Nanning City, China. I ask who recognises the Zhuang language that’s found on some public signage there, and some of the varied responses which people – even Zhuang speakers – have had to it. Then I explain what this case study can tell us about multilingual signage policies more generally, and about language policy research. I hope this helps you teach Linguistics, or learn Linguistics, or even do your own ‘linguistic landscape’ research!

Open embedded content from YouTube

Related resources:

Grey, A. (2022). ‘How Standard Zhuang has Met with Market Forces’. Chapter 8 in Nicola McLelland and Hui Zhao (eds) Language Standardization and Language Variation in Multilingual Contexts: Asian Perspectives (#171, Multilingual Matters series). De Gruyter, pp163-182. (Full text available)

Grey, A. (2024) ‘Using A Lived Linguistic Landscape Approach for Socio-Legal Insight’, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies’ Methodological Musings Blog, Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.

‘Language rights in a changing China: Brynn Quick in Conversation with Alexandra Grey’ Language on the Move Podcast, New Books Network (1 January 2025)

Transcript:

Alex and Kristen in the studio, 2024

[Opening screen shows text: Making Zhuang Language Visible, by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, 2024.]

[Narrated by Alexandra Grey:] In 2004, the local government in Nanning, a city in South China, began adding the Zhuang language to street-name signage to preserve Zhuang cultural heritage. The Zhuang language, which originated thousands of years ago in this region, had largely been overshadowed by Putonghua, a standard form of Mandarin Chinese and the official language of China.

However, the public response to this initiative, including from Zhuang speakers, was not as positive as intended. In this video, I will share insights from my research in the 2010s on Zhuang language policy, including a case study of its implementation and reception in Nanning.

China officially recognises the minority group called the Zhuangzu, who have traditionally lived in south-central China, particularly in the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region, where Nanning is the capital. There are millions of Zhuang speakers, but China has such a large national population that these Zhuang speakers constitute only a small minority.

The Zhuang language can hardly be read even by Zhuang speakers themselves. This is due to the inaccessibility of the Zhuang script; most people do not have access to formal or even informal ways of learning to read Zhuang. This has significant implications for the region’s linguistic landscape.

My research aimed to understand the impact of local language policy. I met with 63 Zhuang community leaders and Zhuang speakers for interviews, including interviews in which we walked and talked through the linguistic landscapes. I also found and analysed laws and policies about Zhuang language, from the national constitution down to local regulations. One important set of regulations were interim provisions introduced in 2004 and formalised in 2013 through which the local government added Zhuang script to street signs in Nanning.

This script these street names used was a Romanised version of Zhuang using the Latin alphabet, and it was always accompanied by Putonghua in both Chinese characters and its own alphabetic, Romanised form. The Zhuang script, which uses letters identical to English and also identical to Romanised Putonghua except for the additional letter ‘V’, was never displayed alone and was always in smaller font on the street name signs. In some cases, the signs contained additional information about nearby streets, but only in Putonghua.

In the broader linguistic landscape, these Zhuang street names were a visual whisper. Most public writing in Nanning is in Putonghua, with occasional English. Only a few public institutions, like the regional museum and library, have prominent bilingual signage that includes Zhuang. Otherwise, Zhuang is absent from common public texts such as road directions, commercial signage, transport maps, and safety notices.

From the community’s perspective, this new bilingual signage caused confusion. Newspaper reports from 2009 indicated Zhuang language was mistaken for misspelled Putonghua, leading to complaints. In my interviews, even some Zhuang speakers had been unaware of any Zhuang script in their environment, often mistaking it for English or Putonghua until it was pointed out to them, or until they started learning to read Zhuang as young adults, if they had that opportunity. Some were not aware that the Zhuang language could be written at all:

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

A university student interviewee: Because it is Pinyin script, no one pays it any regard, they can’t read it. In the recent past, people even thought it was English or [Putonghua] Pinyin, something of that nature, but it is not Pinyin, so they could not conceive of it being Zhuang script. 

Interviewer: Right. 

Another university student interviewee: To look at, it looks the same as English, I think.

In my article, I argue that the invisibility of the Zhuang script is partly because people need to learn to read it, even if they speak Zhuang. My research, which includes reports and census data in addition to the interviews, shows that access to learning Zhuang literacy is very low. Additionally, people are not accustomed to seeing Zhuang as a public language, or as a written language.

Why is this the case? Besides its limited presence in public spaces, Zhuang is also largely absent from educational settings and from the media. There was an irregular newspaper in Zhuang and a bilingual magazine in print when I began my study, but by the late 2010s, that magazine was only printed in Putonghua. This lack of exposure to written Zhuang in everyday life affects the recognition of written Zhuang, even when it is displayed in Nanning today.

Two key themes emerged from my participants’ reactions to Zhuang in the linguistic landscape. Some Zhuang people appreciated the Government’s effort to include and preserve their cultural heritage, but they doubted the policy’s effectiveness; since they couldn’t read the script themselves, they wondered how anyone else would learn anything about Zhuang language or culture from these bilingual signs. Others viewed the policy as tokenistic. They highlighted the lack of accessibility to the Zhuang script and the frequent errors in its display.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: But I’ve heard it’s often written wrongly.  

A community leader interviewee: That’s right, it’s often written wrong but no matter how erroneously those sorts of things are written there is no-one who can pick that out, because Guangxi people have no opportunity to receive a Zhuang script education; who can read and understand?

Another point of dissatisfaction was that the way Zhuang has been standardised, which has made it more similar to Han Chinese – more similar to Putonghua – which felt like a reminder of the marginalisation of Zhuang speaking people in Nanning.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Another student interviewee: This Zhuang writing, frankly, this grammar is in my view a really erroneous usage. It’s completely Hanified Zhuang language. Our Zhuang script must have as its goal opposing that, Guangxi’s so-called Standard Zhuang, which is not endorsed. It doesn’t stick to the grammar of our mother tongue, so we feel relatively disgusted.

For these readers, the bilingual Zhuang street names in the landscape were a visual reminder of other aspects of Zhuang language policy that they felt did not adequately support the language.

[Interview excerpt in Chinese dubbed in English by Kristen Martin]

Interviewer: So, when you see those signs, what do you think?

A community leader interviewee: It’s simply a joke, to use Chinese it’s “to hang up a sheep’s head and sell it as dog meat”, so it’s on the façade, but in their hearts there is no respect.

These perspectives suggest that efforts to include minority languages in public spaces can be perceived as futile or even offensive if the community cannot engage with the script. The Zhuang case study highlights the importance of accessibility and education, not only display, when policies are aiming to support minority languages, but it also highlights the importance of policy responding to the habits and expectations about that language which people will have already developed from childhood onwards from the way they experience the language being absent or devalued in all sorts of places and activities. People bring those habits and expectations and value structures with them into the linguistic landscape.

Broadening our perspective from Nanning to consider the policies for marginalised or minority languages in general, this case study challenges two common assumptions about display policies.

First, there’s the assumption that displaying a minority language increases its visibility in the linguistic landscape.

[Screen shows text: Is the Zhuang language on display in public actually visible as Zhuang?]

Second, there’s the belief that when a powerful entity, like the government, includes a minority language in public spaces, this symbolises the inclusion and valorisation of the speakers of that language, or more broadly the people who share that linguistic heritage.

[Screen shows text: Does the display of Zhuang language symbolise the inclusion of Zhuang speakers?]

These assumptions are foundational in linguistic landscape research, but this study encourages us to question them. The findings suggest that public display policies need to be integrated with other language policies to be effective. In the case of Zhuang, literacy and script policies undermined the efficacy of Zhuang language displays, making them almost invisible.

[Closing screen shows text:

Making Zhuang Language Visible, produced by Ed Media Team at the University of Technology Sydney, 2024.

Narrated by Dr Alexandra Grey.

Interviews dubbed by Kristen Martin.

Script by Alexandra Grey and Kristen Martin, based on Grey (2021) Full text

Thanks to Dr Laura Smith-Khan for content consultation.

Thanks to Wei Baocheng for singing his translation of the song ‘Gaeu Heux Faex’ into Zhuang, from Qiao Yu and Lei Zhengbang’s 藤缠树. Full rendition at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WO0-biO5xJI ]

A wonderful companion read to this episode is Distinguished Ingrid Piller’s Can we escape the textocalypse? Academic publishing as community building.

If you liked this episode, check out more resources on technology and language: Will technology make language rights obsolete?; the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us; and Are language technologies counterproductive to learning?

(Image credit: EduResearch Matters)

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added on February 21, 2025)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick and I’m a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Sue Ollerhead.

Sue grew up in multilingual South Africa, a country with 12 official languages, where she learned English, Afrikaans, Isizulu, Isikosa, and French at school and university. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Languages and Literacy Education and the Director of the Secondary Education Program at Macquarie University. Her expertise lies in English language and literacy learning and teaching in multicultural and multilingual education contexts.

Her research interests include translanguaging, multilingual pedagogies, literacy across the curriculum and oracy development in schools. Sue is currently Editor of TESOL in Context, the peer-reviewed journal of the Australian Council of TESOL Associations. She serves on the Executive Board of the English as a Medium of Instruction Centre, EMI, at Macquarie University.

Today, Sue and I are going to chat about an article that she’s recently written for the Australian Association for Research in Education, entitled, Teachers Truly Know Students and How They Learn, Does AI? We’ll discuss the emergence of AI platforms like ChatGPT and how they are affecting teacher training and student learning. Sue, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Ollerhead: Hi, Brynn. Lovely to be here today.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and about how you became an educator in the English as an additional language space?

Dr Ollerhead: Thanks, Brynn. As you said, I grew up in what you would call a super diverse country, South Africa, which is also very multilingual with 12 official languages. So as well as you said, I learned English, Afrikaans, Isizulu, Isikosa, and French at school.

I would also hear a plethora of language mixing or translanguaging by people all around me all the time. And when I finished university, I began my teaching career at a TESOL Medium Primary School and then went on to teach Zulu-speaking factory workers in South Africa’s Adult Migrant Literacy Program. I’ve also spent a large part of my working life teaching English and working in educational publishing in Sub-Saharan Africa and the United Kingdom.

So always within very multilingual and multi-cultural context. And I guess what surprised me when moving to Australia in my mid-30s, was the monolingualness of the schools and working environments that I was working in, which seemed to be at odds with what I knew to be a significant proportion of people living in Australia, speaking languages other than English at home. It was almost as though those became invisible in the public sphere and English seemed to dominate everything.

So, I guess that questioning of monolingual public spaces and how they include or exclude people has driven a lot of my research work. I think particularly how children who speak languages other than English at home can be excluded within classrooms that adopt an English only approach to learning. I guess the focus of my academic career over the past 10 to 15 years has always been to train students to become knowledgeable, reflective, and responsive teachers of learners from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Brynn: That’s amazing. You really did have a lot of multilingual experience. That’s so cool that you were able to be in an environment with so many different languages like that.

And I think that that must be really useful for you as an educator for not just students like primary or secondary school students, but now that you teach future teachers how to teach. So, let’s talk about this article that you’ve written called Teachers Truly Know Students and How They Learn, Does AI. So, this article discusses the use of AI and platforms like ChatGPT in this teacher training, which you do.

And one important part of learning how to teach is learning how to write effective lesson plans. I mean, I remember doing that for my own teacher training course that I went through when I became a TESOL educator as well. So, talk to us about, I guess, the importance of lesson plans and also about this emerging use of AI in lesson plan creation and what we know about the percentage of teachers who are actually using AI to create their lesson plans.

Dr Ollerhead: I think I heard a statistic the other day that teachers have, on average, about eight minutes to plan lessons over and above the other duties they have. So, we know that teacher workload is a very big issue. And there’s no surprise then that busy teachers are turning to GenAI models like ChatGPT or Perplexity to streamline lesson planning.

I certainly am no expert on AI, but it’s very much part of the landscape now in teacher education. And we know that for teachers, simply by entering prompts, like generate a three-lesson sequence on maybe something like Agricultural Innovation in Australia, they can quickly receive a detailed teaching program tailored to the lesson content, compete with learning outcomes, suggested resources, classroom management tips, and more. So, this is fantastic.

It represents a pragmatic solution to busy teachers, to overwhelming workloads. And it also explains why they’re being taken up quite readily by school teachers and also in places of higher education and teacher training environments. And as far as how many teachers use AI for lesson planning, I suppose a useful survey would be one that was run by the Australian Association of Independent Schools in 2023, where they reported over 70% of primary teachers and 80% of secondary teachers were using generative AI tools in their work.

And the lesson planning or learning design was rated as the top AI assisted task. Now, granted the survey dates back to August 2023, but one could assume that uptake is even greater by now. And in my work as a secondary teacher educator, my observations of AI use amongst teachers across government, independent and Catholic sectors generally support these findings.

Brynn: I can understand why, honestly, because, I mean, we are both educators and I get it, our workloads are huge, and especially if you think about teachers who, I guess, are working in the primary and the secondary school levels, they are not just working from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day. They are putting in so many more hours that people don’t actually see happening.

And then to have to create, not just create lesson plans, but I think maybe people don’t realize that various departments of education or different sectors require you to document these lesson plans in a very specific way and you need to map them onto learning outcomes and objectives and things like that.

So, it’s not just quote unquote creating a lesson plan. You have to really put a lot of effort into it. And if you’re saying that teachers are only getting something like eight minutes to do that, that’s unfathomable. That’s untenable.

Dr Ollerhead: Absolutely. Very, very overwhelming. And we know that lesson planning is really, really important.

A well-planned lesson is really fundamental to classroom management, to effective differentiation, to really, really considering the accessibility of the content. But it is a big task on top of, as you say, all the other tasks that teachers are having to fulfill on a daily basis.

Brynn: You just mentioned something called differentiation. And I think that this is a really important point to talk about. So, talk to us about this concept of differentiation in teaching.

What does it mean? And why is it a concept that teachers need to keep in mind when they’re planning their lessons?

Dr Ollerhead: The D word, yes, differentiation. It’s probably one of the most important and most challenging things to learn when training to become a teacher. And it really, Brynn, it really lies at the heart of Australian Professional Teaching Standard 1.3, which is “know students and how they learn”.

And especially knowing about how to differentiate for students from different cultural, linguistic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds. Differentiation in general refers to the practice of tailoring instruction to meet the varied learning profiles, backgrounds and abilities of each child or student in your class. And it starts with really understanding the diversity profile of your class.

So, for example, I said in the article that let’s say you teach a class where 95% of your class comes from a language background other than English. And you might think, well, that’s unrealistic. Actually, in Sydney, it really isn’t.

There are many areas where that would be the norm rather than the exception. In fact, in New South Wales, one in three students comes from a language background other than English. And in your class, your class comprises a mix of high achieving, gifted and talented individuals, some of whom are expert English users, while others might be newly arrived in Australia and they might have been assessed as emerging on the ELD Learning Progression, which is a tool that we use to measure where students are in their English language learning trajectory.

Now, these students need targeted language support to be able to even access the content of the curriculum. And let’s say your students come from various backgrounds. Some might be Aboriginal Australian students, others might come from countries as diverse as Sudan, China, Afghanistan, Bangladesh.

Some might even have spent three or more years in refugee camps before arriving in Australia, with no access to formal education at all. Others live in Sydney without their families. So, yeah, some are highly literate.

And while others have yet to master basic academic literacies and literacy skills in English. So given this diverse scenario in one class, and as I said, that is actually often the norm, rather than the exception. Differentiation can include things like the types of teaching strategies that you use.

So, using a variety of teaching strategies to engage students at different levels. So, for example, your highly proficient English users might work on extension activities that challenge their critical thinking. New arrivals who are still coming to grips with English as a medium of instruction could benefit from visual aids, graded texts, interactive group work to help them grasp key concepts.

We could also differentiate in terms of the assessment that we use. So, we might implement diverse assessment strategies that allow students to demonstrate their understanding in ways that align with their language proficiency and educational background. So, this might include allowing students to present their knowledge through oral projects or visual representations rather than traditional written assessments.

I always give the example of the water cycle. A child doesn’t necessarily come to the classroom not knowing anything about the water cycle. It’s just that they’re not able to understand it.

They’re not able to express that knowledge in English. So, giving them another mode through which to express that knowledge is really, really important. Of course, language support is very important as well.

So, for those students who are especially new arrivals, who are emergent on the EAL/D learner progression, we can provide targeted language support to scaffolding techniques that can involve using sentence starters, graphic organisers, active vocabulary acquisition activities, specifically designed for the content being taught. You know, in second year, we have a lot of technical vocabulary that is very specific to the field in which you’re teaching. So, for example, the word culture in science means something very different to the way it’s used in society and culture, for example.

And we actually need to think, well, this needs to be, these differences need to be made explicit for our learners, especially those who come from EAL/D backgrounds. But I guess one aspect that’s often overlooked is cultural differentiation. And this refers to modifying lesson content to be culturally relevant and accessible to all students.

So, it’s not just a sink or swim situation where we expect students to come to Australia and understand everything about Australia and its culture. What it means is integrating examples and materials into your lesson that reflect the backgrounds of your students and the various cultural contexts they come from and connecting your curriculum to their experiences. So, Robin Maloney and Leslie Harbin and Susan Oguro have written an amazing book that actually encourages teachers to teach for linguistic responsiveness.

And they encourage teachers to ask questions like, before you teach content, it’s really helpful to ask yourself questions such as, what are my own biases and blind spots related to the subject matter? What insights might my students have that I’m unaware of? So, for example, we know in maths, all countries have mathematical systems that are very particular to their cultural context.

And those can be very rich learning opportunities for all students in the classroom. Also important is what sensitivities could arise in discussions about this content with concerning values, knowledge and language. And I think most importantly, how can I teach this material in a culturally and linguistically responsive manner that promotes my students’ well-being and achievement?

So, do my students see themselves reflected in this content? Or is it presented in a very sort of Australian, monocultural, monolingual way? That is the challenge that I always set for my students to master as teachers who are going into contexts where they’re going to be teaching in very diverse settings.

Brynn: And what I’m hearing in that explanation is that teachers are not just planning this, you know, one lesson plan, saying, okay, everybody in the class is going to be able to do this skill and they’re all at this level. Because even if we had a classroom of monolingual English Australian born students, there is no classroom in which every single student is at the same level on particular skills or in particular classes. So, teachers are already having to do this work constantly, even if they’re in this sort of more monolingual, monocultural environment.

But what I’m hearing you say, and it’s true, is that our reality, as people who live in Sydney and the surrounding suburbs, is that we are becoming more and more and more multilingual, multicultural, and that this is just reality, that teachers are having to now have these additional thoughts and these additional considerations as they plan lesson plans. And the thing is, with this expectation of, well, can teachers just use AI to plan lesson plans? Now we have to think, well, can AI actually take these things into consideration?

Dr Ollerhead: That’s exactly right, Brynn. And it really gets to the heart of what we know about teaching. We know that teaching is not just a science.

It’s not just a process of knowing a series of principles, a series of methods and applying them. It’s actually also an art in terms of that element of, I always say that I think the most important material for success as a teacher is the ability to listen well. So, a teacher that’s in tune with their students will really by default be able to differentiate because in the moment they’re hearing, OK, I’m not sure if my class has actually been taken along with me in this lesson.

I think I might have lost them somewhere. So, I’m not going to ask the question, does everybody understand? Because of course, you’re going to get the answer, yes, of course.

Nobody wants to say they don’t understand. It’s really about the art of listening in, of asking the right questions. And then based on the answers you get to those questions, saying, OK, how can I tailor my delivery to respond to the needs of my learners?

So, I can do many things really, really well. And there’s no doubt there’s a role for it in lesson planning. But I think I guess what I was hoping to explore in that article is that there’s an essential element of listening that is very human, listening and responding with empathy in the moment contingently, that at the moment is still very human, I think.

And I would like to think that with the rise of AI, and we’ve seen it just completely overtake all our expectations, instead of trying to compete with AI, I think what we need to do is to get better at what we do, and that’s being human. And I think that very human empathetic element of listening to our students, finding out more about who they are, where they come from, how they’re feeling today, are they actually even in a space to be learning about equations when they’re still trying to understand the new culture that they found themselves in. So, I guess that’s my biggest hope is that we’re going to graduate a generation of teachers who are really checking in and attuned to the wonderful diversity we have in our classrooms.

Brynn: I think that the whole concept of differentiation in teachers is inherently human. And another part that you talk about in the article that I think is along the same lines is thinking about lesson plan creation in conjunction with the concept of the quote virtual school bag, which I love.

So, what is a virtual school bag? And why is it something that teachers need to think about when planning their lessons, especially when considering linguistic and cultural diversity within a classroom? And then there’s this question of can we expect AI to be able to consider a student’s virtual school bag?

Dr Ollerhead: I’m so glad you asked about that, because that to me has always been a really powerful visual metaphor. And that’s the concept of the virtual school bag comes from Pat Thompson and the work that Barbara Koma has done from the University of Queensland. They’ve done amazing work on looking at the rich cultural and linguistic resources that students from language backgrounds other than English come with to the classroom.

And they conceptualize it in the form of a visual metaphor. And they say that many children come to school with their virtual backpack that’s filled with things like cultural knowledge, geographical knowledge, practical knowledge of cultures and customs and skills from their own context. We call those funds of knowledge.

But what happens is that often they’re asked to leave that schoolbag at the classroom door and not to unpack it. And it’s only really the mainstream resources that are unpacked in the classroom. And so, they say it’s very dehumanizing if children are prevented from showing others what’s in their backpack, what they have to bring to learning, what they have to bring to the teacher.

You know, as teachers, we’re constant learners as well. So, I find that a very powerful metaphor. And you can only really discover what’s in students’ or children’s virtual backpack if you create a space in which all knowledges and cultures are valued in the classroom.

Now, AI is a tool, but it’s not an environment, it’s not a climate, it’s not an ecosystem where children feel safe. That is the teacher’s role. And so, I work a lot with a concept, a theory and a practice of full translanguaging.

And we call that a translanguaging space or a stance where the teacher does not have to be proficient in every single language of the classroom but makes space for the articulation of those languages and cultures throughout certain aspects of their teaching.

Brynn: I think that it gets to this point that I do think that we’ve been seeing more and more in education in general over the last even just decade, which is that we can’t expect every student in a classroom to fit into this one mould. I’m thinking of even just different neuro types or different learning styles, let alone linguistic and cultural backgrounds. And I do think that as a society, we’re getting better at making space for all of those differences.

But I think that we have to keep in mind this long educational tradition of almost trying to force the mainstream that we saw happening, you know, kind of since the beginning of education, really. You know, I’m thinking back to like one room schoolhouses and things like that. And we have to think, okay, we know that that did not work.

You know, we’ve, I mean, I’m a millennial, and that was still very much the education system that I grew up with, was trying to fit all of these kids into this one mould. And so, what I can almost hear is people saying, well, but if we’ve got these multilingual, multicultural students, shouldn’t they just have to learn English? Shouldn’t they just have to assimilate and fit into Australian culture?

But you mentioned the humanity of the teacher and the teacher really recognizing the humanity of the students. And, you know, some people might say that actually, you know, using AI to create these lesson plans, it’s fine, because AI can be more objective. It can almost, you know, force this mainstream.

So, tell me what you would say to those people that are saying, like, well, shouldn’t we all be sort of fitting into this one mould?

Dr Ollerhead: Yeah, that’s a great question, Brynn. And I think it kind of taps into some very powerful discourses at the moment about things like explicit teaching and, you know, being very clear about what the outcomes are for lessons. And there’s definitely merit to explicit teaching and making, you know, making visible the things that students need to achieve in a lesson.

What I want to emphasize is that including students’ cultures and language in the classroom is not antithetical to teaching them how to learn in English. In fact, what we find is that it supports their English learning. And you know why it does that?

It’s because it validates students’ identities. It sees what they come with as a strength and it gets them engaged in lesson content and lesson activities. If you come to school and you don’t see a place for yourself in learning, you’re going to disengage.

And we know that that is a big barrier to successful learning. So these things do not actually necessarily that they don’t preclude each other. So we need to remember that the complete understanding of a student’s unique cultural background, their personal experiences and their emotional needs is complex and often requires human empathy and insight.

And if you’re ever in a classroom, I’m really fortunate to work with some incredible teachers. And I see so many teachers who have been in the field for a very long time. They might not even call what they say differentiation, what they do as differentiation, but they do it instinctively because it’s second nature to them to just tap into where students are, to listen intently, to quickly in the moment tweak their instruction or their strategies to meet their students’ needs.

But we can’t expect new teachers to understand that. We can’t expect new teachers to have the wherewithal to immediately differentiate, especially because our classrooms are becoming more multicultural and multilingual, because of globalization, because of migration. But strangely enough in Australia, that hasn’t actually meant that our teaching practices have become attuned to that increasing diversity.

And it’s something we can’t shy away from. It’s actually something that needs to be dealt with not just in early childhood or primary or secondary, but also at universities. And we really need to, I guess, rethink this “it’s simpler if everybody learns English” because that just doesn’t cut it anymore. We know that it benefits everybody when we have plurality in classrooms where we can learn from each other, where there’s genuine intercultural sharing and understanding. And I guess what we want to do as teacher-trainers and teacher-educators is to say teaching is an ongoing learning process.

But if you understand from the outset that the key to being an effective teacher is actually exercising that empathy, exercising that insight, I think that sets you up for success and it certainly sets your learners up for success. We know that even though AI is amazing in the way that it can analyse and recommend resources related to a student’s virtual school bag, teachers still play a crucial role in ensuring that those resources are integrated in a way that is thoughtful and responsive to each student’s needs.

Brynn: I love that idea of not denying the fact that we have AI, AI is here, people are using it. I mean, this is a whole other episode, but we see students use it as well in their writing.

It’s not something that we can close our eyes to and say, “No, no, this doesn’t exist. Let’s just pretend like it’s 25 years ago.” So, I love that you’re acknowledging, yeah, it exists, it can be a tool for certain things, especially for those busy, busy teachers who have so much that they have to accomplish in such a short amount of time.

But I just really love this idea of fundamentally, teachers have to tap into their humanity and their empathy, and they have to recognize the humanity in their students in order to create a more meaningful and productive classroom, because it’s really only going to be a net positive when we have that integration of cultures and languages and students working together, because in our globalized world, that’s what they’re going to have to do when they’re grownups anyway, you know?

So, you said that you can see AI being used as a tool. Where do you see it going? Where do you think it’s heading in the education and teacher training sectors, for good or for bad?

Dr Ollerhead: Yeah, I mean, you’ve summarized it so well Brynn, but I think it’s, I guess my hope is, and again, I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball, and you know, there’ve just been such rapid changes within the last two years. But my hope is that it will become a symbiotic relationship, where, I mean, for sure, the educational sector will not simply adopt AI, it will embrace it as a catalyst for enhancement. But I think the key there is the word enhancement.

It augments things. It’s really amazing at generating big data sets. And you know, that’s what it does.

I don’t think we could ever hope to compete with that. But again, getting back to the hope that there can be a relationship between AI and education that is symbiotic. So I guess what I mean by that is sort of a balancing act where technology supports, not just supports, but actually amplifies the irreplaceable human qualities that drive effective teaching and learning.

And as AI continues to evolve, I’m excited about the possibilities it presents, I guess, for enriching education and empowering students and teachers. But I’m very much aware that we can’t deny that it’s here. But I’m also very wary of outsourcing crucial things like differentiation for control and linguistic diversity to AI, without actually understanding the fundamental knowledge on which we have to base our judicious use of lesson planning.

Brynn: I love that answer. I think that that’s a perfect summary of where we’re at and where, hopefully, we are headed. So, Sue, thank you so much for talking with me today, and thank you for being on the show.

Dr Ollerhead: It’s been a pleasure, Brynn. Thanks so much.

Brynn: And thank you for listening, everyone. If you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move Podcast, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends. Until next time.

Supermarket in Naples (Image credit: Marco Santello)

A key part of the experience of migration is not being in full control of one’s circumstances and doings. In this episode, Ingrid Piller speaks with Marco Santello about his research with Gambian migrants in Italy. The focus is on Marco’s recent article in Language in Society about migrant experiences of constraints and suffering.

This article explores one underestimated aspect of language in migration settings, namely the experience of not being in full control of circumstances and doings. Recent linguistic research often highlights transcendence of boundaries through migration and celebrates the fluidity and hybridity of multilingualism. By contrast, Santello argues that this discourse neglects migrants’ experiences of constraints and suffering. He sees limitations not just as structural inequalities resulting from macro-social pressures that migrants have to navigate, but focusses on the lived experience of constraint at the individual level.

The study is based on fieldwork with Lamin (pseudonym), a young man from Gambia in Italy. Instead of asking the conventional question how language learning unfolds, the researcher was interested to understand why Lamin had not learnt to speak Italian to any significant degree.

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Call for papers

Marco is currently guest-editing a special issues of Language and Intercultural Communication devoted to “Constrained Multilingualism.” The Call for Papers is available here (abstracts accepted until Nov 21, 2024)

Reference

Santello, M. (2024). Constraints, suffering, and surfacing repertoires among Gambian migrants in Italy. Language in Society, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404524000423

Related content

Piller, I. (2016). Portrait of a linguistic shirker. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/portrait-of-a-linguistic-shirker/
Piller, I. (2016). The real problem with linguistic shirkers. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/the-real-problem-with-linguistic-shirkers/

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 18/10/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller and I’m distinguished professor of applied linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Marco Santello.

Marco is a researcher in multilingualism at the University of Turin in Italy. Marco has a PhD from the University of Sydney in Australia and has held academic positions at the University of Warwick in the UK, at Monash University in Melbourne, and at the University of Leeds where he taught intercultural competence. Marco’s research interests revolve around the intersections between language and migration.

Welcome to the show, Marco.

Santello: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Piller: Marco, so your current research is with African migrants to Italy, and maybe you could start us off by telling us about your research project and the approach you’re taking.

Santello: Yes, that’s right. So, my research at the moment is with migrants from Africa to Italy, and in particular with the group of these migrants, those that come from Gambia, which is a small country in the west of Africa. So, it’s a country which is basically enclosed within Senegal.

It’s only three million people live there, more or less. And that’s a group of migrants that is quite common, actually, in Italy, that I was able to come across. And I thought of being interested in.

The way the project unfolded is due to, first of all, my reading of certain authors in particular, Michel Destot. And so, first of all, I did some kind of academic intellectual work, if you will, on his understanding of everyday life, action in everyday life, and how important are constraints for his understanding of creativity and action within the space of action, indeed. So, this kind of idea that very many people operate within a specific space of action, and don’t have quite the possibility of going beyond it in so many ways.

And on the other hand, migrants have always been at the centre of my attention. I’ve been a migrant myself, travelled, as you were saying before, and lived in different countries. And it’s also been challenging for me at times.

So that’s always been some kind of an interest. At the same time, I was, I always worked in, with multilingualism. And so, from an academic perspective, that’s what prompted me to do a PhD and then to work with migrants afterwards.

And but also in my personal life, I’m just simply dedicating some of my free time to volunteering for new migrants and that I’ve been doing.

Piller: Maybe you can tell us a bit about that intersection between your volunteering and what your volunteering involves and how this relates to your research project.

Santello: Yeah, that’s right. Listen, it’s, you know, I’m a researcher, but I’m also a person. So, the, it just makes me happy really to be surrounded by foreigners.

And it, I volunteer for a couple of NGOs. One of these provide shelter and support to migrants near Padua. And this is something that just I wanted to do and I started doing.

And I didn’t have much of an idea other than I can support them with their linguistic needs. And they were really, the NGOs, they were really telling me, you know, we would need this, would you be happy to do this? Would you be happy to do that?

For example, meeting one to one with people or supporting some small classes. And it’s something I simply did. That was it really.

But then when I thought about this, and this kind of idea that we don’t know for sure constraints that people experience as they migrate, immediately I thought about the possibility of, you know, getting in touch with the NGO and see if they had anything to do, if they thought that was a good idea. Because in my research, I always try to start from the needs that might be coming from the field. So, if of course, on one side, as I was saying, I’m doing some kind of, you know, reading as a researcher, at the same time, you know, what matters to me is really that somehow, I’m connected to people and they were really enthusiastic about it.

And at the very beginning, I remember, I wanted to focus on people who had just arrived. Because that was my idea, and that’s also the kind of people that I was meeting in these kinds of volunteering activities. But then they told me, why don’t you instead talk to these Gambians?

Because they’ve been in Italy for a much longer time, and then probably have much more to say. And honestly, they don’t speak much Italian, some of them. And we don’t know exactly what happens there.

And I also thought to myself, actually, it is very interesting as a question, like why after years, you are not able to easily have a conversation. Some of them, of course, do have conversations in Italian, some of them really don’t, they struggle. So it was an interesting question.

And that kind of linked back again to this kind of idea that we focus a lot on the resourcefulness of migrants, but sometimes there is just something that happens and it doesn’t seem to be working as well as perhaps we would hope for or think about. So that was the whole reason.

Piller: So, what did you actually find in terms of why is it that they take such a long time to learn Italian? I mean, it is a really interesting question. And particularly with Africans, I mean, we know that there is a lot of language learning going on on the continent and people are often very, very multilingual and sort of learn languages easily.

And then we suddenly find that once they come to the global north, to Europe, same in Australia. We’ve just seen that in this new research that we’ve published, Life in a New Language, that actually then all of a sudden learning English becomes really difficult in all these everyday language learning skills that they brought along no longer seem to work. So, what did you find?

Santello: Yeah, I mean, listen, with this particular study that I published called Constraints, suffering, and surfacing repertoires among Gambian migrants in Italy, what I found was that there’s a level where there’s an impossibility to practice spoken Italian because of lack of an environment which is conducive to it. So people working in jobs that don’t require much interaction, and also not having a circle of people with whom they can speak Italian. And that was one of the constraints.

Another constraint that people brought up is the lack of classroom instruction available to them. So, in the specific case of these migrants that I met, the NGO provides some support from volunteers. But it’s a kind of a support which is quite limited in terms of hours, for obvious reasons.

Whereas there might be other schools in other places. But what Lamin, the specific migrant, my main informant for the study reported, it was that he tried to call the local school, but nobody replied. So, he assumed there was no space for that to happen.

And that doesn’t mean of course, that he doesn’t speak any Italian or he can’t communicate at all. But that he feels the need or the willingness to advance in certain aspects. And Lam also showed me a notebook filled with exercises.

And you could see the effort that was there in terms of the learning. But from the spoken perspective, there was a kind of limitation that he was experiencing. So we really see, we touch concretely through his experiences, the range of constraints that he experiences, particularly in terms of the environment.

Piller: Can you tell us a bit more about Lamin? Just introduce him as a person?

Santello: Absolutely. So, Lamin is a migrant, of course it’s a pseudonym, a migrant who moved to Italy six years ago. So, we’re talking about a migrant who has been in the country for a long time.

He comes from Gambia, as you were saying, and he speaks English fluently. Now, I usually have these exchanges in English, and it was important for him, particularly that he could speak English with me, because of course he’s extremely proficient, so he’s able really to make himself understood. He also speaks Mandinka.

That’s his main language, as he describes it. But then he also speaks Wolof, and bits and pieces of other languages. indeed, that was one aspect that came up through my research, which was the progressive surfacing of linguistic repertoires and interactions.

So, what both me and him made apparent at the very beginning, in terms of the languages we speak, was not what actually unfolded during the exchanges. So, by talking about constraints, we were able to bring up bits and pieces of our repertoires. For example, for him, in Italy, it is very important to speak Wolof, because Wolof allows him to communicate also with Senegalese.

The Senegalese are very numerous in Italy, in a long-standing community, many more than the Gambians. Many people in Gambia speak Wolof as well. But at the very beginning, he did not make that apparent to me that he spoke Wolof.

Now you would think such an important language for his life would have been apparent to him straight away. But this is not surprising at all that bits and pieces of our experiences and our speaker would also become apparent in conversation. The same goes to me.

When I explained to him that I’ve lived in Norway, then immediately brought up the fact that he spoke a little bit of Swedish. So, he said a few sentences to me, which was very important because I wasn’t expecting myself, as I was saying, I’m a person, I’m a researcher. So, it immediately brought some kind of emotional reaction on me, very positive.

Hearing this language, I wasn’t expecting to hear it in the shelter in Padua. So yeah, so he’s a multilingual, that’s for sure. And he has lived in the south and in the centre of Italy, going through different camps and also living in the streets.

So as a homeless person and was now living in Padua in the shelter, working in a local factory and trying really to settle in Italy in many ways. So, and when I when I introduce myself to the group, he was immediately very, very keen on telling me about his experiences and so on and so forth.

So, another thing that I want to be an opportunity for him to practice Italian or not, not really?

In this specific case, I don’t think so. In this specific case, I think that for him, it was really important to make his experiences known. And one aspect also that came out of my study was the fact that he was also trying to convey to me that his experience is not like an isolated experience.

That is something that is shared among several migrants. For example, when he was talking about the fact that he arrived in Italy, but some people didn’t because he crossed the Mediterranean. And it’s a very dangerous road as a road and route, really.

As he was putting it, he was really kind of representing it as a collective experience because it is. It’s not just him. There are many, many people taking that boat and trying to cross the Mediterranean.

The same goes for being homeless. So, he was really talking about this in the plural. And conveying the idea that people suffer.

And that’s one of the aspects that I wanted really to include in my article because I sensed that something that he wanted me to communicate. And even though this suffering is not strictly related to language, I thought it was a very good idea to insert it in many ways as part of the data. Because it was, I felt that it was important for him.

And it was important for me to be faithful to what I was given. And so, whilst, of course, every time we do research, particularly this type of research where the researcher is highly involved because again, it’s a kind of ethnographic and it’s a participation of US researchers, he at the same time, for me, was important to do justice as much as possible to what he was giving me. So even though it was something that wasn’t related strictly to language, I wanted for it to be inserted in the research so that again, I did something that I thought was faithful to what he was telling me.

Piller: Yeah, I think we’re both sort of interested in how language actually shapes your life, and the lived experience of language learning and language as a part of life. So, I thought that was really, really important and just so interesting to also for him to have that desire. I mean, again, that we see that a lot in our research as well, that sometimes participants really have this expectation that if they speak to a researcher, we’ll be able to, I don’t know, bring their experiences to the proper authorities, to the attention of people who can actually make a difference in their lives, and I sometimes find that really hard to deal with actually, because I think there is a bit of an expectation that by talking to someone who is in a fairly privileged position as a researcher or who they perceive to be as influential, even if we aren’t really socially influential.

That has a positive aspect or a positive consequence for themselves, but really for the larger structures under which they labor. As you say, he often wanted to make explicit to you that this was not only his experience but that suffering is sort of an endemic condition, I guess. So how did you deal with that expectation?

Santello: Yeah, listen, I don’t tell him, I’m going to solve your problems, etc. I’m just telling him, we don’t know these things, we just don’t know. My job as a researcher is to try and understand them with your help.

What I’m doing is simply trying to understand what’s going on, but I don’t have any power to change policy or anything like this. On the other hand, of course, it is a way for him to take these experiences in another place so that other people are aware of, for example, the constraints he experienced, or the suffering, or the deprivation, and so on and so forth.

And of course, also the sheer fact that we could have this conversation in English, as I was saying to you, at the moment in Italy, my position is within English. And for him, this was very important. And so, I was really, and it was something really united us because just the possibility for him to articulate himself the way he wanted to was key.

And that again tells us something about the importance of the resourcefulness of migrants and of multilinguals more generally, in being able to use different linguistic resources to make meaning. However, as I was also trying to explain in my article, very often we focus on the resourcefulness only from below saying that there’s a kind of a freedom of fluidity, etc. And that somehow by being multilingual, almost automatically, if you will, we will be able to advance or at least to be oppositional to some kind of a given system.

Whereas I didn’t necessarily find that in my research. In the sense that it’s not that by being multilingual, you’re automatically trying to disrupt the system or by going against monolingual norms, etc. Sometimes none of that really happens.

Another thing I also was interested in is in how the constraints are part of the multilingualism that people experience. For example, something really surprising in a positive way that I found was that he was even welcoming some constraints.

For example, in his house, and most of them are from West Africa, and he can speak with them either in English, or in Wolof, or in Mandinka, and so on. But there’s one person who doesn’t speak any of these languages. And so, for him, the only way to speak with this guy is in Italian.

And initially, at the Wolof, that must be difficult, you’re not. But, and I asked him, is that okay for you to speak? And he said, yes, yes, because it’s the only way I can improve my Italian by speaking it.

So, the constraint then was not experienced as a dramatic predicament in that specific circumstance. He was even welcomed as an opportunity to be in a, to be able to speak another language which he finds useful. And in a situation where he’s, that he’s lacking in his daily life, which is the possibility to speak in Italian, because of what we were saying before, the isolation, the non-Italian speaking environment in general, and some many tasks that don’t require any circles of people that speak other languages that he speaks, which are very important, of course.

And he says that very often with the Senegalese, with the Gambians and so forth, and other people from the foreign parts of West Africa, that also speak languages related to Mandinka. But so, there’s a kind of a, it’s a complicated picture, where the constraints are not simply impediments that are lived as something to be overcoming on costs. There is also that aspect, of course, of something that is experienced as a problem, and that is actually something that’s blocking.

But at the same time, there are many more things that we can see happening in, for the understanding of the multilingualism.

Piller: Yeah, I mean, just let’s continue with this idea a bit more that constraints can also be opportunities, because I guess from the national European perspective, from the perspective of the Italian state, or from the majority population, there is this idea that if you don’t speak Italian, you’re hugely constrained, and that’s a real lack, and without discounting that it’s important to speak Italian and whatnot, I think you’re also drawing attention to the fact that there are other multilingual repertoires or other languages in Lamin’s repertoire that are really important and that open doors for him in some kinds of ways and enable his life in Italy. So maybe you can speak to that a bit more.

Santello: That’s right. Yeah. So, as we know, in many countries around the world, there’s this kind of sense that a successful migrant is a migrant who’s able to speak very fluently the national language, for example, the national languages.

This is something that we kind of take for granted. And we know how this is very problematic because it kind of assumes that everybody is a more is more a lingual, it assumes a native speaker standard, and so on and so forth. But actually, even if you think about Italy, people born and raised in Italy, we have plenty of people in Italy who don’t speak Italian fluently, maybe they understand, but then to speak it fluently.

For example, people who speak regional languages, dialects, etc., who are not really able to have an entire conversation, monolingual conversation in Italian. And nobody would even dream of telling them that they are not good citizens.

Or else, we often put this label on migrants who might not be entirely proficient the way we think they should be in Italian, for example. So, there’s a huge problem there. And indeed, when you look at people’s lives, you look at the reality of them living with multiple languages and using many of them to create social networks, to work, to shop, for example.

Now, Lamin, for example, talks about this, the importance of using Mandinka and Wolof, or particularly Wolof, in shops, when he was living in Naples, and when he was going around the Central Station, and there were African shops, he says, and there I would be speaking my language, he says. And that’s where I realized that he was talking about Wolof, not Mandinka. So, you can tell that in that specific circumstance, there is no need for him to necessarily to speak Italian.

Of course, Italian is important, because it allows you to do things. And also because, you know, the overall society has a specific idea of Italian, what confidence in Italian is, but that’s not the only side of the story. So, by shedding light on this multilingualism, we try to understand better how things work, simply and without having this kind of preconceived idea that either you speak Italian like a native, or you’re not very, very good as a migrant, right?

So that’s not what comes out of this. However, he really hopes to improve his Italian and to be able to attend classes. That’s something that he conveyed to me.

Remember that Lamin has been in Italy for six years. And to this day, he has problems, you know, having a full conversation in Italian. So, there’s, and his willingness is there.

And he’s hopeful that that can change, particularly when it comes to spoken language, because it’s important for him. But again, that doesn’t mean…

Piller: Are there any Italian speakers in his social networks? Or is Italian really just the language he needs to interact with institution?

Santello: Yeah, so he didn’t say to me that he has any Italian-speaking friends. And so, I don’t think he has a kind of, you know, interaction from that kind of perspective with Italian speakers. So that’s one side, you know, of the coin.

On the other hand, of course, you need Italian in Italy in many ways, also to interact not just with institutions, but sometimes but also with people around. And then in the future, you know, with potential employers and whatever. So, there’s a, he knows that’s useful, that’s for sure.

One thing that, for example, he mentions to me, which is also very interesting, is this kind of idea that he cannot rely fully on English in Italy. Whilst he was making this comparison to Scandinavian countries, for example, where the knowledge of English is much more widespread. And so, people like him who are proficient in English, can easily rely on English if they don’t speak, for example, Swedish or whatever.

And whereas in Italy, he says, that’s not exactly my experience. So, it also tells us something about people speaking in the country. Of course, people in Italy, lots of people speak Italian, but that doesn’t mean, what I’m trying to say is that English and knowledge of English, which sometimes is regarded as only the kind of way to advance your career, etc.

It actually can be a way to create an easier environment for newcomers. In the beginning, those who speak English, so that at least when they’re very proficient in Italian, it’s not there yet to be able to communicate what they want to communicate. You can resort to English.

That’s not exactly his experience. So, he was making this kind of comparison, which also tells me about his knowledge of different countries, different languages, different, this kind of idea that these people come with a boat and they are unaware where they are. That’s not what I’ve found at all.

Piller: Yeah. Let’s maybe just have a bit more of a look at the conceptual side of things a bit more, because one thing that I really enjoyed about your article was actually that going back a bit, typically in applied linguistics, we see individuals as really creative, and you see a lot of multilingual playfulness, and individual multilinguals enjoy their multilingualism, and on the other hand, when we talk about constraints, when we talk about inequality, we locate that on the macro level, or in terms of language policies, in terms of the state, in terms of institutions. I think you are trying to break down that dichotomy a bit, that the constraints are macro, and the playfulness and the joy is individual.

Maybe you can explain that a bit more.

Santello: That’s right. Yeah. It’s exactly the way you explained it to us.

Basically, often what we see is that there are some societal structures that impede multilingualism, and that really is something that comes from above, and it constrains people, and from below instead, there will be a freedom and fluidity, a playfulness. Some authors talked about unbridled use. But actually, what we see happening among these individuals is something a bit more subtle than this.

It’s not simply social structures that push down, and that are, and these kinds of multilinguals would fight against it somehow. Nor is something at the bottom level unbridled use, where simply linguistic resources are used without any problem, and that they just show creativity and so forth. It doesn’t work like that in this kind of experiences.

What you see is something much more subtle. For example, one aspect which comes out of my research, is this kind of constraints that have to do with their personal life. It’s not only societal structures, for example, you know, something that you experience yourself, you know, for example, in another piece of research, you know, the family member passes away, and that actually sets in motion a change in your investment in language or investment in certain things that you need to do for your migration.

So, and that doesn’t mean that it’s not entangled with some other societal processes, it’s also a personal component. There’s also, you know, the lived experience of people in interaction, the social networks, the people helping each other or not helping each other, and so on and so forth. And so surely, we don’t see at a base level, the simple and unbridled use where people, you know, enjoy their multilingual resources, and this is somehow, you know, they will be unrestrained if they could.

It’s not exactly like that. And there are many more aspects that we need to consider. For example, indeed, what we were saying before, this kind of idea that certain constraints actually can function as a way to exercise certain linguistic skills that the person wants to exercise.

And so, it’s not the unbridled use in that case that becomes relevant, that becomes powerful, that becomes meaningful, but it is indeed a constraint which is inhabited. This is what Destot used to say. People inhabit what is given.

And what they inhabit, what is given, doesn’t mean that they adapt to it. It means that they engage with it in a creative way. So there’s a lot of…

Destot never talks about being passive. Quite the opposite. He says there’s a way to be active, to be proactive, to be able to be creative, which isn’t against the system.

It is within a system where people kind of manage to find a way to be creative, to be able to communicate within a given system. Which was sometimes there is no solution to that at the very stage. There is no way that you can all of a sudden speak Italian, all of a sudden doesn’t work like that, right?

And so that’s what I was interested in. There’s a level of creativity, of resourcefulness, which happens within a space of action. And that specific moment that migrant is not trying to go against anything really, she’s just trying to get things done and communicate within that specific space of action.

And we can see a lot of multilingualism there, a lot of creativity, a lot of things being done. So again, this kind of idea of a dichotomy between strong macro structures that oppress us and something at the bottom which is just free and fluid, I think it’s much more complicated than that. That’s what I found.

Piller: Yeah, so true. Look, Marco, before we go, what’s next for your research? Where will you take this project?

Santello: Yeah, so I’m really trying to expand on the things that I’ve been working on. And one thing that, for example, I would like to expand on is a kind of idea of how are constraints related to this kind of educational deprivation, and how is this educational deprivation actually being counterbalanced by other activities? So, for example, things that don’t happen in the classroom, where people, for example, you were saying about the multilingualism of Africans, you know, how is that ability to learn languages in the street, for example?

So many interacting with people inside the classroom. How can this become resourceful for them in the migratory settings? So, in the host country, in this specific case, how is that worked out?

So how is the constraint inhabited by interacting with people when classes are not provided, for example, because it’s not a situation, it’s not conditioned or you yourself are experiencing certain problems, et cetera. So that’s something I’m working on at the moment. Very excited about it.

Piller: Oh, that’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, we’ve also found that even where classes are provided, they sometimes can be so unsuitable.

And so, you know, besides the needs of the learners, that actually the classes can become another barrier to language learning. So, look, good luck with that. Thank you so much for the conversation, Marco.

Santello: Thank you very much. Grazie.

Piller: Grazie mille and thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time.

“Giant Head” installation at the Gentle Monster store at Sydney Airport

One of the goals of graduate education is to empower students to reach their academic and professional goals by developing their communication skills. For example, one of the learning outcomes of a class I teach in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University is to enable students to “communicate advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.”

To achieve that learning outcome, students undertake a series of writing tasks throughout the semester on a public forum, namely right here on Language on the Move.

Although moderating around a thousand comments per semester is a huge workload, I’ve always enjoyed this task. The series of responses to writing prompts (aka comments on blog posts) allows me to learn more about my students’ backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. It is also rewarding to see that student comments become more sophisticated and engaged over the course of the semester and that their confidence in their academic writing increases.

Has ChatGPT ruined writing practice?

While I used to enjoy supporting students to develop their communication skills in this way, the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the rapid adoption of other generative AI platforms since then has changed things.

A not insignificant number of students now submit machine-generated writing tasks, and I’m saddled with the additional task of catching out these cheaters.

Submitting machine-generated text obviously has no learning benefits. Therefore, my task descriptions and syllabi now contain an explicit prohibition against the use generative AI:

Use of generative AI is prohibited
Your response must be your own work, and you are not allowed to post machine-generated text. Use of machine-generated text in this or any other unit tasks defies the point of learning. It is also dishonest and a waste of your time and my time. […] If I suspect you of having used generative AI to complete your writing task, your mark will automatically be 0.

In 2023, this prohibition took care of the problem, but in 2024 it no longer works. This is because machine writing has become virtually indistinguishable from bad human writing.

Machine writing and bad human writing now look the same

Most commentators note that machine-generated text is getting better. This may be true. What has received less attention is the fact that human writing is getting worse as people read less widely. Instead, more and more people seem to model their writing on the bland models of machines.

The feedback loop between reading and writing is breaking down.

The Internet is drowning in an ocean of poor writing, whether created by humans or machines – a phenomenon Matthew Kirschenbaumer has described as the looming “textocalypse:” “a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in any digital setting.”

Instead of developing their communication skills through audience-focussed practice, my students’ regular writing practice may now be contributing to this tsunami. If students use generative AI, it certainly no longer meets its stated aim – to practice communicating advanced knowledge and understanding of socially relevant aspects of language and culture contact to diverse audiences.

Where is the line between outsourcing learning to tech and using tech to support learning?

To my mind, the line was clear-cut: to use generative AI is to outsource learning to a machine and therefore pointless. I was not concerned about the use of other language technologies, such as spell checkers, auto-complete, grammar checkers, or auto-translate.

But then I received this student inquiry, which I am reproducing here with the student’s permission:

I am writing to inquire if using the grammar check program for writing tasks is also prohibited.
I’ve been aware that AI generation is prohibited, and I did not use AI for my writing task. I [used all the assigned inputs], and I tried to organize ideas in my first language, then translated them by myself (without using any machine translator).
However, I always use a grammar check program, and sometimes, it suggests better words or expressions that I can adopt by clicking, as I am a paid user of it. I use it because I am unsure if my grammar is okay and understandable. I was wondering if this is also prohibited?

The easy answer to the query is that (automated) translation and grammar checking are allowed because they are not covered by the prohibition.

The more complicated question is whether these practices should be prohibited and, even if not strictly prohibited, whether they are advisable?

Dear reader, I need your input!

Translation as a bridge to English writing?

Let’s start with translation as a form of writing practice. The inputs for the task that triggered this question (Chapter 3 of Life in a New Language, and Language on the Move podcast series about Life in a New Language) were all in English.

After having perused all these inputs in English to then draft the response – a short reflection on the job search experience of one of the participants – in another language is a lot of extra work. You have to process input in English, write in another language, and translate that output.

This extra work may become manageable if it is done by a machine. A generative AI tool could produce a summary of the input in no time. An auto-translate tool could translate the summaries into the other language, again in no time. The student then drafts their response in the other language.

It’s technically the student’s work. Or is it? And, more importantly, is this process developing their English writing and communication?

Grammar checkers, suggested phrasing, and auto-complete

Like the student who posed the question, most of my students are international students, most of whom are still developing their English language skills, at the same time that they are required to learn and perform through the medium of that language.

To avail themselves of all kinds of learning tools is important. I myself use the in-built spell-check, grammar-check, and auto-complete features of MS Word. However, I can evaluate the advice provided by these tools and readily reject it where it’s wrong or inconsistent with my intentions.

Judgement needed: Until recently, the MS Word auto-correct tool incorrectly suggested that the spelling of “in-principle” was “in-principal”

I worry that, for a learner using these tools, these nuances get lost. If the machine is perceived to be always right, language changes from something malleable to form and express our ideas into a right-or-wrong proposition.

Similarly, learning synonyms is important to improve one’s writing. To this day, I regularly look up synonyms when I write with the intent to find the best, the most concise, their clearest expression. However, looking up synonyms for an expression and evaluating the various options is different from receiving automated suggestions and accepting them. One seems like an active, critical form of learning and the other like a passive form of learning. The writer’s sense of ownership and autonomy is different in the two instances.

How best to use language technologies to develop academic literacies and communicative competence?

In sum, most use of language technologies for the kinds of learning tasks I have described here strikes me as counterproductive. Yet, I can also see its uses. Where is the line between using tech to support one’s learning and using tech to avoid doing the hard work of practice, the only way that leads to fluency?

How do you use tech in your university assignments and where do you draw the line? How would you deal with these dilemmas as a teacher?

International migration is at an all-time high as ever more people move across national borders for work or study, in search of refuge or adventure. Regardless of their motivations and whether they intend their moves to be temporary or permanent, all transnational migrants face the challenge of re-building their lives in a different cultural and linguistic context, far away from family and friends, and the everyday routines of their previous lives. Established populations in destination countries may treat migrants with benign neglect at best and outright hostility at worst.

How then do migrants make a new life?

To answer that question, Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

Today, Brynn chats with Loy Lising, one of the book’s six co-authors, with a focus on low-skilled migrants and how their experiences are shaped by monolingual ideologies.

Use promo code AAFLYG6 for a discount when you purchase from Oxford University Press.

Advance praise

“This volume breaks new ground by focusing on Doings: a group of diverse researchers collaboratively doing close listening and looking over 20 years, as adult immigrants to Australia engage in doing life, things, words, family, and work in a new language. The result is not only new understandings of the participants’ self-making, but also the making of a new research trajectory that focuses not simply on the learning of a language, but on humanity doing life in language.” (Ofelia García, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)

“This is a moving book that represents the voices of migrants on their challenges and successes across different kinds of boundaries. It embodies impersonal structural and geopolitical pressures as negotiated in the dreams and aspirations of migrants. The authors share findings from decades-long separate research projects to develop richer insights, as a model for data sharing and ethical research.” (Suresh Canagarajah, Pennsylvania State University)

Related reference

Lising, L. (2024). Multilingual mindset: A necessary concept for fostering inclusive multilingualism in migrant societies. AILA Review

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added 05/08/2024)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick and I’m a PhD candidate at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Today’s episode is part of a series devoted to Life in a New Language.

Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, I’ll chat to each of the co-authors about their perspectives.

Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity-making in a new context are explored.

The research uncovers significant hardship, but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements. My guest today is Dr. Loy Lising.

Dr. Lising is a senior lecturer in linguistics at Macquarie University, as well as a senior fellow with the Higher Education Academy. She’s a member of the International Advisory Panel for Migration Linguistics Unit at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. She served as program director for the Department of Linguistics Master of Cross-Cultural Communication Program at the University of Sydney from 2012 to 2014.

In 2015, she was awarded the Andrew Gonzales Distinguished Professorial Chair in Linguistics and Language Education by the Linguistic Society of the Philippines. Loy is a sociolinguist whose research interests lie at the intersection of multilingualism and migration. Employing both ethnographic and corpus approaches, she investigates the enduring consequences of this convergence on key issues such as heritage language maintenance, the evolving variation in languages in society, induced by language context situations between diasporic communities and mainstream society, and the de facto multilingual practices present on the ground in a society that continues to hold the monolingual ideal.

Welcome to the show, Loy. We’re really excited to have you here today.

Dr. Lising: Thank you, Brynn. I’m really excited to be here and thanks for having me.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you and your co-authors got the idea for Life in a New Language?

Dr. Lising: So to begin, I am an Australian linguist of Filipino, particularly Cebuano heritage. And so, the kind of work I do pay homage to those dual identities. My family and I migrated to Australia in 2004.

And in 2005, I started research work in a unit that was then called the National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research. And in 2007, that unit ceased to exist and was replaced by a smaller unit called Adult Migrant English Program Research Centre for which Ingrid became the centre director. And so, in 2008 and 2009, Ingrid hired me as a postdoc to coordinate this national longitudinal multi-sided research project that was funded by the Australian government department called at that time Department of Immigration and Citizenship, which we now know as Department of Home Affairs.

And the focus of this project was on language training and settlement success of migrants to Australia. So, in that study, we shadowed around 150 migrants to Australia across different states and territories. And in that role is where I also met the other authors.

Emily joined from Sydney Uni as Ingrid’s PhD student, and then Donna, Vera and Shiva then started their PhD journey with Ingrid as well. So, I would say that that particular research project was for me transformative and really laid the groundwork for my future research work in trying to understand how living a life in a new country is impacted by how migrants also need to learn a new language or at least a new way of doing and performing a different kind of English to the one they have already and also to their language learning. So, I think our work in the center gave the five of us who were supervised by Ingrid an opportunity to catch her vision and passion for this kind of research focus.

So really Ingrid is the driving force behind this book and her work on this started in 2001 when she was at Sydney Uni and investigated the success and failure in second language learning. And so having supervised the four other authors and also supervised my own research in 2009, really I would say was the starting point of the idea for this book.

Brynn: It sounds like it was a really natural progression for all of you to come together and work on this together. And what’s interesting about Life in a New Language is that this book is all about this reuse of ethnographic data. And as you said, you and the other co-authors each had your own projects that you were working on, but then in order to create this book, you brought it all together.

Can you tell us about the original research project that your contribution is based on?

Dr. Lising: So my original research project, which my contribution to this book was drawn from was a research study funded by Macquarie University new staff grant in 2009. And so, this was at the end of the AMAPRC first phase research project that I was the research manager for. And so, this MQNS project shadowed Filipino-skilled migrants to Australia on a temporary long-stay business visa, or as it was popularly known then, 457 visa.

And 457 visa had eight streams, and the one that my participants were under was the labour agreement stream. This visa was introduced in 1996, and it was intended to attract workers to Australia in areas where there are shortages. And so, the temporary visa is limited to four years with the possibility of extension if the work contract is renewed, and then also they can have the possibility of applying for permanent residency.

So Ingrid supervised that project, and it was modelled in design and reproach, I guess, on the AMAP national project that we worked on together. It was qualitative investigation through rapid multi-sided ethnography, shadowing three cohorts of Filipino skilled workers, abattoir workers, prefabricated home workers that included both IT professionals and carpenters, making prefab harms for the mining companies and also nurses. And they were situated across three states, so Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales.

So that’s the work on which my contribution to this book has been derived from.

Brynn: And you just mentioned that the participants that you were shadowing were doing quite different types of work, the abattoir workers, the nurses and the skilled labourers.

Dr. Lising: Yeah, prefabricated home workers that included the carpenters who actually built the homes and then the IIT professionals that I guess made the homes technology ready.

Brynn: So, it’s quite different work. However, what you really looked at in your part of your work and that the other authors looked at as well was this idea of finding work in Australia once you’ve come to settle. Can you tell us about what you found about your participants’ employment trajectories in these very different fields?

Dr. Lising: The Filipino skilled workers that I interviewed and shadowed were quite different to some of the participants that we have reanalysed for this book in that they came to Australia already having a job because the temporary long-stay business visa required for them to be identified for a specific work shortage. And so, in that sense, there wasn’t a lot of grief in terms of actually finding work. What there was grief about, however, was in their experiences once they came and did their part.

And that was largely to do with one of the main findings that we have in this book, and that is to do with this notion of linguistic proficiency. And so, for example, the abattoir workers, it’s a no-brainer to note that most people who go into abattoir work, other than those who really love that kind of work, would be coming from an educational trajectory where, you know, they have low education, okay? And that’s why they end up doing abattoir work.

And so, the Filipino workers that were hired for this work were hired by an Australian manager who actually went to the Philippines and observed their knife skills. And so “at the time of, for this particular cohort of abattoir workers, at the time of their employment, English language requirement wasn’t actually on the table. And so, so long as they had an offer of work, that was fine.

And so, the grief for them was when they came and the policy changed, and there was then an English language requirement attached to the renewal of their contract and of course permanent residency. And the requirement for those were pegged on an IELTS, so an International English Language Testing System band score of about five. Now, speaking, listening are perhaps things that you can grow to learn in doing work and life in a predominantly English-speaking country, but literacy skills of writing and reading are totally a different skill set that you need to have a sufficient education to be able to improve on those and be able to meet the band score that you need.

So it was that. And then there was also the issue of doing work in a workplace context that were quite intolerant of multilingual practices. And so, I’ve actually, based on that original research study in 2009, I’ve published in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, this paper that I entitled, Speak English, Social Acceleration and Language Learning in the Workplace.

And so, the analytical lens I use there is the notion of speed at work. And so, we have this expectation that when people do come and they don’t have a lot of English, they’ll learn it at work anyway. But you know, abattoir workers work in a conveyor belt-like system.

And so, if they keep talking, they’re going to be behind with their work. But then again, this intolerance of multilingual practices also kind of, or just talk in general while working, really limited their ability to practice their English anyway. But equally challenging for them was this limitation they felt in having this comfort conversations with co-nationals in their own language, because colleagues who only spoke English would actually be suspicious of them.

And often they are told off for speaking other languages.

Brynn: It feels like a real damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation, where they don’t have the literal time during their workday to quote unquote improve their English. But then when they do try to communicate using the resources that they have, maybe the language that they came to Australia with, they’re told not to.

And to me, I remember when I read that part of the book, the first thing that I thought of was nail salon technicians, because I feel like that is the same thing that I hear, especially monolingual English speakers say when they go to a nail salon, and they’ll hear, usually the women that work there will be speaking Vietnamese or sometimes Thai, and so these monolingual English speakers will be saying, I bet they’re talking about me. I bet they’re talking about how bad my feet are, things like that. And it made me wonder if that’s what was potentially happening in the abattoir as well, was that these English speakers were thinking, well, if they’re speaking in a language that I don’t understand, they must be talking about me.

Brynn: Certainly, so one of the participants from that original work that’s featured in this book, Ellen, she’s real aspiration to improve her English. She only finished high school and she has this very accented English, but she understood that if she just kept speaking English, she will become better. But also, I think coupled with that was she one day was pulled aside by the manager and he told her that he gets really embarrassed when other people are speaking their language because he’s not sure what they’re talking about.

So, I think, yeah, I think and that is a monolingual mindset. Absolutely. So, I’ve just written and actually, incidentally, it’s come out just on Friday, this paper on the multilingual mindset.

Brynn: And I’m glad that you’re mentioning this because I did do an episode a while back talking about the monolingual mindset. And until Friday, we didn’t really have anything to compare that to. And now you’ve written about it.

Dr. Lising: I was very excited about that. And I’m very proud of the work. So, it’s entitled Multilingual Mindset, A Necessary Concept for Fostering Inclusive Multilingualism in Migrant Societies.

And it’s in IELA Review and it’s a special issue that’s actually time for 60th IELA Conference in Kuala Lumpur in August, where Ingrid is one of keynote speakers. Yeah. So, in that, I talk about how, you know, the multilingual mindset refers to a way of thinking about languages that is mindful and expectant of variation in not just language proficiency, but also variation in language repertoire and variation in language practices.

So, if we have a shift for a moment that we go to work and we don’t have an expectation that everybody should just be speaking my language so that I can understand what they’re all saying, because otherwise they can be talking about me, but rather that if we step back for a moment and actually think, well, what is a language for? And the language is you has many functions, right? Not only does it index who you are and your identity, you use it for various purposes, and one of which is to connect with “co-nationals, your banter, to exchange humour for levity and for, you know, just to kind of, you know, have fun.

There’s no point in translating those jokes just for the sake of the English speaker who might think that they’re talking about them. And so, yeah, so I think and I hope that people will read that because I think even if they don’t necessarily accept the argument I put forward, I think it’s based on multilingual reality that we live in. But yet we’re still holding on to this monolingual ideal that yes, we have over 400 languages in Australia, but let’s just speak English anyway.

Because if we entertain this notion that it’s perfectly fine for people to operate in the languages that they have, I mean, obviously it’s different when they’re talking to somebody who’s speaking English and achieving a different communicative purpose, right? I’m not talking about that. I’m just talking about the other uses of languages.

And so, this notion of multilingual mindset allows us to kind of step back and reconsider, okay, well, these are the other things that language or languages are achieving.

Brynn: Yeah. In this section that you contributed especially, you really do get that feeling as you read that it just felt really bad for these workers, especially the ones in the abattoir situation, to be told, no, you can’t speak this language in order to achieve some semblance of comfort during the day, or connection or something like that.

In your opinion, what can we do to make things easier for new migrants, especially in this context where maybe they are doing this more quote unquote unskilled labour, which is silly to me because it sounds like it’s quite skilled, but especially for these people who come and work these long hours, or who are not able to speak their own languages, what can we do to make things easier for them?

Dr. Lising: If I could just pivot back to the main three findings, particularly for that chapter on work that we have, and so the three common themes there are in the experiences of our participants relative to Australian work experience, linguistic proficiency and educational qualification. If I can just revisit each and then I’ll get to the answer to your question. So, in terms of Australian work experience, one of the common things we found is that people are asked Australian work experience before work becomes readily available for them.

And it’s like a chicken and egg scenario where no one’s going to give me work, so how can I have a work experience so that I can actually work? And I guess I can answer your question. So, to that, for the migrants themselves, I find that the way to go around that is to actually do volunteer work.

Now that can only go for so long, right? Especially if you’re the breadwinner of the family, like in our book, Story Franklin, for example, who is a qualified English teacher, and he was allowed to do volunteer work at a Catholic school, but won’t be considered for paid work because his qualification is not recognized.

And so that’s the other thing, educational qualification, so not having your overseas qualification recognized, so not just in Franklin, but the story, for instance, of Vesna, who comes from Bulgaria, who’s a midwife, and, you know, as you know, we have such a shortage of midwives in Australia and a lot of other health workers, but the Overseas Qualifications Authority deemed her qualification insufficient for her to actually be working, and so here’s this woman who is done work on midwifery through four years of bachelor’s studies in Bulgaria and did 30 years of work experience in various countries, one of which is in United Arab Emirates, where she worked at a British hospital, and yet those things are not recognised.

I’ve asked permission and I have been given permission by my husband that I can share his story. So, my husband is a vet. So, he got his veterinary medicine from the University of the Philippines, but he obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in veterinary medicine from the University of Queensland.

And for a long time, for about 20 or so years, he served in an international multinational company as the technical services manager for Southeast Asia, and also started a similar work here in Australia. And that’s what brought us to Australia, and he can create vaccination programs for large swine farms, but he cannot write prescriptions because he is not recognized as a vet unless he studies all over again. Mind you, at some point in his career, he’s a recognized swine specialist, considered to be top 50 in the world and was always guest speaking everywhere.

So, you know, qualification, educational qualification. So to that, I guess, in answer to your question, I think we need to rethink the way that we think about the qualifications and we need to reassess our policy relative to recognizing these overseas qualifications in a way that provides new migrants clear and more accessible pathway on how to have their qualification recognized, right?

“In university, we have an RPL system, recognition of prior learning. And so applying the same principle, if you have similar bachelor’s degree, a tremendous amount of work experience, I mean, sure, you need to have some mechanism to ensure that, you know, there is standard quality of work that will be given, but not this just, you know, outright rejection of qualification, you know, so I think there needs to be some reassessment of that. And the other refining we have, of course, is the linguistic proficiency in terms of our participants in this book, both in terms of assured deficit in language and, you know, and kind of automatically assigned to an English class where they find themselves, you know, sitting in a room learning something that’s not really useful because they know English.

And also, I think that’s related to the non-recognition of varieties of other English varieties. And so, this, I think Ingrid has written about that with Hannah Torsch and Laura Smith-Khan, in terms of, you know, white English complex, this notion of a kind of prejudice against other kinds of Englishes as well that is non-white. So, this understanding again, and going back to what I talk about in the Multilingual Mindset paper of an expectation or variation in terms of language proficiency, right?

So, it’s that it’s really about just pay attention and accommodating the other person. And often it’s about perception. So, it’s kind of like if you like the other person, you’ll listen to them and you’ll understand.

But if you look at them and you have kind of an assumption of who they are or prejudice against who they are, and you’re bound to kind of make a judgment that you’re not going to understand them, even if they’re speaking the same language as you.

Brynn: And that’s what really comes through in the book, not just in the portion that you contributed, but with the other authors as well, is this idea of, okay, at the moment, we seem to only have one standard when it comes to either language or employment, and recognizing the recognition of prior learning, like what you talked about. This is the standard of English that you must meet, or this is the standard of employment or education that you must meet. And it feels like there’s no room for nuance, or to really look and judge on a case-by-case basis. And that just feels unattainable.

Dr. Lising: I can share another story that is actually quite raw, because I’m tutoring somebody at the moment who’s a religious person. And he’s here with his family from a war-torn country. And for him to advance to the next visa category that will allow him to qualify for a permanent residency application, he needs to achieve an IELTS band score of five overall and 4.5 in individual bands.

Brynn: And can you remind us, what is the highest band?

Dr. Lising: Nine. So, nine is the highest band that an English speaker who’s paying attention in the test can gain. And if they’re not paying attention, they will not even get that.

But the point of it is, as you were saying, there’s no opportunity here for new ones in accommodation. So, there are two kinds, perhaps there are more, but the two kinds of standard, and for those listening, I’m doing this in air quotes, tests that our government accepts are the IELTS test and the PTE test. And the PTE is computer based and it’s also computer marked.

And so, this person, and I’m sure he sat the test and was highest in IELTS speaking, 6.5, which is by the way, a university entry mark. But when he sat the PTE, he could only get 28 out of 30. And so there lies your real example, precisely of how there’s no nuance in this test.

And the standard against which I would assume his production in terms of speaking would have been judged against would be British speaker and American speaker. So, but yet in his work, he would speak in Arabic. That’s what his work requires him to do.

And he speaks French, but never mind that.

Brynn: But never mind, we’re not going to recognize all of these other proficiencies.

So, let’s shift gears a little bit into the actual writing of this book. So, I’ve spoken to each of your co-authors, minus one so far, and I’ve asked them all the same questions.

Now I’ll ask you, what was it like to co-author a monograph with five other people? Because as I said to one of your co-authors, I’ve done group projects before, they’re not my favourite. Was it like that or was it something different?

What did you do especially because so much of this took place during COVID? What were the ups and downs of this writing process?

Dr. Lising: I mean, group projects can be fun. And it can be fun if it’s in this way that I’m about to describe. So, for me, the experience of writing this book over the last five years among six of us, have been actually quite an enjoyable experience.

Yes, there are moments where it was hard work and we ensured that we crossed our T’s and dotted our I’s and we made sure all the facts that we have about all the participants. Because you’re talking about putting together a book based on 130 participants drawn from six projects over the last 20 years. So, there are, as you can imagine, there are real challenges there in ensuring quality of the outcome.

But I think that for me, there are two main reasons why there has been an enjoyable experience for me. And I think, judging by my observation of others for theirs as well, are that of friendship and trust. So, the six of us, as I’ve said to you at the beginning, have known each other since 2008.

I’ve known Ingrid since 2007. So that’s about 17 years of working together and we’re still working together. So, it’s gone well.

So, all these years, Ingrid has been constant in the way that she has guided us in our scholarly growth. And the great trust in the group, you know, because of that individual relationship, but also the collective relationship, and there’s a lot of, you know, respect. So, the great trust in the group has allowed us to work seemingly so seamlessly together.

Ingrid has been a glue that has bound us together. But I think knowing that we have the same passion, we have the same understanding on how things are to be done and how we interpret things, I think has really been quite enjoyable for me. I can’t really think of the down.

Maybe the only down was that a significant part of the five years in which we were working this book was COVID years. And so that meant that we had Zoom meet a lot of meetings.

Brynn: A lot of Zoom meetings. Everyone did.

Dr. Lising: That’s right. But we managed a few, you know, face to face, except for Em, who’s quite distant. I think that that relationship that has been there all along and knowing how each other works has been a real formula for the success in this group work.

Brynn: This is a good example of group work then. And I really do love how you all came together to do this because I just think that there needs to be more of this in academia. And I think that’s what is so wonderful about the Language on the Move research group is that it brings us all together.

We have friendships, we have academic relationships, and you don’t feel alone, especially for those of us who are just starting out in this academic process. We can ask questions; we can talk to those of you who know what you’re doing. And I think that many academics don’t get that relationship.

And that’s why I would encourage as many academics as possible to do this kind of collaboration and collaborative work that you’ve all done.

Dr. Lising: And it’s been such a bonus as well to actually have done this at a time when the notion of data sharing is just new. And so, we were all so enthused and excited to be part of this innovation.

Brynn: So, before we wrap up, can you tell us what you’re working on now? What do you have any projects going on? Research, teaching, what are you up to?

Dr. Lising: So, I’m in a teaching and research academic job family. And that means that I do equal part teaching and research. So, I love teaching.

And I think that in as much as you have audience in terms of your own research, who can read the work that you do, engagement with the students and being able to translate the research that I do to advance students’ understanding of the field really just excites me and makes me come to work every day happily, joyfully. So, in my teaching, I teach across the undergraduate. So, in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, we have undergraduate courses and postgraduate courses.

So, I teach in the undergraduate course and in the postgraduate. So, in the undergraduate, I convene this large, two large units. One is an introduction to social linguistics, which is one of my most loved content that I like talking about.

And talk about that in terms of the history of the discipline, but also talking about the two parallel strands in terms of social linguistics, so social linguistics in society and micro social linguistics, social linguistics in languages. So, one has the focuses on language and how language features change because of social factors, and the other one takes society as a starting point and looks at how societal structures and features impact on languages. And so, I love that and I also can be in a unit called professional and community engagement unit, which our linguistics major take and that allows them to do workplace, work-integrated learning and relate that to their own understanding of linguistics.

And I shouldn’t have to tell you because you, you tutor with me in that unit.

Brynn: And I love it!

Dr. Lising: And in the postgraduate, our master of applied linguistics and TESOL course, I teach pragmatics and intercultural communication. Those are my teaching tasks in terms of my research.

I’m currently working on a number of collaborations and those collaborations sit within my social linguistic research program, which is in multilingualism and social participation. So, this has two focuses for me in the Australian context. And those are, one is on the employment experiences of non-English speaking backer and migrants in Australia, and also a macro social linguistic focus.

And the micro social linguistic one is the influence of migrant languages on Australian English. And then there are, I also do a couple of other international collaboration on multilingualism in the Philippines. So yeah, that’s what I have in store.

Brynn: I don’t know how you have time to sleep, but I love everything that you do. And I also took your pragmatics course, which I also loved. So, I can attest to that one.

Loy, I so appreciate you talking to me today. Thank you so much.

Dr. Lising: Thank you for having me.

Brynn: And thank you for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time.

Cover art by Sadami Konchi

International migration is at an all-time high as ever more people move across national borders for work or study, in search of refuge or adventure. Regardless of their motivations and whether they intend their moves to be temporary or permanent, all transnational migrants face the challenge of re-building their lives in a different cultural and linguistic context, far away from family and friends, and the everyday routines of their previous lives. Established populations in destination countries may treat migrants with benign neglect at best and outright hostility at worst.

How then do migrants make a new life?

To answer that question, Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Shiva Motaghi Tabari, with a focus on parenting in migration.

Use promo code AAFLYG6 for a discount when you purchase from Oxford University Press.

Advance praise

“This volume breaks new ground by focusing on Doings: a group of diverse researchers collaboratively doing close listening and looking over 20 years, as adult immigrants to Australia engage in doing life, things, words, family, and work in a new language. The result is not only new understandings of the participants’ self-making, but also the making of a new research trajectory that focuses not simply on the learning of a language, but on humanity doing life in language.” (Ofelia García, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)

“This is a moving book that represents the voices of migrants on their challenges and successes across different kinds of boundaries. It embodies impersonal structural and geopolitical pressures as negotiated in the dreams and aspirations of migrants. The authors share findings from decades-long separate research projects to develop richer insights, as a model for data sharing and ethical research.” (Suresh Canagarajah, Pennsylvania State University)

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added 05/07/2024)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network!

My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

Today’s episode is part of a series devoted to Life in a New Language.

Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, I’ll chat to each of the co-authors about their perspective.

Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

My guest today is Shiva Motaghi Tabari.

Shiva is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and a fellow member of the Language on the Move research team. Her research interests lie in second language learning and teaching, intercultural communication, language and migration, and family language policy and home language maintenance in migration contexts.

Shiva completed her PhD in Linguistics at Macquarie University on the topic of Bidirectional Language Learning in Migrant Families. The thesis examined the intersection of parental language learning with child language learning in Iranian migrants to Australia. The thesis won the Australian Linguistic Society’s 2017 Michael Clyne Award.

Shiva, welcome to the show and thank you so much for being here today.

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Thanks, Brynn. It’s great to be here.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you and your colleagues got the idea for Life in a New Language?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Actually, my journey into the realm of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics began during my doctoral studies at Macquarie University. My research interests have always revolved around the intricate dynamics of language learning, multilingualism and intercultural communication, particularly in the context of migration. The idea for Life in a New Language actually emerged from a kind of deep-seated curiosity about the experiences of adult transnational migrants as they navigate the complexities of settling into a new linguistic and cultural environment.

The concept originated during our discussions on how language plays a critical role in the integration process for migrants. We as a group realised that there was a need for a deeper understanding of how learning a new language impacts migrants’ daily lives, their identities and their overall settlement experiences. And for my part, drawing from my background as an academic and a research fellow, coupled with the rich ethnographic data collected by myself and my esteemed colleagues, we embarked on a mission to shed light on these often-overlooked narratives, aiming to provide a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and the triumphs faced by migrants in their linguistic journeys.

And this book, in fact, is sequel to Ingrid Piller’s acclaimed Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. It builds on years of ethnographic research with over 100 migrants from diverse backgrounds. And each of us brought unique insights from our respective fields.

And together we aim to present a holistic view of the language experiences of migrants.

Brynn: All of the co-authors came together with all of their different data and their different participants. And like you said, many of this happened over the course of many, many years. And so Life in a New Language, the book, is all about the reuse of this ethnographic data. Can you tell us about the original research project that your contribution is based on?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: My contribution is based on my PhD research, which focused on bi-directional language learning in migrant families. This research involved in-depth ethnographic work with migrant families in Australia, where I examined how both parents and children navigate the language learning process and the impact this has on their identities and daily interactions. The original research provided rich, nuanced insights into the complexities of language and migration.

In fact, I spent a good amount of time with these families, observing their everyday lives, conducting interviews and participating in their community activities. And this kind of approach allowed me to capture the multifaceted ways in which language learning intersects with their social and cultural integration. So, the insights from this research actually formed the foundation for my contributions to the book and particularly in highlighting the dynamic and reciprocal nature of language learning within migrant families.

Yeah, so it’s actually the foundation and my contribution and the contribution of other group members, my colleagues, spans over a decade of in-depth exploration of the language learning and settlement experiences of migrants to Australia.

Brynn: Your particular research, it had to do with Persian-speaking Iranian migrants. Is that correct?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: That’s correct.

Brynn: And that’s where you are originally from. So, what did that feel like for you to be talking to these migrants in this context? What did you bring from your own background that you found reflected in these migrants’ experiences?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Oh, yes. So there are so numerous commonalities among the migrants from diverse backgrounds, including Persians, actually. This kind of research revealed fascinating insights into the ways in which migration reshapes family dynamics and relationships.

And this is something that I experienced myself when I immigrated to Australia around two decades ago. And how, kind of like many participants, the experience of settling into a new country means renegotiation of familial roles and responsibilities in light of the new social and cultural context. So, we as a group, I mean, those of us who focus on familial relationships in our research, we observed a spectrum of experiences from participants who found strength and resilience through familial bonds to those who grappled with the challenges of maintaining cohesion in the face of, you know, linguistic and cultural barriers.

Brynn: That’s so interesting because in the book that really comes through. It’s really evident that so many migrants and not just from any one particular language background, but from many language backgrounds and many different countries face that shift in family dynamics when they migrate here to Australia.

So, one of the big themes that came up in your particular contribution to the research was the role that language plays in mediating family interactions. Can you tell us more about that and what you found with your participants?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Absolutely. So, one theme that was repeatedly coming up in the research was the pivotal role of language in mediating family interactions, as you mentioned, with language learning serving as both a catalyst for connection and a barrier to communication. That was really interesting.

And another finding related to transforming parent-child in relationships and how parents need to make language choices and how these choices may change family dynamics, like as we may know, children’s oral proficiency in everyday language can quickly become indistinguishable from that of their native-born peers. So, while children make progress in terms of fluency, parents continue to struggle with everyday language and their formal and academic English may well have been far ahead that of their children. But their oral displays were lacking as it was revealed in my research, for example.

So, this discrepancy began to undermine parent-child relationships as children began to feel linguistically superior to their parents. And the key point is that the family transformations as we were talking about and as we’ve discussed in our research do not take place in a vacuum. They are deeply shaped by the exclusions and inclusions migrant families experience in their new society.

So overall, the findings show the complex interplay between language identity and family life in the context of migration in Australia as I did my research.

Brynn: That would be so frustrating. I’m thinking as a parent myself, if I was having this almost battle in my own mind about how I communicate with my child, and those would be really complex feelings of feeling like I wasn’t good enough or I wasn’t speaking my new language well enough, and like you said, but then seeing my child become more and more and more fluent. Did any of your participants talk about their feelings related to that?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Oh, yes, heaps actually, it was a very kind of common answer to this question, particularly for Persians who come from a background that parental authority is a thing for them, and they were worried about the upbringing of their kids on how to make language choices, because on the one hand, they wanted to advance their own language, I mean, conversational language in the new society, and on the other hand, they were worried about using the language of the society, which is English, obviously, at home as a way of practicing their own linguistic skills at home will affect their kids’ home language.

But at the same time, at some point when the kids were advancing in their conversational language, as I mentioned, they felt kind of superior to their parents. And this kind of feeling was very common among the parents who said, we really want to maintain our heritage language because we are feeling that if, for example, one of the parents said, you know, the kid keeps correcting me when I’m speaking, and I have a feeling that if she keeps doing that, then she will think that I’m a weak kind of parent and in other fields as well, in other areas as well, and I will lose my credit as a parent.

And so, it’s better to keep our heritage language as the means of communication with our kids to avoid this kind of relationship or reversal kind of roles in the family.

Brynn: That would be such a hard power dynamic to have to negotiate because, like I said, it is hard enough to be a parent and negotiate power dynamics between you and your kids, but then to throw in language, and especially if these parents also want their kids to develop English because they realize that it is important for living in Australia. I myself, when I used to teach English as a second language to adults, I would often get my adult students say to me, I won’t speak English with my kids because of that exact point that you just made, because my kids correct me, and I understand that they speak English, quote, better than I do, but I just don’t want to be corrected by my own kids, and I completely understand that.

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Absolutely, absolutely. And something that came up as well, in addition to this kind of fear, was the mixed messages or mixed advice, kind of, that the parents got from the society. Some educators would recommend them to use the home language only, and some said, oh no, just use English, because your kid needs to improve their English skills and this was something that parents seemed a bit confused in the beginning, once they arrived and once they just wanted to make language choices, what to do, what not to do.

And this was something very common as well, that it shows that there is something in the educational system that lacks probably, that needs to be worked on to support migrant families on how to deal with these kind of choices and how to maintain that kind of familial bonds at the same time have the linguistic support that they need.

Brynn: Yeah, and that makes sense that they would be getting those mixed messages because I don’t think that we, as a society, have agreed upon what is the, quote, best way to do bilingualism or multilingualism within a family. In your personal opinion, what do you think that we in Australia could do to make that transition easier for these parents, to make it easier for them to make these language choices for their own families?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: As we all know, the journey of migration is full of challenges and improving the situation for new migrants and new families actually requires a kind of multifaceted approach. Of course, there are undoubtedly avenues for improvement to facilitate smoother transition for new migrants, specifically parents and children. Well, I think one key aspect is the kind of provision of comprehensive language support services that cater to the diverse linguistic needs of migrants, which includes not only language instruction, but also access to resources for language maintenance and development within familial and community settings.

It’s really important to encourage families regarding their heritage language maintenance and providing resources. And also fostering inclusive and welcoming environments is really important. The kind of welcoming environments that celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity that can mitigate the feelings of isolation and promote social integration, both for adults and children.

So, some sort of policy initiatives that aim at addressing systemic barriers to employment, to education, to social participation. These are all crucial for creating equitable opportunities for migrants to thrive in their new homes. I believe that one key avenue for improvement, I think, goes through the education system and how our kids, our children, feel safe and secure and happy and proud to have come from a background that has provided them with kind of additional worldviews, additional culture and linguistic skills, in addition to the societal language and the dominant culture.

So that’s the way that I think the education system should have some policy strategies in place for our kids to make them feel secure and happy about this kind of, you know, linguistic skills that they bring from their home countries.

Brynn: That’s a great point that we can kind of as community members do everything that we can to make people feel included, to encourage linguistic diversity and to encourage family languages. But you’re right that there needs to be something that’s a bit more top down in the governmental policies in education because that’s such a huge part of any child’s life and they spend so much time there. So that’s a really great answer. Thank you.

Shifting gears a little bit, I’d love to ask you about your actual experience in writing this book, Life in a New Language. Co-authoring this monograph with five other people, six of you total, had to have been complicated, especially because it was largely written during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Can you tell me what were the ups and downs of the writing process? What was that like to co-author with so many people?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Actually, for me, this kind of, this collaboration was wonderful. So, collaborating with diverse team of authors certainly to me was an immensely rewarding experience. And one of the kind of major upsides I could say was the wealth of perspectives and expertise that each member brought to the table.

Clearly, like every other project, there are some challenges, particularly our research fell during the period of COVID, as you mentioned. And there were some challenges, if you want to call it challenge actually. So, it was just like coordinating schedules or, I don’t know, like navigating different opinions.

So we wanted to make sure that there is a good kind of, I mean, coherence across multiple chapters, how we could achieve that. But nonetheless, our shared commitment to producing a comprehensive and impactful kind of work kept us motivated and focused throughout the writing process, I would say. So ultimately, I would say this kind of collaboration and the collaborative nature of our work allowed us to produce this book that I think reflects by itself the collective insights and contributions of my amazing colleagues.

Brynn: And that’s what I think is so interesting about this particular book, is that it brings so many different types of people together in the stories, because you really feel as a reader that you’re getting a deep insight into migrant perspectives from all different cultures, all different language backgrounds, so you can see what’s different for certain people, but also the themes that keep coming up for migrants of all kinds. And I agree that the co-authorship is a really interesting and unique aspect to this book.

Before we wrap up, can you tell me what’s next for you? What are you working on now? What’s your next project? What are you up to?

Dr Motaghi Tabari: Currently, apart from my academic roles, I’m cooperating with some not-for-profit organizations as well, actually working on new projects. The projects that explore the language needs and challenges faced by kind of more vulnerable group of people in our community from coming from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds in health sector. You know, overall, my goal is to continue contributing to the ongoing dialogue about multilingualism and diversity.

And I would love to put theories into practice in real life. I love to see tangible results and if I can have any kind of positive impacts on the lives of people. And I would love to focus on promoting equity, understanding and social change as much as I can.

Brynn: Well, you’ve certainly started to do that with this book. That is very evident in Life in a New Language, so thank you to you. Thank you to your co-authors. And thank you so much for talking to me today, Shiva. I appreciate it.

Dr Motaghi Tabari: It was great to be here. And thank you for having me here. Thanks for it.

Brynn: And thank you for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel. Leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Until next time.

Cover art by Sadami Konchi

International migration is at an all-time high as ever more people move across national borders for work or study, in search of refuge or adventure. Regardless of their motivations and whether they intend their moves to be temporary or permanent, all transnational migrants face the challenge of re-building their lives in a different cultural and linguistic context, far away from family and friends, and the everyday routines of their previous lives. Established populations in destination countries may treat migrants with benign neglect at best and outright hostility at worst.

How then do migrants make a new life?

To answer that question, Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Vera Williams Tetteh, with a focus on the experiences of African migrants.

Use promo code AAFLYG6 for a discount when you purchase from Oxford University Press.

Advance praise

“This volume breaks new ground by focusing on Doings: a group of diverse researchers collaboratively doing close listening and looking over 20 years, as adult immigrants to Australia engage in doing life, things, words, family, and work in a new language. The result is not only new understandings of the participants’ self-making, but also the making of a new research trajectory that focuses not simply on the learning of a language, but on humanity doing life in language.” (Ofelia García, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)

“This is a moving book that represents the voices of migrants on their challenges and successes across different kinds of boundaries. It embodies impersonal structural and geopolitical pressures as negotiated in the dreams and aspirations of migrants. The authors share findings from decades-long separate research projects to develop richer insights, as a model for data sharing and ethical research.” (Suresh Canagarajah, Pennsylvania State University)

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added 04/07/2024)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network!

My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

Today’s episode is part of a series devoted to Life in a New Language.

Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, I’ll chat to each of the co-authors about their perspective.

Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

My guest today is Dr. Vera Williams Tetteh.

Vera is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and a fellow member of the Language on the Move research team. Her research interests are in second language learning and teaching, intercultural communication, World Englishes, language and migration, and adult migrant language experiences.

Vera completed her PhD with a thesis exploring the language learning and settlement experiences of African migrants in Australia. The thesis examined the interplay between pre-migration language learning and education experiences, and post-migration settlement outcomes in Australia, and the thesis was shortlisted for the 2018 Joshua A. Fishman Award for an outstanding dissertation in the sociology of language and was the runner up for the 2016 Michael Clyne Award from the Australian Linguistic Society.

In 2018, Vera received the Department of Linguistics’ Chitra Fernando Fellowship for Early Career researchers, and she is now working on a collaborative study focusing on oracy-based multilingualism in sub-Saharan African communities in Australia. She also engages in interdisciplinary research with colleagues in Sociology, Business, and Marketing.

Welcome to the show, Vera. We’re really excited to talk to you today.

Dr Williams Tetteh: Thank you, Brynn, for that introduction, and good to be here.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you and your colleagues got the idea for Life in a New Language?

Dr Williams Tetteh: So I’m Vera Nah of Osua Williams Tetteh, an African-Australian woman born and raised in Ghana. I’m from the Ga-Adangbe ethnic group in Ghana. My mother tongue is Ga, and growing up, my family moved from my hometown in Accra to Koforidua where Twi, or Akan, is spoken. So that’s where I learned to speak Twi. And Twi is spelled T-W-I, not T-W-E, as I found in a library recently. I completed my university education in Australia at Macquarie University from a foundation that goes way back to Ghana.

I attended a Aburi Girls Secondary School in the Akuapem Mountains of Ghana. This is the boarding school where I studied for my O-level and A-level exams, and where for seven years, my classmates and I were nurtured, and we blossomed into skilled women that we are today and were spread across our various parts of the global world. Most of my classmates after school went to university straight away.

My trajectory took a different and not so linear direction. I didn’t make the grades for a straight entry to university, so I had to get a job, which I did. I was working at the State Insurance Corporation of Ghana. That is where one of my colleagues introduced me to Benjamin, my husband, who was living in Australia. So, I joined him on the Family Reunion Visa. All this happened in the early 1990s.

In Australia, while juggling a new family life in a new country, I also found my first job as a shop assistant in Franklins. And I worked there in different locations for 10 years. And in the latter part of that 10-year period, I was also studying at Macquarie University, completing my honors degree with Dr. Verna Rieschild as my supervisor.

Verna identified that it would be good to go and shift directions into academia rather than working in the supermarket after my studies. So, Verna gave me my first tutoring role in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. And with my honours degree, I earned a first-class honours.

And with Verna’s encouragement, once again, I applied for the scholarship to do the PhD in Linguistics, which I did and completed under the supervision of Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr. Kimie Takahashi.

Now to the second part of the question, how did I get the idea for Life in a New Language, or rather, how did I come to be a co-author of Life in a New Language? After my PhD, I was fortunate to be one of the two postdocs working with Ingrid on her ARC-funded project, looking at everyday intercultural communication.

So, we defined everyday intercultural communication as interaction between people from different linguistic backgrounds and with different levels of proficiency in English in interaction. And such interactions obviously happen a lot in Sydney. And we were hoping with that study to improve institutional communication through findings from our research.

So that’s what we were working on with Ingrid. So, the interesting thing is that my colleague Shiva, Dr. Shiva Motaghi Tabari and I had completed PhDs working with migrants within Persian and African communities respectively under Ingrid’s supervision. And we had gathered our rich data, which was specific to our communities.

And we were focusing also on their settlements and their communications. So, we already had the rich data waiting to be used. And given the current, you know, climate of data sharing and the natural progression under Ingrid’s expert direction, of course we were able to pull all our ethnographic data together, analyse them and get them all into one volume.

Brynn: That’s what’s so interesting about Life in a New Language, is this reuse of ethnographic data. Can you tell us about your particular research that was then incorporated into this reuse of all of this ethnographic data? What did your particular research look at?

Dr Williams Tetteh: So, my research was with African migrants and their settlement experiences in Australia. So, I looked at their pre-migration language learning experiences, opportunities as well, and the post-migration experiences. I realised in the beginning when I first started researching, doing background reading for my work that not much was understood about African migrants, and we were all pulled together under one deficit lens that saw us as not able to settle or finding difficulties.

And so, my study comes with looking and sharing how different people with different experiences of having English or not having English, do life in a new place with English. In my study, I used four typologies to look at this situation. The first group was migrants from Anglophone African backgrounds who have completed secondary school or above, and English would have been their language of education.

And group two was people from non-Anglophone African countries who would have completed secondary school or education or above in a different language like French or Arabic. And then group three, migrants from Anglophone African countries who have had no schooling but have street English or have learned and used English. And then the last group was people from non-Anglophone African backgrounds who have had no schooling, did not have English as well.

Because remember, in Africa, most of us study in a language other than our mother tongue, the formal language is English or Arabic or the language of the former colonial country that colonised our states. So having those four groups made it easier to see some of their experiences and bring out all these things that would otherwise would have been hidden if we put everything, everyone together. So, looking at people from group one who already had skills and studied in English, they expected that, you know, they would be able to use their English, their skills.

And after all, Australia is an English-speaking country and they’ll be able to slot in. But that didn’t happen for them that week at all. So, there were some challenges.

And what was interesting is that the people were prepared to continue with their studies. They got more Masters and other studies at tertiary level to skill themselves and still they were struggling to get jobs. With group two, people who studied in a different language, a language other than English, they felt that they needed to learn English to be able to use their skills as well.

The people in my study at that time were still learning English and hoping that afterwards they will be able to get jobs and work in Australia. The next group is group three. So, group three was mainly people who did not have schooling and had some English as well.

And you find that most of the people in this group were women. These people were in classes to learn, and sometimes there was a mismatch with the English language. These people are multilingual. Some of them have five, six languages that they have learned already. The only thing is that these languages are oral based languages, so that made it a bit difficult when you sat in front of the classroom and a computer. So, there’s a lot of assumption there.

And so, they struggled as well. One of the participants said that, you know, they put us, because we’re speaking, you know, because they’re oral beings, they speak English, you put in class with people who have degrees and so on and so forth. And then in there you’re shown that, you know, you do not have what is required.

So that was challenging for them. And then we have people from the last group who were learning English as well as doing things in English for the first time. And that was in itself quite, quite difficult as they found.

Language learning experiences and settlement for the participants were quite different for the four groups. And I think that’s what my research shows so clearly and interestingly that hasn’t been seen previously. And that’s what it brings to Life in a New Language.

Brynn: It sounds like because you were able to distinguish these four very different groups, you probably saw their employment trajectories or sort of what they hoped to be able to do in Australia in terms of employment as quite different. That would be my guess, but maybe not. Can you tell us a bit more about what the four groups wanted to do with employment and sort of the realities that they faced in Australia in terms of employment?

Dr Williams Tetteh: So in terms of employment, most of the participants in group one, when I found them, most of them were still studying, looking for skilled jobs. Some of them, their certificates were not recognised. Some of them had started work in low skill areas.

Some of them were doing process work while studying and trying to get better grades or better qualifications so that they can get better jobs. So yes, most people were in that situation doing that, to qualify and to be able to find a good job. So that’s group one.

People are aspiring to go better and do jobs because some have skills and they work in the countries of origin and they have English skills and they believe that they should be able to get jobs, but it didn’t pan out like that for them. Those from French and Arabic, people who had studied in French and in Arabic, well, some of them were studying English knowing that when they finished their English, they will be able to get jobs. Some were in university, some were doing nursing, and they believed.

So, the difference is that they believe that they will be able to get a job and it’s the language that is hindering them from going forward to get jobs. Group three was quite interesting because some of the women turned to ethnic jobs. Women in particular had all the ethnic businesses that they had started hair-braiding.

One in particular had gone to TAFE to get her certification so that she started a hair-braiding business with her husband. People have started big shops because there’s the need for that in the community. For some of the participants, their hairdressing shop or hair-braiding shop or African shop also doubled as a community place where people who newly arrived in the country would go to find things and go informally to be pointed to where to go, in which direction to get help, that kind of thing.

So, it’s interesting. Group 3 brought skills and expertise in business into Australia and they’re thriving in that aspect. And then Group 4 were still looking for jobs and still, some of them were still learning the language.

And it was quite challenging for Group 4, having no English and also having no education and trying to make sense of it all was quite challenging. Most of them were women as well. They were doing as much as they could, juggling things at home, going to classes, learning from their children and having hope for some that even if they don’t make it, the investment in their children will make a difference for their lives.

So, it was quite interesting, all these different ways people approached life in the different groups. One interesting thing to note though, it was normal, well not normal I’d say, it was quite common to have a man in Group 1 and his wife in Group 3 or Group 1 and the wife in Group 4 because of pre-migration gender expectations. Mostly men had gone to school and were higher in the older cohort. So then in Australia, you’d find that when the dynamics change and the men are struggling to get jobs and the women are able to get some process work and things, you find that the home is changing, and women become the breadwinner and the man is still doing his certification and going through. So that kind of changed things a bit for some of the participants.

Brynn: That’s such a fascinating dynamic. And I really thought that that particular part of the book, because that does come up in several parts in Life in a New Language, especially with your research, that part is so fascinating because I feel like that’s not something that we generally think that much about are sort of the ways that family dynamics change or relationship dynamics change when people do have to do this move to a new place. And then you throw in the language difference on top of it.

And that makes for a really different settlement experience for people. And it sounds like these are some really difficult processes that people went through. In your opinion, based on what you saw in your research, what is something that we in Australia could do to make this settlement experience easier for new migrants?

Dr Williams Tetteh: That’s a tough question and a good one too. I think I’ll go back to what we do at Language on the Move. Our everyday experiences and bringing this book together is because we embrace people that come in.

So, you have a team of people. Some people have been there already. I’ve worked with Ingrid since 2007. So, we have, let’s say, senior team members, and then we have junior team members, people coming in. And we see us as a team. So, when you come in, we embrace you and we help you and we show you what to do.

So, on that micro scale, that’s what we do. I think if we open that up to the broader macro domain, this is a country where people are coming in. There are people here already. So, what do we do? We embrace them, we buddy with them, we show them around. And it’s not a one direction way of doing things.

We also learn from the newcomers because they’re not coming as a blank person that came with nothing. They have already brought things with them that we don’t know anything about. So, I think we need a deeper understanding of the push and the pull factors that make people come here. What are they here for? What brings them here? Like they venture into the unknown, even hostile places to begin life.

And for some, it’s going to be a life in a language that they’ve never heard before, never spoken before. But they’re here and they’re human beings. And we’re all migrants. I mean, this place belongs to the indigenous custodians and owners of the land, past, present and future. We all happen to be – our origin is from somewhere else. And so, some people have taken the lead and come here.

And newcomers come in, we can embrace them, we can look at what they bring, the positives, not just the challenges and we don’t want them. And especially when they look a certain way, then we find ways and means of putting barriers instead of helping them to move along. People who come with multiple languages maybe have oral-based knowledge in these languages and may not have the literacy skills, but we can tap into what they have and then help them rather than seeing them as deficits in English.

When a monolingual English person is teaching someone who is multilingual and has learned so many languages, what can we learn from how they learn their languages and do it their way rather than fitting them into what we feel they should go and do and then erase all the positives they bring in linguistic resources and see them as deficits because they cannot have English. And in doing so, then we equate English with knowledge and wisdom, and then we perpetuate that kind of myth, which is not the case. It’s really a challenge.

And at this time, the one persistent issue for my community is with this English test, language test, especially when people have done their degrees here. And recently we had to write to MPs to say they have to have another look at this criteria, because people have studied in English, have done their degrees in English. And then before you register as a nurse, you need to be able to pass your IELTS test so that you are registered.

These people, before they even go into nursing as registered nurses, are working as ARNs, so they are working as nursing aides and assistants in nursing homes and doing all sorts of shifts to be able to live here and help, helping our system, helping our disabled, helping our aged. And so, for them to better themselves and go to university, some of them work full time and also put all these things together. And then they have to do this test.

People have done this test and then they will tell me that, you know, the test, I don’t think it’s about English. They tell me it’s just not about English. I’ve done this test five times. I give up. So, I’ll just work in the nursing home. I’m not saying working in the nursing home is not a good job. When people have identified that they want to further their career, and this is what we want in Australia, then of course, we need to not put barriers in there like that. Yes.

And one of them said to me, this is just making us into second class citizens because they don’t want us to be registered nurses, which is unfortunate. So, if you haven’t done your second reschooling in here, then you have to do the test to prove. And the test to them is not about English, it’s more computing.

Brynn: Yeah, there is so much we could say about the IELTS test and about English language testing. And we have so much at Language on the Move about that. And I’m sure that that will be, we’ll have more podcast episodes devoted to just that, because that’s such a huge part of the migrant settlement experience in English.

And that’s something that, you’re right, I think that we as a society need to devote more thought to and we need to rethink what we’re doing there.

Shifting gears a bit, let’s talk about how you co-authored this book, Life in a New Language, with five other people. So, there were six of you working on this book. And I want to know how complicated was that and what were the ups and the downs of the writing process? And what did you learn from writing with so many people at once?

Dr Williams Tetteh: That’s a good question. So, I have also heard about some of the challenges and interesting dynamics with co-authoring. I think for us, it was pretty straightforward.

It was straightforward because we had Ingrid in the center who knows all our work. So, Ingrid was our supervisor, my supervisor, Donna’s supervisor, Emily’s supervisor and Shiva’s supervisor. So, as I said previously, we have this data that is sitting there that Ingrid has supervised.

And also, Ingrid was Loy’s supervisor and mentor in her staff grant project. So pretty much, it’s just like this was the natural progression of the data. Ingrid has worked with all of us with our PhDs and all the ideas coming together.

So, it was good in a sense that you had the uniting factor and the supervisor, mentor, who knew our strengths and our differences as well, our challenges as well. So, putting it all together, it was just a fun thing to do. And I’d like to say that for individually, our strengths come from within our academic excellence, by the nurturing and the healthy relationship that we had.

And for us, it was not just about write your bit and that’s it. We had this lovely relationship and I think that’s very, very important. So, it was not just the writing, but it’s outside of the writing. What do we do? The unspoken characteristic is just that we do things together. Extracurricular activities, asking how each other is going, you know.

That hand holding, that pastoral care, that knowing that it’s not just about work. There’s life outside of work, some of the challenges. And having Language on the Move also as a platform, that family, you know, that nurturing place, there was no, you didn’t feel scared or worried or threatened or anything. We were just a pool of people eager and willing to learn under Ingrid’s supervision and to work together and let our strengths shine through.

For me, one of the challenges, I’d say, was working online on a shared document. I’m very old school. That is not my style at all. And so, in the beginning, I like to think through my writing, and I like to change things backwards and forwards. So, when I log in, I know that people know I’ve logged in, but I’ll download the file and I’ll work on it my way and then I’ll put the changes in.

And I think at a point Ingrid said, Vera, I saw you online, but I didn’t see what you were doing. And I said, yes, Ingrid, I’m kind of quite old school, but as we went on, I was able to be able to work a bit more online than I used to do in the beginning. So that was something I learned while writing together.

Brynn: Oh, the old shared document folder. I know what you mean. It can be really hard.

But I love that answer about making it more of a community of people who are truly working together in a non-threatening way because, you know, academia can feel scary, it can feel threatening. It is such a good example for those of us who are the more junior academics in the group. You know, I’ve got my own group chat going with some of the more junior members and I feel like we’ve been able to take what you’ve all done and learn from that.

And we’re also helping each other now, you know, like we’ll text each other and say, do you know how to format a citation in this way? You know, things like that so that you don’t feel alone and you don’t feel like you’re doing everything on your own. And then we also talk about non-academic, non-work things. And you’re right, I think it leads to a much more healthy and productive academic life that is nicer than a lot of other corners of academia.

And so, before we wrap up, can you talk to me about what you have going on with your work now? Do you have a project you’re working on? What’s next for you?

Dr Williams Tetteh: So, what’s next? I’m currently working with Dr. Thembi Dube on our Hidden Oracies Project. The project is an offshoot from my PhD research. It also stems from our advocacy work within the African community and also our collective desire, Thembi and I, as linguistics scholars in Australia, of African descent, to make visible the sideline and invisible African languages, which mostly are oral-based languages. And so naturally, they are viewed as tied to the home and to the community in their usage. But in reality, they do contribute to building social cohesiveness and healthy and resilient communities.

And these go a long way to promote economic stability for our society. So, you have people with different languages that are working in various places that, you know, broker some of the situations that are going on through their language. So, we call these languages hidden oracies because they are shared and spoken languages and their function mostly behind the scenes.

So that’s what we’re doing to promote them because they’re very important. So yeah, we’ve done a lot with that. From this project, we have contributed a chapter, Decolonizing African Migrant Languages in the Australian Market Economy. And it’s coming out next month in the edited book, Language and Decolonization, An Interdisciplinary Approach, published by Routledge.

I also have an article in preparation for inclusion in the special issue, Epistemic Disobedience for Centric Theorizing of Anti-Blackness in Australia. And this will be in the Australian Journal of Social Issues. And my paper is titled, Epistemic Disobedience, Reflections on Teaching and Researching on With and for Africans in Australia. So that’s it on the academic front. That’s my project.

My advocacy case work in Australia is ongoing with the African Youth Initiative that I work with. And also, I’m currently acting in the role of Global Director for Welfare and Mentorship for my old school, Aburi Girls, Old Girls Association. And I’m working with a team of dedicated women to give back to our alma mater and make meaningful contributions to the development of the girls in the school as they move out of school into the global world.

And I would like to end in the words of Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey of Ghana. He wrote the book titled The Eagle That Would Not Fly. He said that if you educate a man, you educate an individual. But if you educate a woman, you educate a nation. So here we are. Thank you for this interesting conversation.

Brynn: Oh, Vera, that’s such a beautiful way to end. Thank you so much for that.

And thank you to everyone for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel. Leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Until next time.

Cover art by Sadami Konchi

International migration is at an all-time high as ever more people move across national borders for work or study, in search of refuge or adventure. Regardless of their motivations and whether they intend their moves to be temporary or permanent, all transnational migrants face the challenge of re-building their lives in a different cultural and linguistic context, far away from family and friends, and the everyday routines of their previous lives. Established populations in destination countries may treat migrants with benign neglect at best and outright hostility at worst.

How then do migrants make a new life?

To answer that question, Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

Today, Brynn chats with Ingrid Piller, one of the book’s six co-authors, with a focus on migrants’ challenges with finding work.

Use promo code AAFLYG6 for a discount when you purchase from Oxford University Press.

Advance praise

“This volume breaks new ground by focusing on Doings: a group of diverse researchers collaboratively doing close listening and looking over 20 years, as adult immigrants to Australia engage in doing life, things, words, family, and work in a new language. The result is not only new understandings of the participants’ self-making, but also the making of a new research trajectory that focuses not simply on the learning of a language, but on humanity doing life in language.” (Ofelia García, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)

“This is a moving book that represents the voices of migrants on their challenges and successes across different kinds of boundaries. It embodies impersonal structural and geopolitical pressures as negotiated in the dreams and aspirations of migrants. The authors share findings from decades-long separate research projects to develop richer insights, as a model for data sharing and ethical research.” (Suresh Canagarajah, Pennsylvania State University)

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added on July 03, 2024)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network!

My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

Today’s episode is part of a series devoted to Life in a New Language.

Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, I’ll chat to each of the co-authors about their perspective.

Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

My guest today is Ingrid Piller.

Ingrid Piller is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. There is so much I could say about her prolific academic work, but for now I’ll introduce her as the driving force behind the research blog Language on the Move and the lead author on Life in a New Language.

Welcome to the show, Ingrid!

Dist Prof Piller: Hi, Brynn.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got the idea for Life in a New Language?

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, sure! Look, I’ve been researching linguistic diversity and social justice for like 30 years. So, the key question of my research has been like, what does it mean to learn a new language at the same time that you actually need to do things with that language? So that it’s not just a classroom exercise.

It’s not just something that, you know, you do for fun, but you actually need to find a job through that language. You need to, I don’t know, get health care. You need to rent a house. You need to get a new phone contract. You need to go down to the shops. You need to, you know, make a new life, make new friends.

And so that’s sort of been the key question of my research in various aspects for a really long time. And sort of around in the mid 2010s, I kind of felt like I’ve been doing so many projects in this area. My students have been doing so many projects in this area, and we really should actually pool these resources and these findings and all this research that’s sort of all over the place and bring it together in one coherent systematic exploration of what it actually means to simultaneously learn a new language and have to do things through that language.

And so that’s the story behind the book.

That’s such a big part about starting a new life in a new language. And I think a lot of people don’t necessarily realise that. They sort of separate the idea of language learning and life, and they don’t tend to think of the two together.

Brynn: And something that you’ve just mentioned is about how you had students, other people that you were working with throughout the course of all of these years, who were doing this type of research. And the book, Life in a New Language, is all about the reuse of this ethnographic data. Can you tell us about the original research project that your contribution is based on?

Dist Prof Piller: Okay, so I supervised each and every one of the projects. That is actually the basis. So, in a sense, I’ve had a finger in the pie of each of the research projects that we brought together in Life in a New Language.

But the sort of the one key piece of data that is mine, if you will, came from a research project that I did or that I started in 2000, so 24 years ago. And the interest there was to understand how people achieved really high proficiency. And at the time, I just finished my research with bilingual couples, where, you know, one partner comes from one language background, the other partner from another language background.

And one thing that came out sort of as an incidental finding in that research project, amongst many, particularly of the German participants I had there, is that many of them were sort of often like testing themselves if they could pass. So, they spoke about these passing experiences, like, you know, they, I don’t know, they’ve gone to the shops and someone had asked them like, Oh, are you from some other city down the road in the UK or something? And so hadn’t realized straight away that they had a non-native accent.

This was sort of an incidental finding that people or high-performing second language speakers were really interested in these passing experiences. And so, I kind of thought, Oh, that’s an interesting research project. And let’s do that as a separate research project.

And I got some first internal research funding from the University of Sydney, where I worked at the time, and then later from the ARC to actually investigate high-performing second language speakers. So, people who identified themselves as having been very successful in their second language learning. And so, I conceived that as kind of an individual ethnographic study, mostly an interview study.

And so, we started by just distributing ads and asking for people who thought they’d been really successful in their English language learning here in Sydney. And, you know, lots of people put their hands up in interesting ways, actually. And some of them then when we actually spoke to them, we usually started the conversation with like, you’ve put your hand, been highly successful in second language.

And then they go like, now you tell me whether I’m highly successful. So, it was kind of, you know, really, really interesting. And then the data that we collected from that project over a couple of years also became part of life in a new language.

Brynn: That’s so cool because I feel like we very rarely have those research opportunities with people who feel like they have been successful in the language. I feel like so often, I mean, rightly so, we do a lot of research with people who might feel like they’re struggling with the language.

What did you find with them just out of curiosity? Was there any sort of through line?

Dist Prof Piller: One of the most interesting people on that study, and someone I sort of went from participant to friend, was a guy who’d signed up. And when we interviewed him, the first interview we did, I did that together with the research assistant, Sheila Pham. And we had this conversation.

We were chatting about all kinds of things, like, you know, his language learning stories. He was from Shanghai. He was really like extrovert and kind of talking a lot about how Shanghai is so great and Sydney is so boring and provincial by comparison.

And anyways, after we’d done that interview, Sheila and I, we looked at each other and it was like, we found the Holy Grail. We found a second language speaker who started to learn English actually in his early 20s and, you know, who’s indistinguishable from a native Australian speaker. Doesn’t have an accent.

And it was like, oh, wow. So, you know, so this is going to be like our focal case. And we’re so excited.

Next thing we did, we transcribed the interview and looked at it on paper. It was actually, I mean, it wasn’t good at all. Like, I mean, there was so many like grammatical errors.

You know, if you look at it like in terms of grammar, in terms of syntax, anyway, it wasn’t high level actually. So, there was a complete mismatch in a sense between the performance, the oral performance of this person, which was like, you know, as I said, indistinguishable. We both agreed and we then, you know, got other people to kind of assess him as well.

Everyone sort of agrees, you know, no, wouldn’t have realized that he hasn’t grown up in Australia. If you actually sort of look at it from like a grammar perspective, no, that is really, really fascinating. And in many ways, I didn’t do enough with that case study because I went on to do other things.

But the kind of embodied performance, the way you behave, the things you talk about that is really, really important. And as language teachers or in, you know, in TESOL, we often think so much about accuracy. But in many ways, accuracy isn’t really so important in language.

And so, language is never only about language. I guess that’s one of the key messages of this book and also of my research. I mean, language is OK, we’re linguists, but language is never just about language itself is not interesting.

What is interesting is what people do with it and how they become different persons in a different language or how people react to them and how we kind of organize our society as a linguistically diverse society. So, it’s really the sideways looking, the social aspect that interests me as opposed to like what’s going on with the grammar.

Brynn: Yeah, and I think that’s so important to keep in mind, especially when we think about people who are doing all of these things with language in maybe a new place, especially in this participant’s case, being in their early 20s, starting to learn English and something that you have to face in your early 20s is the idea of work. And that’s something that is a big topic in the book, Life in a New Language is the idea of settling in a new place and finding work. So, can you tell us about what you found about the participant’s employment trajectories in the book?

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, so that was a really, really big topic and employment work came up really across the data, even if the initial focus of data collection or of the study had not been about employment. Like, I mean, as I told you, the focus of the data I brought to it had been high performance and high-level proficiency. Employment came up for everyone is really, really big topic.

And that, of course, relates to some. I mean, it’s not entirely surprising. It relates to something we know from the statistics that amongst migrants, there are much higher levels of unemployment and underemployment than there are amongst the native born.

And underemployment means you have work at a lower level than for which you’re qualified or you work fewer hours than you want to work. And both unemployment and underemployment are really high. We know that in the typical explanation that is given for that is that we find like in the business literature, the migration literature is, you know, migrants.

English isn’t good enough, so they’re struggling with language. That’s a barrier to their employment. Their qualifications aren’t good enough.

You know, they’re not as strong or as high as qualifications of people trained in Australia. So essentially, the explanation is migrants have a human resource deficit. To me or to us as the authors of the book, this has never been entirely convincing.

And the reason I don’t find that convincing is that in Australia in particular, the migrants have a particular, bring relative high human resources to Australia. And to understand that I need to say a few things about Australia’s migration program, because Australia’s migration program is essentially organized in re-streams. And that’s a real simplification because at any one time during the 20 years we did this study, there were like close to 200 different visa types on the books.

But all these different visa types essentially fall into three categories. One category is related to skills. So, you get a visa to Australia because you bring something to Australia.

So usually that’s your professional skills, work skills. You can apply as an individual migrant, like many of our participants came from Iran. So, let’s say you are an IT engineer in Iran.

You are like in your late 20s or early 30s. You have a bit of professional experience. You’re interested in migrating to Australia.

You put in an application and you get points for your qualification and also for your English. So, in order to come in under the skills program, most of the skilled migrants need English. And the skilled migration program takes up, and that can be temporary or permanent, so lots of variations.

But essentially everyone in that program needs English. There are a couple of exceptions. Like if you bring a lot of money, you do not necessarily have such great English.

But overall, we can say like around 80% of our migration program are people who come in for their skills. And part of that skills is actually they need to show they have high levels of English language proficiency. Then the other two groups and they are much smaller are family reunion migrants and humanitarian entrants.

So, these people get their visa because for family reasons, so because they are the spouse of an Australian citizen or the parents of an Australian citizen, or for humanitarian reasons because they deserve our protection and chief refuge in Australia. Now for these two groups, they don’t need to demonstrate English language skills because they are assessed on something else. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t speak English necessarily, right?

I mean, so it’s true that, you know, many family reunion migrants do not speak English, but at the same time, they may have learned English already, right? And the same for refugees. I mean, one thing that we found amongst the refugees in particular was that many of them were really, really highly qualified, spoke English, had been educated through English, particularly from various African nations, post-colonial nations.

And still they were always seen like they’re refugees. They haven’t got any qualifications. They don’t speak English.

So that’s not the truth at all. Now, to go back to the original point that I was making is that we have these people who come in under these different visa categories. For most of them, they need to demonstrate English to even get into Australia.

So why then, once they’re here, they don’t actually find jobs because their English isn’t good enough. Something doesn’t add up there. And so, what we found was that English actually becomes like this global criterion on the basis of which you read people are excluded from the job market just because you don’t want them or it becomes like every employer, every person who has anything to say takes it upon themselves to pass judgment on the English language proficiency of newcomers, regardless whatever their qualifications are. I mean, they usually have no qualifications whatsoever, but still they go, Oh, your English isn’t good enough.

And so, we found things like, I mean, one participant, for instance, from Kenya, she was applying for like receptionist jobs. And so, she was having an interview with a small business and small business owner goes, Look, I love you. You’re fantastically qualified, but I can’t really have you as a receptionist because my customers won’t understand your English. Now her, I mean, she’s been educated through the medium of English. Her English is like Queen’s English, British English, very, very standard, very easy to understand.

I mean, maybe a bit of an East African little, that’s it. You know, this is fairly clearly a pretence for something else, right? And she was actually offered then kind of back-end work in the same company where she didn’t have, where she didn’t need that good English, but in reality, I think where she wasn’t in a customer facing role.

So that’s one thing you can, it’s illegal in Australia to discriminate against anyone on the basis of their national origin, their ethnicity, their race, but it’s not illegal to discriminate on the basis of language. And there really is no recourse. I mean, I can always tell you your English isn’t good enough, right?

And what can you do? I mean, that’s one issue there. Another issue around English language proficiency as this exclusionary criterion is that it’s simply applied holus bolus regardless of the job you’re applying for.

And so, we had a couple of fairly low educated people in our study who objectively didn’t speak a whole lot of English. And they weren’t aspiring to like, you know, language work. They were looking for like cleaning work and couldn’t get cleaning work because people told them or employers told them your English isn’t good enough.

And so, what was going on there essentially is in order to… And they were going like, you know, I’m like one participant, she was from South Sudan and had sort of a complicated migration story, had lived in transit in Egypt for like a decade. And she was saying, look, I mean, in Egypt, I lived like the Egyptians. I was cleaning houses. I was looking after children and it wasn’t difficult. I can do that. And that’s all I want to do here. I want to clean people’s houses. I want to be a cleaner. I want to maybe look after children. But really, she was aspiring to cleaning. But wherever I go, they tell me, your English isn’t good enough.

And she was like, part of that is that you actually in Australia, you need certification, right? Like if you’re cleaning, you need some certificate that you’re not going to mix up the various cleaning products so that you know how to do that hygienically. And that’s really difficult to do if you have low levels of literacy.

And so there were these like really artificial barriers where English kind of becomes an intermediary artificial barrier to doing work you’re perfectly qualified for and you have the right language for. And so, I mean, I’ve spoken a bit about cleaning now, but we sort of also have that at the other end of the spectrum, like another of our participants. She was really, really highly proficient.

She had studied English all her life, had an English language teaching degree from Chile, then had been on Australia for quite a while. And she was retraining as a TESOL teacher and trying to get an MA in TESOL to become an English language teacher. And that was like 20 years ago.

So, it may have changed now. But anyways, she needed to do an internship as part of her degree. And she just couldn’t get a practicum place.

And she tells the story that, you know, she was calling up one. I mean, it’s just like, I called up every TESOL and every ELICOS and every language school in Sydney. And they’d always say things like, oh, yeah, we don’t have a place at the moment.

Or, you know, can you call back again like next year or whatever? And she had this one story where she said, on a Monday, I called this particular school and, you know, I asked, can I do my practicum there? And the person in charge told her, no, we are full for this term or whatever. Call back again next year, next term. And on Wednesday, she spoke to a classmate and the classmate said, look, I’ve just called this particular school this morning and I’m going to do my practicum there. And so, it was like two days later, there was this space.

And the only difference between these two people was that, you know, our participant was from Chile, spoke with a bit of a Spanish accent. And the other participant was, she called it Australian. And when our participant said Australian, it was always native-born Anglo-Australian.

So really the absence of this accent was the, and so that’s the only explanation. So she gave up on the TESOL degree because she kind of said, look, if I can’t even get an internship to graduate, how am I ever going to find a job, right? And so, yeah, language is this really, so in a sense, we, it’s not migrants who have an English language deficit.

It’s actually that we create artificial barriers through making language proficiency, this kind of global construct that is this big barrier, and then apply it whenever we sort of have any kinds of concerns or prejudices or just don’t need that person, whatever. It becomes the explanation for everything, but that really doesn’t do anyone any favours. And I think that’s where one of the important lessons of the book is we actually need to unpack what it means to speak English well, to speak English so that you can do a particular job you’re aspiring to, because that is beneficial, it’s beneficial for the economy. It’s beneficial for everyone, right?

Brynn: And that’s what is so interesting to me is when you talk about “we” in that context, you know, we need to remove this artificial barrier. And a lot of times I think about that in two different ways.

One is sort of the more policy driven. So, like, people in the government, you know, things that we can do policy-wise that would remove those barriers. But then another thing that I think about is just kind of your average person, especially your monolingual English speaking, in this case, Australian, all of these things that these participants have had to go through sounds so difficult. How can we, and this could be, you know, either or, the policymakers or sort of your average Joe on the street, how can we improve things to make it easier for migrants to come to Australia, whether they have this high level of English or not, but to find work and to begin to settle?

Dist Prof Piller: Look, that’s a good question and it’s of course a difficult question and one that our society has been struggling with for years and decades. And overall, I guess we also need to say that Australia is actually doing things pretty well in international comparison. I think that’s always important to keep in mind.

I think it’s a lot harder in North America, a lot harder in Europe, but in different ways, I guess. And so, what’s the lesson for us here? I guess in terms of policy lessons, one thing would be that we need a better alignment across different decision makers, because one thing that we found is particularly with those independent, skilled migrants, once they received their visa to Australia, because they’d gone through that process, you know, they put in their application, they demonstrated their qualifications, they’d done their IELTS test and sometimes, you know, a number of times and kind of should I’ve got the right IELTS score.

So, they’ve done all these things and then they received the visa and they kind of felt like, you know, the Australian government is now telling me I’m ready, I’m good to go, I’m welcome, I can make a contribution to this society. And then they arrive and it’s nothing like that, because all of a sudden there are different bodies that make decisions over their qualifications. And so, for instance, like with all the medical professionals we spoke to, that’s a huge barrier.

So, they get their visa and then they come here and then they need to be re-accredited. And the re-accreditation process is independent from the government visa process. And so all of a sudden, it’s actually not so straightforward.

So, one of our participants, it’s a really interesting story. So, she was a midwife from Romania and she had like 30 years of experience delivering babies. And so, she had the qualification from Bulgaria.

I think it was actually Bulgaria, but it doesn’t matter. So, she had like, you know, this four years training qualification. But in Europe, most of continental Europe, midwives are actually not trained at universities.

Like they’re here, they’re sort of hospital trained, but it’s also a four-year process. And, you know, they do a lot of theory at the same time. And so, she had that training and then she had experience for like 30 years working not only in her native country, but also overseas through the medium of English in the Gulf, somewhere in the UAE.

And there she met her husband an Australian, and they together moved to Australia when she was in her 50s. And she was totally optimistic that, you know, she would go on to deliver babies for another 10, 20 years until her retirement. And before they moved, she had looked up like job ads and seen, you know, there was a real midwife – I mean there is a midwife shortage and has been a midwife shortage in Australia for quite a while. They were moving somewhere regional in Western Australia. It was like, should be easy, very straightforward, and benefit both for the personal career of this woman, but also for Australia’s society. I mean, for our health care system, right? But that’s not how it turned out.

So, she arrives and they go like, I know your four years of hospital training, they’re not equivalent to what we do here. So, you need to do, and the 30 years practice experience, they don’t count. And so, you need to redo your midwife training. And that’s three years.

But because in Western Australia, every midwife is also a registered nurse, you first need to do your nursing degree. And so that’s like six years. And she was like, I’m in my mid-fifties.

I’m not going to study for six years also. My English is good enough to work, but it’s not the kind of English that I can write a big essay. I can’t necessarily go and study and be successful at university.

I can perfectly do the work. I have all the experience, but she ended up doing a phlebotomy course and now in a blood collection unit somewhere. And I’m just sort of happy that she’s still back in the hospital.

But of course, it’s a huge demotion. It’s extremely frustrating for her personally and such a loss for our society. And so that’s really where policy can do something, where you can actually create a pathway that you align the visa decision processes with the various professional qualification processes and also simplify professional qualification processes to the degree that you actually identify, like, what is the gap here?

I’m not saying, you know, everyone can work in whatever, not everything is equivalent. I mean, there’s no doubt about that. But like, what is the gap?

So, you’ve got this kind of level of training, you’ve got this kind of experience. So, maybe you need to learn something, something that is specific to Australia or that is specific to the way this role works here or, you know, whatever. But we really need to create those pathways.

And it’s not very difficult to map these things. But it shouldn’t be that we’re saying, like, you need to do all of your midwife training again and then on top of that, you need to become a registered nurse. And that’s just not feasible for people who are in middle age and, you know, who’ve done all their studies and all their qualifications.

Most people also needed to, you know, support their families and make a living and, you know, life is short. So, you just can’t redo something that you’ve already done. So, we really need to be much smarter about identifying the gaps and aligning decision-making processes.

So that’s one thing. You also asked about, like, what can individual people do? And I think, I mean, that’s where our book comes in, in a sense.

I mean, what we’re trying to create, I guess, is empathy for the challenge and the extreme courage it takes to actually make a new life in a new country at a time when, you know, your socialization, if you will, has already been largely completed in another place. So, to pivot to another world, it really takes a lot of courage, a lot of resilience. These are very bright people.

And so, yeah, empathy for this dual challenge. And just because someone doesn’t speak English all that well, that doesn’t mean they are stupid, right? I think that’s one of the things that we often see.

You just sort of feel, going back to this thing that we said earlier, people don’t necessarily understand what it means to learn a new language. If you have an adult who doesn’t speak English or your language well, you just see them as this deficit person, and you just see what they can’t do in English. You don’t think, well, they’re actually a whole other person in their other language, and they’ve got skills and knowledge, and they’re funny and interesting and whatever.

It may just be that they need a bit of help to express that in English as well. And so, we really need to treat people with a bit more compassion and empathy, I think.

Brynn: And I think that’s what this book does so well, is in pulling together all of these different participants from across so many different years, it really paints this picture of what we, as the English speakers in a dominant English-speaking country, what we need to keep in mind when we are interacting with these migrants. And on that idea, I think that this is a good time to mention that you co-authored this with five other people. So, there were six people total that did this, and you all brought your own studies and your own participants and your own research to kind of paint that picture.

But what I want to know is what was that like to work as a group of six? What were the ups and downs of the writing process? How did you even go about doing that?

Dist Prof Piller: Look, I mean, one thing, in addition to everything else we brought, in addition to our research, we also brought our lived experience. So, four of us actually have this experience of moving to Australia as adults. And so, I think that’s another dimension that we brought to it as people who had also been on that journey and rebuilding our lives here.

So, what was it like to co-author? It was a lot of fun. It was also a lot of work.

So, I guess these are the two things. So, one thing people might think like, you know, you have six people to author a book. So that’s like, you know, a sixth of the work.

And so, it should have been really quick. That’s not true at all, I would say. And I mean, I’ve written a couple of books as a sole author.

I would say this was more work. On me as an individual, I contributed more and that’s true for all the other five authors. So, it’s hugely inefficient in a sense.

But at the same time, it’s not at all because, you know, none of us individually would have been able to write this thing. So it really needed the collaboration. And that’s another that’s a reason I’m really proud of that book, because I think it does something that we don’t do often enough in our field, where you sort of have this collaboration and joined.

You know, you share your data, obviously, but do your analysis together. You do your writing together. And that really is much more than the sum of its parts.

And I mean, one decision that we made, like right at the beginning of this is we don’t want this to be like an edited book or we don’t want this to be just, you know, each of us writes a chapter and then we kind of all go over it and adapt it a bit. We made a decision that we wanted this to be our combined voice, if you will, that we write in a particular voice. But we do this really together as, you know, you couldn’t say like, oh, this part is written by Ingrid and this part is written by Vera or something like that.

So that’s not how it works. And what we’ve achieved in the process is something that, you know, I think is a real advance or a real innovation in qualitative research, that we’ve actually been able to kind of add generalizability to ethnographic research, because, you know, usually you don’t expect ethnographic research to be generalizable. And that’s how it works.

But by actually pooling all these resources and redoing the analysis, based on new codes and new research questions, we’ve been able to paint a much broader picture. And I think that’s, you know, that’s actually quite fantastic. And I’m really, really happy with that.

And in terms of fun, it really, I mean, it took a long time. It was hard work. But it’s also great, actually, to work on something together.

Like if you have the Sisyphus Project where you always feel like, you know, you need to push and push. If you do this together and celebrate things together and kind of be able to laugh about things and kind of end the day on a little WhatsApp chat about like, what have we achieved? What haven’t we achieved? Where have we gone backwards? That’s actually good. So, it really keeps you motivated and it kept us going and was actually, I mean, it took longer than expected. And I think that’s fair enough.

Brynn: And I really do too. I think it’s so important in our field of academia to encourage that collaboration and to celebrate that collaboration, because it’s not something that tends to get done that much in academia. And it’s just so nice to see that sort of positive collaboration happening because then that could happen more.

That could happen more between more authors, more researchers to give us these more generalizable ethnographic studies, which I think are really important, like you said, to paint that picture for people. And this book is really readable. You don’t have to be a linguist to enjoy this book or to learn something from this book.

And I think it’s important to say that because it is something that even monolingual English speakers can really learn from through all of these stories that come together. And just before we wrap up, can you talk to us about your next project? What are you working on now?

Are there going to be more books? What are you up to?

Dist Prof Piller: I’ve always got too many things on the boil. But one thing I really want to keep going is this kind of collaboration, I guess, and doing things together. And one more, one more harking back to your previous question, like, what was this like?

I think academia can be quite hard on people, particularly on early career researchers. And there’s always this pressure to perform. And, you know, how many articles have you published?

And how often have you been cited and whatnot? And by actually building a community. And I think, you know, we’ve built an author community and a community of practice with this book.

But Life in a New Language is also part of this broader community that we’ve built with Language on the Move and the various PhD projects and research projects and collaborations and all kinds of directions that are going on there. And so that really is important for me to keep going, to continue all these various joint projects that we are doing. And, you know, this podcast is, of course, another one of these projects that I’m very excited about that, you know, you are taking forward in such wonderful ways and that we’ve only just started quite recently.

In terms of my individual writing, the next thing I’m working on is actually the third edition of Intercultural Communication. So that’s this textbook that I originally wrote in 2011, and that’s been doing really well. And so, the third edition is almost ready, and it will include a new chapter on health communication and sort of the lessons that we’ve learned for intercultural communication from the pandemic.

Brynn: That’s very exciting to me, particularly, because as you know, as my supervisor, that is what I’m working on on my PhD. So, I’m very much excited to hear that. That’s awesome.

Ingrid, thank you so much for chatting. Really, really appreciate you taking that time and talking to us about the book today.

Dist Prof Piller: Thanks a lot, Brynn. It’s been a lot of fun. Thank you.

Brynn: And thanks for listening, everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time!

Cover art by Sadami Konchi

International migration is at an all-time high as ever more people move across national borders for work or study, in search of refuge or adventure. Regardless of their motivations and whether they intend their moves to be temporary or permanent, all transnational migrants face the challenge of re-building their lives in a different cultural and linguistic context, far away from family and friends, and the everyday routines of their previous lives. Established populations in destination countries may treat migrants with benign neglect at best and outright hostility at worst.

How then do migrants make a new life?

To answer that question, Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

In this series, Brynn Quick chats with each of the co-authors about their personal insights and research contributions to the book. Today, Brynn chats with Dr. Donna Butorac, one of the book’s six co-authors, with a focus on how identities change in migration.

Use promo code AAFLYG6 for a discount when you purchase from Oxford University Press.

Advance praise

“This volume breaks new ground by focusing on Doings: a group of diverse researchers collaboratively doing close listening and looking over 20 years, as adult immigrants to Australia engage in doing life, things, words, family, and work in a new language. The result is not only new understandings of the participants’ self-making, but also the making of a new research trajectory that focuses not simply on the learning of a language, but on humanity doing life in language.” (Ofelia García, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)

“This is a moving book that represents the voices of migrants on their challenges and successes across different kinds of boundaries. It embodies impersonal structural and geopolitical pressures as negotiated in the dreams and aspirations of migrants. The authors share findings from decades-long separate research projects to develop richer insights, as a model for data sharing and ethical research.” (Suresh Canagarajah, Pennsylvania State University)

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 13/06/2024)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network! My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

Today’s episode is part of a series devoted to Life in a New Language.

Life in a New Language is a new book just out from Oxford University Press. It’s co-authored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh. In this series, I’ll chat to each of the co-authors about their personal research contributions to the book.

Life in a New Language examines the language learning and settlement experiences of 130 migrants to Australia from 34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America over a period of 20 years. Reusing data shared from six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies, the book illuminates participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language, finding work, and doing family. Additionally, participants’ experiences with racism and identity making in a new context are explored. The research uncovers significant hardship but also migrants’ courage and resilience. The book has implications for language service provision, migration policy, open science, and social justice movements.

My guest today is Dr. Donna Butorac. Donna is Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of Anthropology and Sociology at Curtin University in Australia. She has a background in applied and sociolinguistics and has researched and published in the areas of language learning and migration, and teachers’ professional development.

Welcome to the show, Donna! We’re really excited to talk to you today.

Dr. Butorac: “Hi, Brynn. It’s nice to be here.

Brynn: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you and your co-authors got the idea for Life in a New Language?

Dr. Butorac: Sure. So right now, I teach at a university, but for a lot of years I taught English to adult migrants in the Australian Settlement English Program. And it was actually while I was there that I completed my PhD in applied linguistics.

I had done an undergrad degree in anthropology and linguistics, and then I worked and traveled for a lot of years. And then I did a post-grad diploma in TESOL in Canada, and then later did a master’s in applied linguistics at Macquarie. And so, I had taught a lot of international students, like in Sydney and Vancouver and in Perth as well.

But it was while I was teaching in the Settlement English Program in Perth, I began to wonder while I was working in Perth in the Settlement English Program about what it was like for the students who were sitting in front of me. I’d be standing in front of the classroom looking at them and going, what’s it like to be them right now? What’s it like to be, and they were mostly women a lot of the time, what’s it like to be them developing a voice in English in this place, in this time?

And so that kind of thinking shaped the PhD that I subsequently undertook, and I was actually really fortunate to have Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi as my supervisors for most of that degree. So, I completed that in 2011 and I pretty soon went into full-time university work, but initially for three years I was working in a leadership role in learning and teaching, and then I went straight into anthropology and sociology in 2015. And because I was involved in work that wasn’t closely related to what I’d done my PhD, and because I was trying to focus on being a mum as well, to be honest, I didn’t do much publishing on my research.

And then I think it was probably in about 2018 Ingrid approached me and four other women to ask if we’d be interested in writing a publication that was based on our combined research projects. And because they’d all been on language learning and post-migration settlement in Australia, and we were all really keen, I was certainly keen, I know the other women were too. So, we met at Macquarie in 2019, I think, to workshop the ideas and to plan the book.

Brynn: I’m sure nothing then happened in 2020, did it (laughs)?

Dr. Butorac: Yeah, of course. Yeah, it kind of went slow. I mean, we were still in touch, you know, obviously, over Zoom and so on.

But I can’t remember, yeah, it’s a bit of a blur, actually, the whole COVID period. It’s like, it’s like life stopped for a while. And I think, was that before COVID or after COVID?

You know, you kind of have these phases in your life. So, yes, it was a slow project to get going. But we’ve gradually kind of pulled it all together over the last few years.

Brynn: You really have. And you just said so many things that speak directly to me. Being a mum who is trying to do academic work. I also am a mum trying to get my Ph.D.

And I also feel like so many of us that go into the teaching English space, we also maybe kind of also want to major in anthropology. I know I went through a phase where I actually was an anthropology minor in undergrad for a while. And I really think that those two areas go well together, because like you said, we do as teachers, especially of adults, kind of get up there in front of the class and you do, you look out at all of these people that you’re teaching and you think, where did you come from? What is your story?

Dr. Butorac: What’s your story? What’s it like to be you. Yeah, I haven’t thought about it like that, but it’s true.

You always take that because my undergrad was anthropology. And even though I did, like, for my honors, I challenged myself to do what I was probably least naturally leading towards, which was the really pointy headed stuff. And I did it on the adverb, you know.

But what I was really interested in was people who speak and people. And so, I feel like I’ve come full circle and that sort of culminated in the PhD, which I think is really sociology of language rather than linguistics. And so now teaching anthropology and sociology, I feel very much at home in these disciplines.

I feel like I’ve had these different elements all come together in actually being a teacher in this field.

Brynn: What an awesome combination. I love that. And I love that idea of the sociology of language rather than what I think a lot of people think of when they think of linguistics is that we’re all grammar pedants, you know, and that’s not it. A lot of us do this more sociolinguistic work.

And speaking of that work, Life in a New Language, the book that we’re talking about today, is all about the reuse of ethnographic data, which is really interesting and it’s quite novel for this book. Can you tell us about the original research project that your contribution to this book is based on?

Dr. Butorac: Sure. So, what I did was I explored language learning and identity, because I was really interested in what’s it like to be them and how do they see themselves. And so, I worked with nine women who had recently migrated to Australia.

And they were all, when they started, they were all studying in the Migrant Settlement English program. So, it was a longitudinal ethnography and it followed those women over a 22 month period. And it was based on in-depth personal interviews.

And I did those at the beginning. I planned to do them at the beginning, in the end, I ended up doing another set in the middle, but I also did group discussions. So, the group discussions were on a single broad topic.

Being a woman was one of them. Society, what it was like for them being in the world, in Australia. That’s where things around their experience of racism or their mixing with other people came in.

Also learning what it was like to be learning and their experiences with that. Their sense of who they were, their self. And then relationships was another one.

And then I kind of threw open the topics for them to include others as well. I also got them to do an essay writing task. I wanted to know what their plans and aspirations were for the future, for their life in Australia.

And I got them to write that at the beginning and then at the end, because I was interested in, okay, what’s going to be the impact of learning English on them as women, how they see themselves and how they understand their desires for the future. Would that change as in theory, as they got better with learning English and had more confidence in their voice and their use of English? Because yes, so I wanted to see how my broad goal was, how does learning English in Australia impact their sense of self and their feelings about who they could be as a woman?

Brynn: I’m so interested in that because I also remember a few years ago when I was teaching, I think maybe in the same program or at least a similar program to adults. I would see so many of these women and we had this thing in common about we have kids at school, we need to leave right at 2:45, we need to go pick them up from school. To me, that is such an additional element to language learning, is having to parent while you’re doing that and all of the hopes and aspirations that go into your own language learning, but then also what that means for your children.

But also, your brain is exhausted at the end of a language learning day and you’ve still got to go home and parent.

Dr. Butorac: Yeah, it’s true. And in fact, one of the women in the project, she had a really interesting experience with that because she and her husband had migrated from Brazil to Japan and they lived there for five years because he had a job there and he spoke Japanese because he was Japanese Brazilian. He was from that community in Brazil.

She was from the Chinese Brazilian community and their daughter. So, they all spoke Portuguese together, but living in Japan during that time, she had a very young daughter. The daughter really bonded with Japan, everything Japanese.

And so, she started speaking Japanese. Her mum never really learned it and the daughter stopped speaking Portuguese. By the time they came to Australia, she said, oh, it’s really interesting. My daughter refuses to learn English. She doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be back in Japan.

And so, the daughter and father could speak Japanese together, but the daughter couldn’t speak to the mum very much. She would talk to her and she would understand bits or she would say, oh wait till Papa comes home and get him to mediate. But she was the main caregiver because he was working full time.

So, these sort of things happened through migration and through people identifying or having aspirations towards one language or one culture, but it’s out of sync with where their parent is at, perhaps. In this case, it was out of sync with where the mum was at. She was so invested in being in Australia because she thought this would be a better life for all of them.

Brynn: Did the daughter ever learn English?

Dr. Butorac: No, she did eventually. At first, she refused and so her mom was great. She put her into the Japanese school, there’s the Japanese Immersion Programme.

And for the first, I want to say it was like more than a year, it could have been two years, but let’s say a year at least, she attended that school. Eventually, she agreed to go across to the English, the Australian school. And so, she did end up learning English.

So it was just in that initial sediment period where she was kind of digging her heels in about, no, we’re not staying here, we’re going back to Japan.

Brynn: And that idea about a person’s identity is so interesting. And a big topic in the idea of migrant settlement is this idea of creating a new home, achieving belonging. You’ve spoken about this particular person’s trajectory in achieving this linguistic belonging, especially with her own daughter.

Can you tell us more about what you found about other participants’ identity trajectories?

Dr. Butorac: One of the things that I always come back to, because I found it so fascinating at the time, was the way that a couple of the women found that even early on when they were at best intermediate level English proficiency, they found that they were a much more confident person when they spoke English than when they spoke their primary language, which turned my thinking on its head because I thought, well, surely confidence is about proficiency. And why would you feel more confident in English, which is not your best language? And it wasn’t really about proficiency.

It was about perhaps the affordances of the culture that they were using English in and that this was tied up with using English and speaking it. So, in both cases, those women were Japanese and and they spoke about the stress of navigating norms of respect in social interactions in Japanese and also the ways that they felt restricted by the gender subjectivities for women in Japanese society. And one of these women talked about having many masks in the drawer and having to decide which one to put on each day.

And so, these women felt that to speak English meant they could be a different kind of woman and more socially confident woman. And they quite liked this. So that was that was really interesting to me.

But that was something specific to those women. And I think the other woman who had spent time living in Japan could relate to some of that thinking. But the women who came from European backgrounds didn’t feel that kind of shift at all.

They weren’t able to perceive that their identity was shifting from learning English. What they felt was in the beginning, they said, I’m still the same person. I just can’t express myself very well in English during those early stages.

But what they did experience over the course of the project was that their development of a voice in English. So, they got better at speaking English. And by the end, they could see they could hear themselves that it had begun to impact how they spoke their primary language.

So, they’d be telling me about, well, I was back in Russia, I was back in Bulgaria and I’m talking to people and they particularly noticed it in transactional encounters. So, they go to the shops or something and they said, oh my God, I’m finding that I’m saying, please and thank you a lot more. And you don’t do that in my language.

People look at me funny, like, why are you saying please? So, they’re using this English sensibility that they develop from being here in this kind of culture. And by the way, they all would say, oh, it’s so much more polite here. And I’m like, really, you’re serious? I don’t see it that way. But anyway, but they found themselves being that kind of person in their language, which was odd.

I mean, one of the Japanese women, it wasn’t so much about politeness. That was really what the European women spoke about. But one of the Japanese women said, I feel like I’m becoming this weird kind of Japanese person because I go back there and my sister’s looking at me funny because I’m saying things like pigs don’t fly, which we don’t say things like that in Japanese.

But I’m saying it in Japanese, but it’s something I developed from being in Australia. And so, I’m becoming a strange Japanese person. One of the things that I did also find interesting because I think they all felt that being a woman in Australia was a good move.

It was good because of the rights and affordances. You know, there’s equality, gender equality and all that kind of thing, which was great. So, I know one of them in particular had all sorts of aspirations about what she was going to be and what she was going to do.

But what I found interesting over the course of speaking to them all was that, yes, they all had the sense that women in Australia are quite liberated and quite independent et cetera. But they couldn’t necessarily kind of appreciate all those affordances of those rights because of things that get in the way of that. So, one of them was the monolingual mindset in the labour market, which privileges just the use of English.

And so that meant, you know, success in the labour market was going to be impacted by proficiency in English. Also, the kind of qualifications, gatekeeping that goes on in the labour market. So, it means that their prior qualifications and lots of years of work experience weren’t going to be recognised and would mean that they’d have to go back and do all sorts of new qualifications in order to work here.

And the other factor that limited some of the women was prejudice in the labour market that can make it harder for people from outside the Anglosphere and from Western Europe to be able to achieve success in the job market. And in my study, that was felt by women from the woman from China. There’s another Chinese Brazilian woman and also the women from Japan.

They felt often quite despondent about their, you know, their chances of actually being able to get meaningful work or advance within a job in Australia.

Brynn: And that is such a powerful theme in the book throughout many of the author’s studies. When you read the book, you can see that there is this huge overarching theme of difficulty in entering the workforce, the labor force in Australia.

If you’re coming from a different country with a different language background (and you don’t have to achieve world peace in your answer to this question) – But just kind of for you, how do you think we could improve things to make it easier for these new migrants? Whether it is being mothers, whether it is being language learners, or if it’s entering the labor force, what should we as English speakers be doing in Australia?

Dr. Butorac: I feel like the society in general, one of the big things that has to shift, but it’s a societal wide shift, is that monolingualism, that idea that you’re only judging someone’s English capacity. You’re not seeing the full person. And I feel like if we recognized a person’s full language capital, then that would make us judge them differently in terms of going for jobs.

That’s one thing. And also, the qualifications recognition. I mean, that thing that needs to be loosened up.

Even like me coming from Canada with my post-grad TESOL from Canada, it wasn’t recognized in Australia.

Brynn: The same thing happened to me. I had a CELTA certification from Europe. And when I came over here to teach English in Australia, I had to re-certify.

Dr. Butorac: Yes. The only person I struck, like colleague I ever struck, who didn’t have that problem, came from the UK. There seemed to be full recognition of her prior qualifications.

And I was a bit surprised at them not recognizing my TESOL diploma because I thought it’s from Canada, a very similar education system to here. How does that not even appeal to you? But no, it had to be it had to be assessed.

They did a bad job of that first. I had to challenge that. They had to go back and then do a very lengthy – It took months, which really surprised me. So, yes, that is a problem for many people.

The other thing I think we could do within the Settlement English program, and this is just based on, I guess, responding to the findings from my own study, is help new migrants navigate some of the more challenging aspects of getting a job.

And so, I’m thinking, we should be using what we’ve learned from research to inform students about what to expect. So, for example, we know from previous audits of the labour market that there is prejudice that favors hiring people from within the Anglosphere. So, some people are more likely to get an interview call back from a job application than others.

And this is a function of their ethnicity. But we never tell students this. We just pivot a lot of their English language development towards being able to get a job on the assumption that all they have to do is develop their English.

So, they have better English proficiency. So, when students aren’t successful, they assume that it must be them, must be their English. When in reality, it is quite likely that their life of success is about the prejudice of the company that they’re, you know, trying to hire into.

And I feel that if we could first be open about having an honest discussion about racism in the labour market, this could pave the way to being able to advise students on strategies for dealing with this. And I think back to that study from 2009, I think, that Booth, Leigh and Varganova did an audit of the labour market by applying for over 5,000 jobs and so on. And one of their main findings that stuck with me was if you’ve got a Chinese last name, you have to apply for twice as many jobs as if you’ve got an Anglo last name in order to get an interview call back.

And I thought, why are we not telling students this? And it’s like, OK, so then they can at least strategise. All right, so I have to just keep applying because I’ll have to apply for twice as many.

You know, I know that’s a really simplistic way of looking at. But I feel like, why not pass on this kind of information that we know from research, pass it on to the new migrants in the settlement program so they can figure out how to manage that reality? Because this assumption that it’s just about your English is not good enough.

And it makes them blame themselves. And I’ve seen that time and again, you know, they go, it must be me, you know, there’s something wrong with me.

It does. And that kind of goes back to what you were saying about how your participants had sort of this idea of an Australian woman or maybe Australians in general or Australian society and what the society is and the freedoms that it affords. And this kind of puts that into sharp relief, you know, it’s quite a contrasting idea.

But you’re right. I think it’s important that we’re at least honest about it.

Dr. Butorac: Yes. Yeah. But I think and so maybe that’s just a question of within the practical front, you know, the coalface of teaching language.

We should be connecting more with the research that lies behind some of the thinking and what we know about, you know, society from applied studies, you know, from the sociolinguistic studies that have been done, particularly in migration and settlement experiences and trajectories and so on.

Brynn: I agree. I really love that answer. Let’s shift a little bit to the actual co-authoring of this monograph.

So you and five other people co-authored this book and that to me, and I have done group projects before, that sounds really hard. What were the ups and downs of the writing process for you? How do six of you do this, especially during a global pandemic?

Dr. Butorac: Yeah, the pandemic was probably a bit challenging. But, you know, to be honest, it was really more up than down. And I think this is a great way of doing academic work for me.

I really enjoyed it. And this is not just for the ability to work with the larger sets of ethnographic data, which obviously it enabled us to do, but also for the joys of collaborating with colleagues. You know, it’s really nice.

And it does, of course, rely on, you know, people being able to work well together. But I think our team is really wonderful. So, for me, it was always a joy to meet with my colleagues.

And I think we’re all quite different. But I feel like we complement each other really well. You know, academically, we’re not all at the same stage in our careers.

Of course, Ingrid is in a much more senior role to all of the other co-authors. But that has felt more like an opportunity than a problem. And I think we also see each other as social equals.

And so, we’re able to have a good laugh together as well as work together. So, yeah, I really loved it. I think the only downside for me was the physical distance, which was worse during COVID when we couldn’t travel, especially in and out of Western Australia.

But we still connected online. It was that physical distance because most of the colleagues, and it’s the same for Emily. Both of us live outside Sydney.

We’ve taken every opportunity we could to gather in person. And I always feel such a personal and professional boost when I meet these women. And I remember thinking back in that first workshop, I remember thinking professionally, these are my people.

I had a real sense of being at home then. And I think that’s because I’d been feeling a bit isolated at work. Perhaps because anthropology and sociology, I had moved into teaching in the faculty.

It’s quite a small program at Curtin. And so, to be in the room with these women, and most of them I’d met while I was doing my PhD at Macquarie, and being able to continue working with Ingrid. And we’d all done research in a similar broad field.

It was really affirming for me. It’s always been a really positive thing. I love it.

Brynn: That’s really lovely. I love that answer. And I feel the same way with the Language on the Move research group at Macquarie University.

I love gathering with those people. I love the camaraderie that we have, not just as fellow academics, but many of us as women, several of us as mums who are also doing all this academic work. And it really does feel like an opportunity to network with those people, but also develop friendships and relationships, which I think is really important in academia, which can be a difficult sphere to work in.

Dr. Butorac: Oh, it can.

And I think a lot of that is to do with Ingrid’s personality and her desire to create this kind of sociality, because you don’t always see this with academics. And I feel like I’ve learned a lot from being supervised by Ingrid and from watching the way she does bring people together, her students, her former students, and create a social world around it. And that creates opportunities for people.

And I think that’s really wonderful. And you don’t see enough of that. But I think this collaborating idea is so great.

And to be able to combine your different research projects in that kind of collaboration to create this bigger data set is really exciting, actually. It’s a new way of looking at ethnography.

Brynn: And honestly, it makes for a really good book. I read it and it’s great. So, I applaud that.

And before we wrap up, can you tell us what you’re up to these days, kind of post-authorship life? I know you’re a senior lecturer. Can you talk to us about what you’re currently teaching?

Dr. Butorac: Yeah, sure. Well, I’m in a teaching-focused position. So mostly what I do is teaching and supervision for about six years.

This is the first year actually I’ve returned to just teaching and supervision because I was also doing leadership roles at the school level for about six years. But it’s really been nice to sort of be immersing myself back more fully in the delivery of the programs and having more direct contact with students. But one of the things I did soon after I joined the faculty, and which I’m quite proud of, is I created a new unit that explored the sociology of language, because this was an area that was quite missing from the major, and the unit’s called Language and Social Life.

And it explores theory and research in a range of topics from the sociology of language, as well as skills development in doing research. So doing qualitative research that focuses on language ideology and use, so looking at frameworks for doing discourse analysis and things like that, working with datasets. And so, in the sociology of language, there’s topics on gender and language and language ideology, race and power and language and culture and things.

There’s also topics from my collaboration with Ingrid, and also other scholars that I’ve met through the Macquarie University connection. So, for example, there’s one topic on linguistic diversity and social justice, and that draws heavily from Ingrid’s publication on that topic. And then another topic that I brought in a couple of years after I’d started teaching it was the result of going to a symposium at Sydney University that was organised by Laura Smith-Kahn and Alex Grey.

And that really opened my mind to some of the fantastic research that’s been done in things like forensic linguistics and in understanding how language ideologies mediate criminal justice and asylum claims hearings. And so that topic is called Language and the Law. So we just look at a whole range of things in there.

So yeah, it’s been this collaboration and the connections with people that I met through Macquarie has influenced that unit and inspired some of the work that goes on there. But I love that unit, I love teaching it.

Brynn: That unit sounds awesome. I might have to show up there as a student because it sounds really good. And I agree, I love teaching as well.

I get to be a tutor in undergrad courses every other semester. And I just really, really like it. I feel like I go back to my roots in that way because I feel like that’s how I was trained was to be a teacher. And I really love doing it. So, I agree, I think it’s a really important part of what we do.

Dr. Butorac: Well, it is and it’s quite impactful. I thought years ago when I was sort of going, oh, I should be publishing more. And then I thought, you know what, I could publish something that 10 people might read if I’m lucky.

But I’ve got 80 people standing in front of me right now and I can speak directly to them. And that’s meaningful.

Brynn: That is meaningful. And that’s a beautiful way to end. Thank you for chatting with me today, Donna. I really appreciate it.

And thank you to everyone for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel. Leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Until next time!

The conversation addresses community and heritage language schooling research and practice, and our guest’s long history of important language policy research and activism, as well as the interconnections between the two.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Reference

Cruickshank, K., Lo Bianco, J., & Wahlin, M. (Eds.). (2023). Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges, and Teaching Practices. Taylor & Francis.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick; added 29/05/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dr Torsh: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hanna Torsh, and I’m a lecturer in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

I’m very pleased today to say that my guest is Joseph Lo Bianco, a foundational figure in linguistics here in Australia. I could say many things, but I will introduce him as Professor of Language and Literacy Education at Melbourne University. Today, we’re going to talk about his new book, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. It was co-edited with Ken Cruickshank and Merryl Wahlin and published by Routledge.

Welcome to the show, Jo!

Prof Lo Bianco: Thank you very much, Hanna.

Dr Torsh: Now, for those who don’t know your very impressive body of work or, perhaps, are new to this field, could you just start by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Prof Lo Bianco: Ok, well thank you for the invitation. I’ve recently retired from the position at the University of Melbourne in Australia which I’d had for 20 years. Prior to that and even during that period of time at the university, I worked in language policy studies. I started off my academic life as an economist. I was very interested in the integration of migrant populations, particularly migrant women.

I worked in that focus of work in Victoria. But I became less interested in it when it started not to focus on culture and not provide any kind of focus on people’s language. I retrained as a language person and educator and linguist, and then I became slightly uninterested with the descriptive tendencies of a lot of linguistics. I’ve always really been interested in public action probably more than anything. So, I started to research policy around language. I became actively involved in those things myself directly.

Then, during the late 1970s, early 1980s in Melbourne, Victoria and other places, I was very involved in activism around these things. There were some political changes which meant that I was invited to put my money where my mouth was. I was basically demanding that governments do better for minority populations and they said, “Well, let’s see what you would do.” So, I was invited to draft policies. I did write these, and I became extremely interested in the traction of ideas.

The policies were accepted. The National Policy on Languages in 1987 was the peak. Really, it was the first multilingual policy, some people say the first one ever anywhere, but certainly in English speaking settings. Then I became very heavily involved in the implementation of this. I developed a very acute interest in problems of making change real. This moved me away from academic research considerations. I had always loved research, but you can’t do so many things at once. So, I became very actively involved in that.

Because the policy was adopted by government and launched and funded, there was a lot of interest in it internationally, and the early successes that we had. Languages started to boom. We had extraordinary growth in research and interest in translation and interpreting and in the approach that we took in the policy, which was comprehensive.

Most policies, if you look at them, on language tend to be just the policy on behalf of the official dominant language of a country. Country X protects Language Y. That’s typically what language policies do. Or they tend to be some concession to a minority population, but they don’t go very far.

We were trying to do very ambitious things, you know. Think about public discourse, how people spoke to each other, inclusion of minorities, social cohesion, but also justice and rights questions. Naturally, a lot of opposition grew up against this from people who didn’t like what we were trying to do. So, the politics of language became my life, really, for many years.

Then, because of what we were doing, it got noticed by people like Joshua Fishman in the United States, who invited me over there. I’ve never done what I promised him I would do, actually. At one point he said I really should document this as an experiential process, and I will do that in my retirement at some point as a reflection on how to do language policy from the inside. Even though language policy is something that is studied by applied language scholars, they still tend to theorise it a lot. So, its practicality is lost, I think, and I want to reinject that.

But anyway, this was noticed around the world, and I got lots and lots of invitations to work in different places, including with international organisations like UNESCO and UNICEF and the Council of Europe. So, I started to do assignments on invitation in Southeast Asia – Samoa, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu. And in South Asia – Sri Lanka for the World Bank, Myanmar for UNICEF and other Southeast Asian settings. Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines. I went to many assignments in Europe.

So, this has been my career since then, working on practical language policy things, which always raise questions of literacy and language study but also the linguistics of these problems. Who describes what language is? How do they do them? What happens with the work that linguists do? How does it get taken up or not get taken up within practical contexts? That became my obsession.

Recently, we’ve just submitted for publication a book on Tunisia that I’ve done with a colleague. We’ve looked at language, ideological discourses. Arabic, French, the two kinds of Arabic, English and Berber and other language issues there. So, it became a kind of reverberating set of discussions. I’ve had a very wonderful career of working all around the world in different settings on practical problems.

In some places, we’ve produced significant change. In Thailand, we produced the first language policy in that country that wasn’t just about the protection of the national language. In Myanmar, we did 45 public discourses around language rights for minority populations, the learning of the main language by minority populations, which is often also a grievance. This kind of thing. I did a trilingual policy in Sri Lanka in 1999 and submitted this and worked with the President’s office on the implementation on it. Then it got thwarted by conflicts there.

So, I’ve had this wonderful opportunity and in this part of my career I want to think about putting down some reflections on this experience.

Dr Torsh: Oh, thank you. That’s so interesting. I’m thrilled to hear that you’re going to write a reflection about that process of putting together the National Policy on Languages because that’s something that continues to be important in the work of myself and other scholars in Australia, so that’s really exciting.

Ok, but we’re here to talk about your new book at the moment, so congratulations on that new edited book. Before we talk about it, the book is called, as I said, Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education: Research, Challenges and Teaching Practices. For our listeners who aren’t really across the community languages sector in Australia, could you just give us a brief overview of it? Obviously, it’s also connected to your own policy activism, and how did that happen? How did it come about that it was established in Australia, and how has it changed? How has the policy focus and the sector changed since that time?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it’s a long and convoluted story, and I can only tell a tiny fraction of it. Suffice to say that in really nearly every society that I’ve worked in, I’ve visited and worked with community language schools in Nagoya in Japan, these kinds of processes of a community generating institutional structures to support and maintain and transmit their languages to their children is really universal.

In some cases in some societies, it’s heavily repressed, and in other societies they’re actually encouraged. But the phenomenon is practically global, I would say, and it tends to be ignored. Most of what focuses the attention of researchers in relation to language education is mainstream or official or dominant schooling. We’ve had this third sector, you might call it, third sector schools. The two sectors other than that are the public government school and then the independent or private schools, and in Australia there are large Catholic school sectors. So, they’re the two other sectors and then you have these parttime schools in the main, although some of them are also full time, that are schools whose primary purpose is the transmission of language and culture to immigrant children, but also increasingly indigenous children in our society.

Now, traveling around the world and the kind of work that I’ve done that I described before, I noticed at meetings and other places there would be community representatives, or even academics who would come and say, “Look, I’m working with Chinese schools in Malaysia” or something or other. And that can be mainstream government schools or that can be the parttime schools.

So, with Ken and Merryl we decided that we would hold an international conference to try and do some proper comparative work. This had never really been done. And we had this very successful conference in Sydney, much affected by Covid and restrictions on travel, but nevertheless it was a very successful conference. And we realised there’s a huge unaddressed agenda there, well we suspected that. So, we thought we’d produce a volume that started to map out the territory. There’s a little bit of a taxonomy that I started to produce in my own chapter, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done into this.

But also, what needs to be both theorised and then developed in a practical way, is what do we want of these schools? If we’re adopting a pluralist position where we believe in language rights, what role would we hope for these schools? Then, in practical terms, what could be done?

Now, in my policy work, right back to the really early 1980s, late 1970s, I worked for government in Victoria. We promoted all sorts of things like cooperation and integration between these schools. Sometimes these schools use the premises of a mainstream school on a weekend or after hours. So, we used to do very practical things. We did this in 1981, you know, facilitating the writing up of contracts, of meetings between the two sectors. Often, the teachers are not trained, or they can be trained teachers in another system but it’s not recognised here. We would facilitate collaboration.

You can imagine the kinds of problems that would be there of a practical nature. Of people not understanding each other, even mistrust. Sometimes much worse things than that. All of these things were there and in spades, which is a colloquialism of saying in large quantity. So, we started to do lots of facilitation of this.

In 1982, actually from your university, Macquarie University in Sydney, Professor Marlene Norst, who has sadly passed away, she was commissioned partly from some of the pressure we had been putting on the federal government, to do a survey of these schools as a preparation to some kind of systemic support for them. She produced a wonderful report (which) unfortunately got repressed by forces who didn’t want this report. It wasn’t just a survey. She produced a really interesting guide to what could be done. She went beyond the brief in a very helpful way.

There’s always resistance to any kind of progress. We know this. Unfortunately, her work got marginalised. But I promote it a lot because I liked her a lot. She was a good scholar and tried to do a great thing, but it’s got ignored.

I took that up in my 1987 National Policy on Languages and promoted it, and we got some extra funding for these schools, so they started to be incorporated into the system. So, this is what we wanted to do in the book, is to think, “Well, what do other societies do? Are they marginalised? Are they given municipal level support, but not state or federal government support, depending on the governance structures in different countries? Are they actively repressed? Are they underground schools?”. This happens in very repressive systems. This can be very dangerous to the lives, actually, of people, to engage in this kind of activity. So, I think there’s a call for solidarity with people who struggle against repression, but also to learn from systems where more substantial work is done.

In some systems, government and public education, or mainstream schooling, only supports prestige foreign languages and these community languages tend to be marginalised and they might get some token support or acknowledgement or given a license to continue to teach, but they’re not actually encouraged. And all the community language teaching and language maintenance, as distinct from second language learning, would happen only in those marginal settings.

Well, in Australia and many other countries in the world we have a much more integrated approach. Our mainstream schools teach multiple languages, including many community languages. Many students study the language at school, at mainstream school, that they might also study in an after-hours system. So, I think, and we can go onto this with another question, but I think we need to think imaginatively and in a future-oriented way about cleaning up this mess, as it were.

Having principles that start from a different basis, not a toleration basis, but a basis of learning, for having a different way in which all of these – I mean, children just have one brain. The learning goes on in that same one brain, and if that one brain is shopped around different systemic structures, those structures ought to get their act together rather than the child and the family having to continually have to adjust to different forms of provision.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, great, thank you. I think for those who are outside of the sector and aren’t that aware of it, can you just explain what that discontinuity actually can look like for those who haven’t experienced it?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, it can look like a child studying whatever language it happens to be, let’s say Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, in a school in Sydney during the week. They might do a one- or two-hour program during the week, so it’s not a huge commitment of time. And then, because their family might come from Malaysia and be an ethnic Chinese family but they might not speak modern standard Chinese, or Mandarin, in their home, the child goes to a Saturday morning school run by the community, or an after-hours school two days a week. And sometimes that after-hours teaching happens in the same physical premises as the week program.

Now, there’s a lot of issues here. One of them is about the coherence of the pedagogies that are used in the two places and the wastefulness of the lack of any collaboration between the two systems. Wouldn’t it be much better if it were possible for this to be maybe not seamless, that would be an ideal aspiration, but at least less jagged and disruptive if it were coordinated in some way, pedagogically as well as in other ways. If there were shared knowledge among the different teachers about individual children.

It would have to start from a child’s focused look and also be informed by good pedagogical language learning processes and also of the affordances. Different systems afford different possibilities. Imagine a highly literate mother tongue speaker teaching on a Saturday or Sunday but who isn’t necessarily a trained teacher. This might be a perfect input for colloquial, continuous communicative language. Then you might have a more structured grammar-centred approach in the school system. These are just some ideas that I’ve had that we could work on, and we’ve put them into action in some places.

But I feel like systems, governments, run away from this. It seems to them like an immense problem, a very messy problem. But as I argue in my chapter in the book and at the talk I gave at the conference, I think they’re going to have to deal with this at some point because of the radical changes that are happening in the world of communication and learning anyway that are going to overwhelm all these structures. We’re going to be forced to think about these things differently. I always think if you can predict a change happening, prepare for it. Start talking about it. Get intellectuals in to start theorising what’s involved. Literacy scholars have got a lot to contribute here, and people who think about the semiotics about the representation of language with communities.

I love partnerships which involve these kinds of interactions. I’ve always found them very productive, and I’ve always tried to set them up. That’s what we did in Myanmar (with) all those dialogues.

Sticking with the community language schools which, in some countries, I have to clarify, are called heritage language schools, or heritage languages, and I and other people have resisted that encroachment of that terminology here. Not because it’s bad terminology but because typically in English, I think, “heritage” has a connotation of something that’s in the past, like a heritage façade of a building. Or the heritage which might be the historical memory of a community. I’m not saying that it’s inevitable that it has that connotation, but I think it often does. Whereas a “community language” suggests that it’s something that is present and vibrant and vital within an existing alive community now. So, I’ve preferred it from that point of view.

In the book, we say “community/heritage” because obviously other people use the other terminology. And of course, we can inject new meaning into terms. We don’t have to be defeated by past ways in which words work. So anyway, there’s that kind of issue there.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, that’s great, thank you. I’m now rethinking my use of “heritage language” in my own work, so that’s great to think about that.

I’m really interested in this argument that you make in your chapter, as you said, about changes in our understanding of what literacy is. So, you have a chapter in the book which is based on a talk that you did at the conference. The chapter, which introduces the volume, is called “Community/Heritage Language Schools Transforming Education: Beyond complementary, more than integration”. And you’ve already said systems need to grapple with this idea that you can’t have these two sectors not talking to each other, that it’s not in the interest of the learner. You argue that in part because of this idea of the way we understand literacy is changing as a result of technology, of the fourth industrial revolution.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that, for our listeners? I realise they have to go read the chapter, but just a little bit of a summary for them, to draw them in?

Prof Lo Bianco: It’s an immense topic, of course. If you look at any organisation that has worked in literacy for a long time, you can’t fail to notice that they have adjusted their definition of what it is. One organisation whose definitions I have studied is UNESCO. Of course, they are a very important organisation in this because when they were founded, from the very beginning, they were given the world mandate I would call it for kind of a global agenda for literacy in the world. That’s how I’ve described it in a publication.

If we look at how they understood literacy in the late 40s, early 1950s, and compare it to how they understand literacy today, it’s cheese and chalk. Two very, very different notions. Teachers and researchers have done this. I mean, there have been many movements in this. One of the most important ones was the new literacy studies of the 1990s which started to inject social understandings of literacy and move away from a pure and psychometric or cognitivist approach. Of course, it’s moved on even a lot since then.

So, what we know is that what is taken to be literacy has expanded beyond simple capacity to read and write a language to multiple other dimensions of what’s involved in being a literate person in a society that penalises people who are not literate. This is the really important social consequence of this, that we have the social cost. It shouldn’t be like this, but it is. The social cost of low literacy even understood in traditional ways of understanding literacy is very, very high. There is a high risk of unemployment. It’s no accident that a really high proportion of prisoners in jails are low literate people. There are multiple explanations of this. It’s not a predictor, it’s a consequence of the social punishment.

I’m very committed to this because both of my parents were very low literate people. Neither of them had any serious formal education. And yet, they were both very intelligent people. So, we can’t make any kind of connection between intelligence. This is an enormous discourse, and I’ll just leave it planted there, but what I did want to say about this is that what’s changed in our understanding about literacies from the 50s to now has been this social dimension.

What’s changing increasingly now is a massive technological injection in which multimodality is the principal characteristic of literacy. I mean, anything we do online cannot be reduced to language-centred semiotics. It involves manipulation of multiple semiotic resources that are not just linguistic anymore. Colour, movement, image – there’s any number of things that go into a very complex meaning-making practice. This is going to continue to accelerate in what some people call literacy 4.0. My colleague Professor Lesley Farrell at the university uses that term. (This) mirrors industry 4.0, the 4^th industrial revolution, which is not just computers but artificial intelligence beyond computing as a practice that people are in charge of. It’s absurd in a way, to call them machines anymore, but machines which learn and can learn independently generate their own kind of knowledge and then project that into the space of meaning. So, we’ve got something really radical going on. That’s going to change how language works.

I think one of the reasons we have a crisis in language study today, and this is very true, sadly in English speaking or dominant countries in particular. We have the biggest struggle for language teaching and learning that we’ve had for many years. People misunderstand the technologies as obviating the need for language study. That’s because they’re very reductionist about what’s involved. People used to take literacy in this very reductionist simple way. They take language to be very reductionist, and they tend to think it’s just basic communication. So, we can inject that stuff with voice retrieval. You can ask your little pen to say something in Japanese and you’ll hand that to someone and it’ll say “good morning” in Japanese.

This is completely possible. It exists. There are very sophisticated technologies that will even do lip syncing, so that you’ll look like you’re speaking the language when you take a video of yourself speaking German or Italian or whatever it happens to be. So, this is going to be a battle that we have, to persuade administrators and other people that language learning is not this. This is forms of communication. Let’s welcome them. Let’s adopt them. Let’s embrace them. We can’t deny them. They’re there. They’re going to grow. Elon Musk wants to inject probes or whatever they are, implants in people’s brains. All of these things are going on at a very rapid rate, and some of them might be ethically very, very questionable. But I can’t see any way that they’re going to be stopped or slowed down until we get on top of what they mean for people.

So, we have to understand them. What they mean is that people’s learning will be occurring in places other than in schooling. It will be self-generated and generated by outside forces including machines. It’s going to be massively challenging to everything that curriculums, official curriculums, require and prescribe in schooling.

This is going to create, I think, for indigenous populations, and especially for dispersed, small populations – I worked with the Tigrinya community in Melbourne many years ago with a very small population in Melbourne but who had other members in Brazil and in Africa and in Italy and other places. You can aggregate numbers in communities with the technologies that you can’t do otherwise very easily. So, there are multiple benefits that we can point to. Individualisation, aggregation, personalisation, learner control and pacing. There’s lots of pedagogical impact that a learner can govern in this.

The challenge for schooling is absolutely foundational, almost existential I would say. Therefore, we have to embrace it. In my chapter, and I only just make a small dent into the problem, we have to think about a new way to imagine learning and start from there. The school systems that currently are the principal institutional ways of delivering learning have to be redone, and they have to be seamless. Teachers have to be managers of the educational experiences of learners. That’s how I call them. Rather than the exclusive input to the learner. So, they have to understand the principles of the acquisition of language knowledge.

I see a bigger role for professional language specialists in this, to interact with practitioners directly, but also curriculum writers and others. We have to rethink these things. And then communities who own community or heritage language schools and who are the repositories of the communication in these languages, you know, the Arabic, Tamil, Vietnamese and Greek in Sydney and everywhere else in Australia and other countries. A large part of what’s involved in learning is interaction with speakers, so we have to make sure that there’s seamless connection there.

So, I’m just touching on the outlier of this, but that’s what I’m trying to do with this, is to get people to imagine more creatively, pushing ahead, but not that far. These things are imaginable within a decade. Many of them exist now. Instantaneous translation, voice to script, I mean all of these things challenge all the separations we’ve ever had. What is literacy going to be when it’s possible to have no division between spoken language, signed language and their representation in a written form or some other form?

They’re really important questions to ask and to be asked by people who are interested in multilingualism.

Dr Torsh: Yeah, so much to think about. And I guess this kind of question that you sort of answered, but I want to make sure I understood and maybe you can elaborate a little bit. For mainstream teachers, this is the question you pose at the end of your chapter and that somebody asked you, and I really was interested in this. What can mainstream teachers do in order to support the learning of community languages? It sounds like you’re saying they are also a really important part of this process, of this existential crisis that we’re seeing in education when it comes to both language and literacy and what they mean.

Prof Lo Bianco: I’m often asked this question by mainstream teachers when I give talks. As I said before possibly, I’m speaking to Indonesian teachers in Victoria tomorrow. One of the anticipated questions is exactly this even though their specialist teachers of Indonesian are mainstream teachers.

When you look at students who drop out of language programs – I did a study once in the western suburbs of Melbourne in working class schools. I interviewed and discussed and did subjectivity analysis with large numbers of kids. I published it in a book in 2013 out of Multilingual Matters. One of the things that we found (is that we) classified students according to whether they were going to continue or drop language study. We classified them as “waverers” or “committed” kids and then we worked heavily with the waverers to think about what was it that was going on in their minds.

One of the things that came up repeatedly is something that mainstream teachers have got an enormous amount of influence on, and not just the language teacher. That is the attitude or ideology that is attached to the practice of language teaching and learning.

We found that lots of students had imbibed a negative, sometimes quite racist construction of what they were engaged in. This was not coming from the language teacher. This was coming from systemic imagery and systemic, often not even openly, hostile – anyone who’s had children or raised children or been around children, little children I mean, knows quickly that they are semiotic sponges. They pick up signals from multiple sources. They know when something is half-hearted. In the book I called it half-heartedness. When schools are just half-hearted about something, kids get it. They know it’s less important than something else. You’re not actively saying that learning Japanese or Italian, the two languages in that particular volume, is less important than doing something else like sport. But I see the way the school is arranged, and I can work out that’s exactly what you’re doing. One of the girls I interviewed said this to me. She said, “They don’t really, really mean it. We can tell. So why are they pretending?”. So this is something mainstream teachers can do, be enthusiastic supporters.

I helped introduce a CLIL program in a Japanese school where the boys, it was a boys’ school in this particular case, had had a mostly grammatical or formal syllabus. They were doing fine. And as soon as the Japanese teacher started to teach content that was about the Fukushima earthquake, really interesting material in which the kids had to research online and the teacher had to teach technical language ahead of time so they could manage to read these complex texts and stuff like that, the first thing that happens is pushback from the mainstream teachers. Oh, geography, that’s my space. Or, oh science and physics, that’s my space. You’re just the language teacher. That was all resolved beautifully when the teachers understood that the purpose of the CLIL was for the language teacher to enrich the content in the Japanese program. It wasn’t the exclusive teaching of the science or geography. Then they started to see the benefit of additional focus on the content they were teaching as specialists. So, the collaboration was brought about.

These conversations between the mainstream and specialist language teachers are essential. Mainstream language teachers can either choose to be an innocent bystander, an active supporter or at least an encourager. Again, it’s this same one mind that these children have. One mind, one heart that gets shipped around to different classes. The multiple messages that they pick up about the choices they need to make are significant. So that’s something I would say in relation to that question.

Dr Torsh: Great, thank you. Yeah, I know that study well. I’ve used it in my own research. It’s fantastic. I think that it’s really helpful to teachers, and I know we have education students who listen to the podcast, so really helpful to know what they can do.

That was really my last question, but before we wrap up, I just want to know – you’ve talked a little bit about your next project on Tunisia, which is a fascinating context. I’m excited to hear about that. What else is up next for you?

Prof Lo Bianco: Well, that one’s in press, or it’s under review. I’m working with a dear colleague in Sri Lanka. I’ve lived and worked in Sri Lanka, and my colleague and I are putting together a volume on bilingual education there. Bilingual education means, typically, English plus either Sinhala or Tamil. That’s a project that will come out next year. I’ve got a book coming out with some colleagues from Hong Kong Uni on supporting learners of Chinese. There’s a lot of other work. I’m much less efficient than I used to be because of illness and old age, both of which have made me slow down.

But I really, really want to go back into the theory of language change and deliberate language change. Language always changes. Everyone knows that language is a dynamic process and changes. But language policy and planning is deliberate language change, and even deliberate language change can happen unconsciously. But planned deliberate language change, which is what I call language policy, and as I said, Joshua Fishman, when I first met him, said that I should document this, a kind of insider account of policy writing, and that’s what I want to devote some time to.

But unfortunately, I was trained as an academic in an era in which you made a distance between yourself as a scholar and the subject matter. I know I haven’t done that for years, but that’s still my predilection. I have to overcome that a great deal to speak personally in this way in writing. I need to do that. That’s something I ought to do. I’ve got a huge amount of documents from, like, 45 years of engagement in language policy, agitation and writing and stuff, and criticism.

You can’t just criticise if you want to – I mean, a lot of language scholarship is dominated by a critical disposition these days, especially sociolinguistics. That’s been important to uncover and expose a lot of injustices and hierarchies in the world. But I don’t think we should overstate the agentive power of our disciplines to really affect change. You have to engage with processes of concrete change, and you have to not set aside criticism, but make criticism productive. I find that, unfortunately, a lot of critical scholarship, maybe not a lot, some critical scholarship is not so productive. If you want to be productive, you have to engage with people whose views are different from your own. You have to compromise on things. You have to find conceptual categories that unite differences.

When I was working in Myanmar and south of Thailand where there’s been a conflict for many years in which language and script and bilingualism are implicated, it’s really really indispensable. It’s not just a methodological, I think it’s an ethical requirement to adopt a different set of understandings and practices. Criticism is something that has to be understood as being particular to some purposes and not others. So, I do think that there’s too much mindless criticism. Too much of a disposition to begin activity with a critical air.

Having said that, I don’t want to be assumed to be anti-critical. Criticism is critical to civil life, to decent life, to social improvement. I just think that there are moments of productive participation in shared creation of new things in which criticism can be a problem. I’ve seen that to very bad effect. I’ve seen it from people who have been trained just in the critical tradition who don’t know when to stop.

So that’s something I’d like to do. I’m going to think about that a lot. I haven’t written enough about that. I read other people’s writing on this and I’ve learned from it, but I feel as someone who has tried to write language policies and be engaged with concrete productive change and not just analysis or critique, that that’s something I want to think about more carefully.

Dr Torsh: Oh, that’s a really wonderful place to end, I think, on that. What do we do beyond criticism, especially for emerging scholars and research students? So, fantastic. Fantastic.

Look, I would love to keep going, but I have to wrap up. So, thanks again, Jo! Thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend our Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time!

Broadly speaking, Croatian Studies in Australia attracts three groups of students: first, children and grandchildren of immigrants from former Yugoslavia who learned the language at home and want to study it formally to develop higher levels of proficiency, including academic literacies; second, students with a heritage connection who did not learn the language in the home but want to develop some level of proficiency to connect with extended family, also on visits back to Croatia; and third, a small but growing number of students, with no heritage connection who have developed an interest in Croatian for various reasons. The latter include mature age students who take up the challenge of learning another language later in life for reasons of personal interest and intellectual development.

Dr Jasna Novak Milić in the Croatian Studies Centre Library at Macquarie University

Croatian is a fascinating language in many ways and so the conversation is also a springboard to speak about language politics and language naming, both back in Croatia/former Yugoslavia and in the diaspora. Croatian speakers first came to Australia in the early 20th century but mass migration from former Yugoslavia was a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century.

The Croatian Studies program at Macquarie University developed in this context and during Australia’s decisive turn to multiculturalism from the 1980s onward. The Croatian Studies Centre today enjoys strong community support through the Croatian Studies Foundation and is also benefitting from the commitment of the Croatian state, a member of the European Union, to the Croatian diaspora.

Beyond the specifics of Croatian language learning, our conversation also turned to broader issues related to “small” languages in Australian higher education, and why the availability of languages programs in higher education is critical for heritage language maintenance.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Related resources

• About the Croatian Studies Centre at Macquarie University
• Study Croatian at Macquarie University
• “Easy Croatian” Podcast” hosted by Dr Jasna Novak Milić on SBS
• Keynote lecture by Dr Jasna Novak Milić, “Why Australia needs Croatian Studies“
• Petition to save Croatian, German, Greek, Italian, and Russian at Macquarie University

Video available at Faculti: https://faculti.net/like-the-fish-not-in-water/

Editor’s note: Despite its diversity, Australia continues to be imagined as a White nation. In this post, which is also available as a 20-minute video, Donna Butorac explains how this idealized image of the White nation shapes the settlement trajectories of women migrants from Asia and Europe in different ways.

Teaching in Australia’s Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP)

I did research on language learning and identity among people who were studying in the Australian Adult Migrant English Program (we call it the AMEP for short), where I taught for 9 years. This is a federally funded and administered settlement English program that provides subsidised language classes for new migrants who have Beginner to Intermediate levels of English proficiency on arrival. The program is delivered by organisations that successfully bid for fixed-term contracts through a competitive tendering process, and historically it has most often been delivered by state-based post-secondary colleges of further education. However, during the time I was working at the AMEP we saw a successful move into the space by profit-seeking private sector organisations.

At the AMEP I often taught classes that were mostly made up of women and I developed a curiosity about what it was like to be them – to be sitting in that class, learning English in this context. I wondered how it made them feel about themselves and how it impacted their relationships and their sense of the future, of who they were and who they felt they could be in the world. This led me to design a study that was about language learning, identity and gendered subjectivity in the context of migration. I wanted to find out how developing a voice in English might impact a woman’s sense of self, her aspirations and also her key family relationships. I also wanted to understand how the way she was being constructed in Australian society might impact her aspirational sense of self and to compare this with her socialisation in her primary languages and country of origin.

An AMEP classroom (Image credit: Immigration Department)

English teaching in the AMEP for the labour market

The AMEP has been around in Australia since the late 1940s but it has evolved quite a bit over that time. Successive governments, whether they are conservative or centre-left, have always tied inward migration to economic development goals but in the time that I was working at the AMEP in the early 2000s, we saw this connection being more overtly expressed within the framing of the contract terms and in the design of the language courses we delivered. It was also expressed by politicians in their media statements and in their presentations to AMEP teachers and researchers. For example, one government spokesperson told us that new arrivals who had come from difficult circumstances were “very marketable in the workplace” because of their “willingness to do jobs that many Australians reject” (Andrew Robb, 2006) and another federal minister described the role of immigration as a “job-matching agency for the nation”, because “as Australians take up the skilled work opportunities available, shortages of labour in the service and regionally based industries will become more and more acute” (Chris Evans, 2008).

So, the government was increasingly seeing the AMEP as leading new migrants from “the airport to the workplace” (as another politician put it in 2007) and this put pressure on the settlement English programs to adopt this outcome as a goal for English language development. Remember that they have to bid every few years for a new contract, so they closely examine government messaging for clues as to how best to frame their programs in the next contract round so they can beat out the competition.

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An example of how this translated into program change while I was conducting my study of new migrant women was that some of the curriculum and assessment content was reframed to focus on gaining skills needed for applying for a job, doing a job interview or communicating in the workplace, and there was a strong emphasis placed on helping migrants decide on their future study and employment goals. Each student had to meet with a vocational guidance officer when they arrived and set up a learning plan. This plan was updated by teachers and vocational guidance officers over the course of their time at the AMEP and the students all met with the vocational guidance officer again when they were exiting the program.

Learning a language, when it’s framed like this, becomes a commodity to attain in order to achieve economic settlement goals rather than a way of seeking knowledge and personal growth and a sense of belonging through developing a voice in a new language and culture.

And the way that the migrant language learner is positioned in this kind of context is as someone who is deficient in English, rather than as someone who is an emergent bilingual or multilingual.

But there is no place in all of this where the deficiencies of the society or of the labour market are ever problematised or discussed.

So, for example, racism in the Australian labour market, which has been well attested in the research literature, is never discussed and new migrants are not given strategies for how to counter this. What is also not discussed is that Australia still has a persistent monolingual mindset, in spite of there being hundreds of languages spoken in the community. In this kind of context, people may be judged only for their proficiency in English, rather than for their combined language capital. But in the settlement English program, language learners are led to believe that if they develop English proficiency, they will be able to achieve their social and economic settlement goals. When they struggle to realise these goals even after they have achieved a good level of functional English, and this was the case for some of the women in my project, they may naturally assume that the failing is theirs, and that their English is not good enough, when it might actually be a failing of a prejudiced English monolingual labour market or an unwillingness of employers to adequately acknowledge the skills and qualifications that the person brings with them.

Doing a sociolinguistic ethnography in the AMEP

To realise my research goals, I carried out an ethnographic study of 9 women who had recently migrated from a range of countries and who were studying in an Intermediate level class in the AMEP. I wanted to research with them over an extended period during the early phase of their post-migration settlement because I wanted to find out if the development of their voice in English actually made changes in the way they saw themselves and their aspirations. There had been other interview studies done on language learning and identity following migration, but these had more often been a retrospective reflection on the process. I wanted to try to capture this as it was being experienced.

I used qualitative methods of inquiry and data collection and this included two semi-structured personal interviews with each woman at the beginning and end of a 22-month data collection period, and I held a series of focus groups in the first year of the project; I also gave them an essay task at the beginning and end of the data collection period, in which I asked them to write about their aspirations for the future. In the final interview, I gave each woman the same broad prompts I had given them in the first interview because I was curious to know if their ideas had changed over the intervening period, perhaps as a result of changes in their sense of self from learning and using English. I also asked them to keep an email journal of their experience of learning and using English and how they felt about their lives. Because they were emergent users of English, I had thought that they might find it easier to write in English than to speak it; however, I was proven very wrong because for the most part they didn’t really engage with the journal task but seemed happy to talk to me and to each other! So, I ended up covering this topic in a third personal interview that I set up in the middle of the data collection period.

What emerged from the first stage analysis of the raw data was that the impact of language learning on identity could be usefully organised into three domains where the self is both constructed and performed – the self in key family relationships, the self in wider social interactions, and the self in work. I analysed each of these domains to identify sub-themes related to language, race and gender that emerged from across the data set. I was exploring identity and language learning, but this was also a way in to understanding what it’s like to be someone who has undertaken transnational migration involving language change and who is trying to find inclusion and belonging in a new society.

Migrant trajectories to social inclusion

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Social inclusion is a term that has been in use since the 1990s to convey ideas about the goal of creating pathways for economically marginalised people to achieve greater participation in society through employment. It is also used to refer to the inclusion of people from diverse cultures and languages within the mainstream in multiethnic societies. We might think of people who have migrated to a new society as being on trajectories of belonging and inclusion, where they might be on the social edges when they arrive, especially when the dominant language is not one they use well, but eventually the idea is that they will gain acceptance and inclusion and a sense of belonging within the mainstream of that society, in part through developing better competence in a dominant language.

What studies like mine have found is that this trajectory towards social inclusion is not always straightforward or complete for many migrants, often due to things a person may have little control over, like the way their race or their gender is viewed, or the way their language proficiency is judged, as a result of ideologies and prejudices within the receiving society.

Experiences of everyday racism shape pathways to inclusion

In my study I didn’t actually set out to explore race and prejudice but to explore the way a woman’s sense of self was being impacted by language learning in this cultural context; however, as I listened to the experiences of the women who participated in the study, both in interview and in conversation with each other, I realised that race was something I needed to discuss because it was a determiner of differences in the experiences and imaginings of inclusion and belonging that the women were reporting. For example, the women from European countries all expressed the realisation that they were just like everyone else because it seemed to them that most people in Australia came from families that had at some point in their history migrated from somewhere else.

These women felt despondent in the early settlement period about their English proficiency and how hard it was to communicate with others, but they could easily imagine becoming a part of the mainstream as their English improved. This kind of trajectory is normalised in the history of European migration to Australia and in the lives of the people they interacted with. So, the European women communicated a sense of optimism about their trajectories of inclusion and belonging in Australia. In contrast, the Asian women in the study did not express this kind of optimism about their settlement trajectories and they talked about the everyday racism that they and people they knew experienced, as well as what it was like trying to gain meaningful employment.

In the focus group discussions, some of the Asian women expressed the feeling that they might never achieve settlement success and might end up leaving Australia to have a better career. This really surprised the European women, who would say things like “But your English is really good; I don’t understand why you feel so hopeless about your future”.

Actually, one of the Asian women did end up going offshore, soon after the project ended, because she was offered a job with a global company that valued both of her languages, instead of just her English. In Australia, where only her English proficiency was being judged, she had constantly been rebuffed in the labour market and told that she needed to brush up on her English, which was functionally very good and certainly adequate to the jobs she was applying for. But offshore, she was being judged for her entire language capital, which included Japanese and English, and she was seen as a ‘fantastic bilingual’ as she described it.

When a migrant’s full language capital is being considered, as was the case with another Asian woman in the study, the employment outcome was quite different. This woman had migrated from China and she had a similar English proficiency to the woman I have just described, but when she began exploring professional employment opportunities she was immediately successful because the first company that interviewed her for a legal role was trying to build their client list in China and so they saw her as a bilingual, bi-cultural asset to the team instead of someone who was deficient in English. Actually, in the entire hiring process they never once commented on or asked about her English proficiency.

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Another finding from the study related to how new migrants might feel socially excluded by the language practices of locals. Some of the women in my study reported that in social situations with locals, for example at Church or with fellow students in post-secondary courses, locals in the group would speak in rapid colloquial English, using lots of idiomatic expressions, or they would speak to everyone else but never make eye contact with the women or speak to them. This practice made the women feel invisible, and it’s a fairly overt micro-aggression that excludes newcomers. Actually, this kind of experience was only reported by the Asian women in my study. But it seemed some of the European women were listening because towards the end of the project one of them told me in her final interview that she remembered what the Asian women had said about being made to feel invisible by locals and although she had never experienced this herself, she witnessed it with some Asian members of her tennis club that she played social games with. She had reflected on all this and she expressed a sense of her white privilege when she said to me “it’s nice to be beautiful white woman”.

Aside from these findings on race, there were really interesting findings on negotiating language use in key family relationships, and on how some women felt that they could express a different, more confident self in English than they could in their primary language.

Language learning and finding work

There are a number of conclusions related to language and race that come out of my study. For example, the way language proficiency is framed in the labour market impacts how successful new migrants are in achieving settlement goals through meaningful employment. As I’ve suggested, the Australian labour market is predominantly English monolingual, and this usually means that a migrant’s full language capital is not often considered when they are looking for work. However, in the few instances when their full language capital is being considered, this has the potential to greatly improve the settlement trajectory of new migrants and also to allow the economy to benefit from better utilising the qualifications and skills that migrants bring. It’s ironic really, because skilled migration is desired for Australia’s continued economic development and it makes up the largest proportion of the country’s annual migration intake, yet many people who come under that scheme struggle to find meaningful work in the fields they are qualified for, in part because of the way that ideologies about language and attitudes to race impact hiring practices.

One of the implications of these findings is that they can be used to develop the way that English language learning is framed within the settlement English program. In my experience, language learning was framed as the development of a kind of ideology-free, bounded lexico-grammatical system, and learners were encouraged to believe that developing proficiency in English was the key to social and economic inclusion.

Studies like mine have shown that this is not necessarily the case and their findings suggest that instead of framing learners as deficient speakers of English, we should be seeing them as emergent bi- or multilinguals, and we should be problematising interactions they have in the wider society and using an evidence-based approach to better inform language learners in the settlement English program about what to expect when they are looking for employment, and then we should be advising them on strategies for managing their entry into these important spaces of belonging and inclusion. Without this kind of approach, many new migrants end up blaming themselves for their lack of settlement success and the society as a whole denies itself the valuable contributions that could be made by its newest members.

Life in a New Language

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Many of the findings of my study are included in a forthcoming co-authored book from Oxford University Press called Life in a New Language. It’s a collaboration that sees data from six existing ethnographic studies of language learning and migration in Australia combined into a single large data set with over 100 participants. Sociolinguistic ethnography usually involves small data sets and rich data, but it is often considered to lack generalizability and rarely makes an impact outside specialist circles because it is widely dismissed as “anecdotal.” This book project marries depth with scale by combining and re-analysing data sets from these existing small-scale longitudinal ethnographic studies with the objective of making convincing conclusions about language learning and social inclusion, based on the premise that a larger qualitative data set increases the scope for generalisability. It represents something of an innovation in linguistic ethnography, as an after-the-fact multisite ethnographic study.

Life in a New Language will be published in June – watch this space for updates!

References

Butorac, D. (2011). Imagined Identity, Remembered Self: Settlement Language Learning and the Negotiation of Gendered Subjectivity (PhD). Macquarie University, Sydney. Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/DButorac_PhD.pdf
Butorac, D. (2014). ‘Like the fish not in water’: How language and race mediate the social and economic inclusion of women migrants to Australia. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 37(3), 234-248.
Piller, I., Bodis, A., Butorac, D., Cho, J., Cramer, R., Farrell, E., . . . Quick, B. (2023). Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Inquiry into ‘Migration, Pathway to Nation Building’. Canberra: Parliament of Australia. Retrieved from https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8c0d9316-2281-4594-9c7b-079652683f54&subId=735264
Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Tetteh, V. W. (2023). Scholarly sisterhood: Collaboration is our academic superpower. Language on the Move. Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/scholarly-sisterhood-collaboration-is-our-academic-superpower/
Piller, I., Butorac, D., Farrell, E., Lising, L., Motaghi-Tabari, S., & Williams Tetteh, V. (in press, 2024). Life in a new language. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Map of Transoxania (Source: Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: Arabic language learning is experiencing a revival in many parts of the world, such as China, where it may be a source of empowerment for impoverished Muslim women. This post by Mehrinigor Akhmedova (Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan) and Rizwan Ahmad (Qatar University, Qatar) takes us to Uzbekistan, a part of the post-Soviet world, where some aspects of Transoxania’s multilingual past are being revived for religious and economic reasons.

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Mehrinigor Akhmedova, Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan
Rizwan Ahmad, Qatar University, Qatar
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Recently, interest in the learning of Arabic language and script among the young generation of Uzbeks has been rising. Young Uzbeks are learning Arabic not simply because of their faith, Islam, but also because it is desirable in the domestic job market and opens a window of opportunities in the Arabic-speaking Gulf states.

In September 2023, the Department of Islamic History Source Studies, Philosophy at Bukhara State University invited a professor from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University to teach courses in Arabic. This is a significant change in the history of Arabic and Islamic learning in Uzbekistan. During the Soviet rule and early years of independence in 1991, Uzbekistan witnessed many ups and down regarding the place of Islam in the constitutionally secular Uzbek society. In 1998, fearing radical Islamic ideologies, the government closed many madrasas, traditional schools of learning, established soon after the independence.

Liquidation of Madrasas and Teaching of Arabic in Uzbekistan

Although the repression of Islam in the former Soviet republics, including modern-day Uzbekistan, began during the Tsarist regime, it reached its climax during the Soviet rule following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The state repression of Islam took many forms, including the persecution and killing of mudarris and ulama, teachers and scholars of Islam, nationalization of vaqf properties, Islam endowments, and forceful removal of veils from Muslim women, known as the hujum campaign.

Dome of the Mir-i-Arab Madrasa (Image credit: Wikipedia)

On the educational and sociolinguistic fronts, the repression led to the dismantling of the centuries old traditional Islamic educational system of maktabs and madrasas where students learned to read and recite the Qur’an in Arabic. In 1928, the Fourth Meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic issued an order on the liquidation of all old method schools and madrasas. According to Ashirbek Muminov and Rinat Shigabdinov, before the 1928 decree, there were 1,362 madrasas in Uzbekistan with 21,183 students enrolled in them.

Another measure that damaged Arabic teaching and learning was the decision to replace the traditional Arabic script of Uzbek with a Latin-based writing system in 1927. Ten years later in 1937, as a measure of Russification, the Cyrillic script replaced the Latin script. These measures dealt a death blow to the teaching of Islam and Arabic language and script in Uzbekistan. In 1945, as a token of acceptance of religious institutions, Stalin allowed Mir-e-Arab madrasa, established in the 16th century, in Bukhara, to reopen with a limited number of students. Subsequently, two more institutions of Islamic learning were established; namely, madrasa Baraq Khan in 1956 and Tashkent Islamic Institute of Imam al-Bukhari in 1971.

Arabic within Multilingual Transoxiana

Present-day Uzbekistan, which in pre-modern times, was part of the larger Transoxiana region in Central Asia, was a thriving center of Arabic language and literature. The Persian-speaking Samanids (819-999 AD), who ruled Central Asia from their capital in Bukhara under the suzerainty of the Arabic-speaking Abbasids, maintained Arabic as the language of administration, Islamic learning, and sciences. The Samanids simultaneously encouraged use of Persian in the court. Under their patronage, many Arabic texts were translated into Persian, including the Quranic tafsir, exegesis, of Al-Tabari (d. 923 AD) and the Kalila wa Dimnah, a collection of fables, originally written in Sanskrit.

1958 Soviet stamp celebrating the 1100th birthday of Rudaki (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Rudaki (858-940), born and raised in Bukhara and regarded as the founder of New Persian Poetry, was granted the esteemed position of the court poet of the Samanids.

In this multilingual linguistic and intellectual environment, there emerged in Bukhara two towering figures among the scholars of Hadith, the most foundational Islamic text after the Quran, namely Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Bukhari aka Imam Bukhari (810-870 AD) and Muhammad ibn Isa known as Al-Tirmidhi (824-892). Both were born in the Bukhara region of what is today Uzbekistan. In pursuit of the compilation of the Hadith, the sayings of Prophet Muhammad, they travelled widely to different parts of the Muslim world. They wrote their collections of hadith in Arabic, known as Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sunan Al-Tirmidhi respectively.

To the illustrious history of Bukhara as a center of Arabic can be added the polymath and physician Ibn Sina (980-1037), known as Avicenna in Latin Western sources. He is considered to be the father of early modern medicine. Born in Afshona in Bukhara, Ibn Sina, had memorized the whole of the Quran before the age of ten. Later he turned his attention to the study of medicine. He authored many books in Arabic on philosophy, mathematics and other branches of knowledge. In medicine, his famous work is Al-Qanoon fi Al-Tib, “The Canon of Medicine.” This work consists of five volumes with over 1 million words. He was the physician of the Samanid ruler Nuh II (976-997).

In September 2023, in a speech delivered in the UN, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the president of Uzbekistan, named Imam Bukhari and Ibn Sina, among others, as scholars who richly contributed to science and showed that Islam was a religion of knowledge and peace.

Rise of Interest in Arabic in contemporary Bukhara

After the repression of Arabic and Islamic teaching during Soviet rule, there are signs of change in today’s Uzbekistan. In addition to official institutions such as Bukhara University encouraging the teaching of Arabic, many private language centers have also recently emerged in the city of Bukhara. There are over 50 private language centers in Bukhara, including popular ones like Takallum, An-Nisa, and Naqshbandi School.

Drawing of viscera from Ibn Sina’s “Canon of Medicine” (Source: Wellcome Collection)

On their Facebook page, Takallum invites students as follows, “…reciting the Qur’an with Tajweed is our obligatory deed and our deed will lead us to Paradise! Lead your friends to paradise, help them read the Quran, be a true friend for them”. Evidently, for Takallum the learning of Arabic is coupled with Islamic beliefs and practices.

Based on a pilot study conducted in September-October 2023, we found that there are clear signs of the rise in the interest in Arabic learning. First, we discuss a survey that was given online to an active Telegram group called NIسA_School, Ayollar Maktabi, with over 14,000 women members. The use of the Arabic letter س in the first word of the group is indexical of the fact that it brings back the Arabic language and its history in Uzbekistan.

Next, we discuss statistics of students who received Arabic language proficiency certificates from Davlat Test Markazi Buxoro Viloyat Bo’limi, National Test Center, Bukhara Region.

In response to the survey question ‘what was your goal of learning Arabic?’, an overwhelming 82% of the participants (N=347) answered that they considered learning Arabic as most important knowledge for their self-development. Related to this personal/spiritual goal of learning Arabic was the response from 14% of the participants who learned Arabic in order to teach it to others.

It is important to mention here that Muslims believe that God rewards those who read the Qur’an in the original Arabic, even if they do not understand its message. This means that the original Arabic text has spiritual value that cannot be gained by reading it in translation.

The remaining 4% learned Arabic because they wanted to live and work in an Arabic-speaking country.

Another indicator of the rising interest in Arabic comes from the data of students who have received a proficiency certificate in Arabic based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In 2022, Uzbekistan started to use the six-point CEFR proficiency levels from A1-A2, basic user, through B1-B2, independent user, to C1-C2, proficient user. Since the implementation of CEFR in 2022, the total number of students receiving CEFR enrolled in different Arabic language teaching centers in the Bukhara region alone was 3,079. The vast majority of them (92%) received B1 and B2 and the remaining 8% received the higher proficiency level C1. No Uzbek students attained C2, the highest-level proficiency.

Post-Soviet transformations

Bukhara, Old City (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Another important factor propelling people’s interest in Arabic learning is that the Government of Uzbekistan encourages learning of foreign languages and rewards those who earn high-level proficiency certificates in them. According to a presidential decree of 2021, teachers of Arabic and other foreign languages with a C1 certificate will be paid an additional bonus of 50% of their basic salary. Similarly, employees in any government agency possessing any national or international certificate in a foreign language will receive an extra bonus of 20% on their basic salary. Furthermore, students applying for admission into master’s and Ph.D. in the philological studies must show a C1 level proficiency in a foreign language and those in non-philological fields must have a B2 level proficiency.

The discussion above clearly suggests that the changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union have transformed the linguistic and educational fields. Uzbekistan, one of the great centers of Arabic language during the medieval era is witnessing a renaissance in the learning of Arabic after a long period of state suppression. Many young Uzbeks are rediscovering their history by learning the Arabic language and its script. The government’s incentives of learning a foreign language make Arabic learning even more attractive.

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Akhmedova Mehrinigor Bahodirovna is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English Literature & Translation Studies at Bukhara State University. Her research covers issues related to translation, literature, spirituality and sociolinguistics.