Two new Language-on-the-Move PhDs

Congratulations to Dr Agnes Bodis and Dr Liesa Rühlmann, who both recently graduated from their PhDs!

The PhD research by both researchers was significantly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, which makes their achievement all the more impressive.

Multilingual students at monolingual universities

Agnes undertook a PhD by publication to investigate language ideological debates about international students in Australia. Her research was supervised by Ingrid Piller and Phil Chappell.

Agnes now works as lecturer in Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University.

“Multilingual students at monolingual universities” explores the discursive construction of English language proficiency (ELP) and multilingualism in the context of Australian higher education. The shift to a marketized higher educational model has brought an increased number of international students to Australian universities, resulting in several tensions. Most prominent among these is the ‘English problem’, namely the widely discussed claim that international students’ ELP is too low to cope with their academic workloads and, after graduation, with the professional requirements of their work. Therefore, language ideological debates related to international students constitute a prominent site where interrelated conflicts about academic commodification and national identity play out.

The thesis approaches the research problem through a series of critical multimodal discourse analytic studies of mainstream and social media discussions of international students’ ELP, university ELP admission requirements, and interviews with, and observations of, English language teaching professionals.

Overall, the study finds that ELP is highly simplified in both public discussions and institutional communication. Furthermore, ELP levels are attached to specific student cohorts as a permanent quality. The responsibility for low ELP and its negative consequences is consistently assigned to international students themselves. This casts international students in a perpetual deficit view, particularly as their multilingual skills are either erased altogether or, where they appear, depicted as devious.

The study shows that public discourse and institutional communication are interlinked. This points to the need to ensure more responsible and realistic representations of ELP both in public and institutional communication as well as shifting the focus from language as a deficit view to fostering inclusive practices for a greater appreciation of linguistic diversity.

Race, Language, and Subjectivation

Liesa undertook a joint PhD across Hamburg University and Macquarie University to pursue a raciolinguistic perspective on schooling experiences in Germany. Her research was supervised by Drorit Lengyel and Ingrid Piller.

Liesa now works as a postdoc on a project related to migration and racism at Bielefeld University.

In her retrospective interview study, Liesa focused on language use as experienced and reflected upon by plurilingual former students who attended school in Germany. In particular, she analyzed subjectivation processes through a raciolinguistic perspective. This conceptualization was informed by a Grounded Theory approach, and the findings show that interviewees re-position schooling experiences and themselves along dominant discourses of racialization and language use.

White speakers reflect on experiences in which they were positioned as the raciolinguistic norm and they re-position themselves as such. Black interviewees and Interviewees of Color discuss experiences in which they were positioned as raciolinguistic Others, whose language use was ignored, devalued, ‘complimented’ or perceived as non-proficient, and they actively engage with these ascriptions.

The interviews show that subject positions powerfully assigned to students concerning plurilingualism shape how they (have to) reflect on experiences in school from a retrospective focus in often re-positioning themselves along assigned positionings.

Overall, the results highlight the necessity of focusing in more detail on how listening positionalities shape language use in society and in schools specifically.

References

Bodis, A. (2021). The discursive (mis) representation of English language proficiency: International students in the Australian media. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 44(1), 37-64.
Bodis, A. (2021). ‘Double deficit’ and exclusion: Mediated language ideologies and international students’ multilingualism. Multilingua, 40(3), 367-392.
Bodis, A. (2023). Gatekeeping v. marketing: English language proficiency as a university admission requirement in Australia. Higher Education Research & Development, 1-15.
Chappell, P., Bodis, A., & Jackson, H. (2015). The impact of teacher cognition and classroom practices on IELTS test preparation courses in the Australian ELICOS sector. IELTS research reports online series (6), 1-61.
Piller, I., & Bodis, A. (2022). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 1-23. [open access] Rühlmann, L., & McMonagle, S. (2019). Germany’s Linguistic ‘Others’ and the Racism Taboo. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 28(2), 93-100.