US flags (Image credit: Wikipedia)

To help our readers make sense of it all, we bring you a new occasional series devoted to the politics of language and migration.

Following on from Rosemary Salomone’s essay providing the historical and legal background, political anthropologist Gerald Roche today shows how the axing of language access service provision is an exercise in necropolitics – a use of power that leads to the suffering and death of certain groups of people.

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On March 1st, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating English as the official language of the United States of America. As a result, people are going to be harmed, and some will die.

There are direct and indirect reasons why this order will get people killed. Most directly, people will die as a result of this order because it will deny language access services to the more than 25 million people in the USA who need them. Apart from declaring English the USA’s official language, this order revokes Executive Order 13166 (August 11, 2000), which obliged US government agencies to provide language access services to people who need them.

Government agencies didn’t necessarily always fulfill their obligations under this order. But now, any motive they had to respect people’s language rights has been removed. Access to critical services will have life-threatening consequences in at least three arenas.

First, during natural disasters, such as fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, people require timely access to accurate information to have the best chance of survival. However, linguistic exclusion and discrimination are reproduced in how this information is provided to the public, resulting in what Shinya Uekusa calls ‘disaster linguicism’. Research during the recent LA wildfires by Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, showed that thousands of Asian Americans were denied access to disaster alerts and other information in their preferred language

Secondly, healthcare is another setting where language access is vital. When people’s language rights are respected in healthcare, they are more likely to use healthcare services, which are also more likely to be effective. When people’s language rights are violated, they are more likely to die in mass health incidents, such as pandemics. The individual consequences of linguistic exclusion can be seen in the case of Arquimedes Diaz, who called 911 after being shot, but was denied interpretation services for 10 minutes. Those crucial minutes were enough to leave him paralyzed. Any longer and he could have died.

A third area where people will be exposed to increased risk of death due to this executive order is the justice system. Sociolinguists such as Diana Eades, John Baugh, and many others have demonstrated that failures to account for linguistic differences lead to miscarriages of justice in police encounters, courtrooms, and elsewhere. This has life and death consequences particularly in the 27 states of the USA that still have the death penalty. However, we also need to take into account the fact that incarceration reduces life expectancy by 4 to 5 years, and that after incarceration, people experience twice the risk of death by suicide. Any miscarriage of justice on linguistic grounds that leads to imprisonment therefore has life and death consequences.

So, in disaster management, healthcare, and the justice system, the reduction or removal of language access services will directly expose people to harm and increased risk of death. There are also two additional, less direct ways that this order could lead to death.

First, we can look at the complex link between Trump’s official English order and death that particularly threatens Indigenous people. Trump’s order is almost certainly inspired by a law previously drafted by his vice-president, JD Vance: the English Language Unit Act of 2023. That proposed law included a clause stating that it could not limit Native Alaskan or Native American peoples’ use or preservation of their languages. The new order contains no such clause.

To understand why this is a problem and how it relates to death, we need to look more broadly at Trump’s record on Indigenous policy. During his first term, Trump carried out ‘continuous attacks’ on Indigenous communities, starting with a memo that reinstated construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Starting his second term, Trump signalled his hostility to Indigenous languages by using one of his first executive orders to wipe an Indigenous place name (Mount Denali) from the map. This prior hostility towards Indigenous communities, and Trump’s general austerity agenda, mean that Indigenous languages are likely to be underfunded during his second term. This will have life and death consequences, because decades of research has shown that language revitalization has health benefits, improves wellbeing, and reduces suicide rates.

Finally, Trump’s promotion of English and his hostility towards Indigenous peoples and languages should be viewed as part of a broader white supremacist agenda that has life and death implications for people of color. The push to make English the official language of the USA has always involved opposition to bilingualism, and often to specific languages: Jane Hill has noted how English-only movements often go hand-in-hand with efforts to limit the use and legitimacy of Spanish. These movements have gathered steam since the 1980s, and have consistently been associated with the right, and its more xenophobic, white-supremacist fringes: the linguistic fascists, as Geoffrey Pullum once memorably dubbed them.

Trump’s executive order effectively mainstreams the far-right linking of whiteness, English, and belonging in the USA. Asao Inoue has argued that the life-and-death consequences of this linkage start with the discursive circuits and communicative practices that shape judgments about whose language and life are considered valuable. But more directly, this order will legitimize the white supremacist practice of using perceived proficiency in English to target people for violence. We saw this in December 2024 in New York City when one person was killed, and another injured, after their attacker asked them if they spoke English. In another incident in July 2024, a man shot seven members of a family after telling them to “speak English” and “go back where they came from.” Trump’s official English order risks inciting similar acts of violence.

Taking all of this together, we can see that Trump’s executive order making English the official language of the USA will almost certainly harm people, and is also likely to lead to deaths. That’s why I think we need to take what I call a necropolitical approach to language – one that examines how language, death, and power intersect. A necropolitical approach demonstrates that designating English as the USA’s official language is not just a symbolic declaration, it is also, for some people, a death sentence.

Related content

In this episode of the Language-on-the-Move Podcast, Gerald Roche talks with Tazin Abdullah about his new book The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet. Gerald is also a regular contributor to Language on the Move and you can read more of his work here.

For more content related to multilingualism in crisis communication, head over to the Language-on-the-Move Covid-19 Archives.

The White House (Image credit: Zach Rudisin, Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: The Trump administration has recently declared English the official language of the USA while simultaneously cutting the provision of English language education services. This politicization of language and migration in the USA is being felt around the world.

To help our readers make sense of it all, we bring you a new occasional series devoted to the politics of language and migration.

We start with an essay by Professor Rosemary Salomone, the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. John’s University in New York City. Professor Salomone, an expert in Constitutional and Administrative Law, shows that longstanding efforts to make English the official language of the USA have always been “a solution in search of a problem.”

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English in the Crossfire of US Immigration: A Solution in Search of a Problem

Rosemary Salomone

Making English the official language of the US has once again reared its head, as it does periodically. This time it has gained legal footing in a novel and troubling way. It also bears more serious implications for American identity, democracy and justice than the unaware eye might see and that the country should not ignore.

Trump Executive Order

Amid a barrage of mandates, the Trump Administration has issued an executive order that unilaterally declares English the “official language” of the United States. It does not stop there. It also revokes a Clinton Administration executive order, operating for the past 25 years, that required language services for individuals who were not proficient in English.

The order briefly caught the attention of the media in a fast-paced news cycle. Yet its potentially wide-sweeping scope demands more thorough scrutiny and reflection for what it says and what it suggests about national identity, shared values, the democratic process and the role of language in a country with long immigrant roots. It also calls for vigilance that this is not a harbinger of more direct assaults to come on language rights. Subsequent reports of closing Department of Education offices in charge of bilingual education programs and foreign language studies clearly signal a move in that direction.

English and National Identity

German Translation of the Declaration of Independence

English has been the de facto official language of the United States for the past 250 years despite successive waves of immigration. Though the nation’s Founders were familiar with the worldview taking hold in Europe equating language and national identity, they also understood that they were embarking on a unique nation-building project grounded in a set of democratic ideals. As a “settler country” those shared ideals and not the English language have defined the US as a nation unlike France, for example, where the French language became intertwined with being a “citoyen” of the Republic.

In the early days of the American republic, the national government issued many official texts in French and German to accommodate new immigrants. Languages were also woven less officially into political life. Within days of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, a newspaper in Pennsylvania published a German translation to engage the large German speaking population in support of the independence movement. As John Marshall, the fourth chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, noted in a letter to Noah Webster in 1831, geographic and social mobility, rather than public laws, would create “an identity of language through[out] the United States.” And so it has been.

The executive order distinguishes between a “national” and an “official” language. English has functioned well as the national language in government, the courts, schooling, the media and business. It has evolved that way through a maze of customs, institutions and policies that legitimize English throughout public life. It is the language spoken by most Americans. Over three-quarters (78.6 percent) of the population age five and older speaks English at home while only 8.3 percent speaks English “less than very well.” And so, by reasonable accounts, formally declaring it the official language after 250 years seems to be a solution without a problem unless the problem is immigration itself and unwarranted fears over national identity.

While benign on its face, at best the Trump order veers toward nationalism cloaked in the language of unity and efficiency. At worst it’s a thinly veiled expression of racism and xenophobia, narrowly shaping the collective sense of what it means to be American. Though less extreme in scope, its spirit conjures up uniform language laws in past autocratic regimes where language was weaponized against minority language speakers. Think of Spain under Franco and Italy under Mussolini where regional languages were outlawed.

Context and Timing

Context and timing matter. The order comes on the heels of the Trump Administration’s shutting down, within an eye-blink of the inauguration, the Spanish-language version of the White House website along with presidential accounts on social media. Reinstated throughout the Biden years, the website had first been removed in 2017 during the first Trump Administration.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump blasted former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is married to a Mexican-American, for speaking Spanish on the campaign trail. “He should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States,” Trump remarked, projecting what became an administration openly hostile to “foreigners” and the languages they speak. Against that history, the official English order now signals rejection of the nation’s large Spanish-speaking population and the anti-immigrant feelings their growing numbers have engendered.

The irony is that Trump, not unlike other politicians, has courted that population with Spanish language ads. With 58 million people in the United States speaking Spanish, political operatives understand that Spanish is the “language of politics.” But the “politics of language” is far more complicated. The 2024 Trump campaign ad repeating the words, “Que mala Kamala eres” (“How bad Kamala you are’) to the tune of a famous salsa song with the image of Trump dancing on the screen is hard to reconcile with his prior and subsequent actions as president.

The current shutdown of the Spanish-language website did not go unnoticed among public dignitaries in Spain. King Felipe VI described it as “striking.” The president of  the Instituto Cervantes, poet Luis Garcia Montero, called it a “humiliating” decision and took exception to Trump’s “arrogance” towards the Hispanic community. On the domestic front, the executive order raised even more pointed concerns among immigrant and Hispanic groups in the United States.

Issued at a time of mass deportations, hyperbolic charges of immigrant criminality, attacks on “sanctuary” cities and states, and rising opposition to immigration in general, the new executive order will further divide rather than unite an already fractured nation. Fanning the flames of hostility toward anyone with a hint of foreignness, it can incite lasting feelings of inclusion and exclusion that cannot easily be undone.

Official Language Movement

The Trump order did not come from out of the blue. It is the product of years of advocacy at the federal and state levels promoting English to the exclusion of other languages. Proposals to make English the nation’s official language have been floating through Congress since 1981 when the late Senator Samuel I. Hayakawa (R. CA), a Canadian-born semanticist and former college president, introduced the English Language Amendment. Though the joint resolution died, it set a pattern for congressional proposals, some less draconian, all of which have stalled. The most recent attempt was in 2023 when then Senator J.D. Vance (R. Ohio) introduced the English Language Unity Act.

Hayakawa went on to form “U.S. English” in 1983. It calls itself the “largest non-partisan action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States.” It currently counts two million members nationwide. In 1986, its then executive director Gerda Bikales tellingly warned, “If anyone has to feel strange, it’s got to be the immigrant, until he learns English.”

The group’s website now celebrates the Trump order as “a tremendous step in the right direction,” a supposed antidote to the 350 languages spoken in the United States. Obviously that level of diversity can also be viewed as a positive unless “diversity” is totally ruled out of even the lexicon. Two other advocacy groups with similar missions subsequently joined the movement: English First and Pro English.

Defying Democratic Norms

The fruits of those efforts can be found in official English measures in 32 states. The earliest, from Nebraska, dates from 1920 in the wake of World War I when suspicion of foreigners and their languages reached unprecedented heights. By 1923, 23 states had passed laws mandating English as the sole language of instruction in public schools, some in private schools as well. With immigration quotas of the 1920s (lifted in the mid-1960s) diluting the “immigrant threat,” the official English movement didn’t seriously pick up again until the 1980s as the Spanish-speaking population grew more visible. The remaining Official English laws were largely adopted through the 2000s, the last in 2016 in West Virginia. Some of them, as in California and Arizona, were tied to popular backlash against public school bilingual programs serving Spanish-speaking children.

Some of these state laws were passed by a voter approved ballot measure, others by the state legislature. Some reside in the state constitution, others in state statutory law. Unlike the Trump order mandated by executive fiat, they all underwent wide discussion by the people or their elected representatives, which a measure of such high importance, especially with national reach, demands. And they can only be removed using a similar process, unlike an executive order subject to change by the mere stroke of a future presidential pen. This is not like naming the official state flower or bird, a mere gesture. The consequences are far more serious.

As official English supporters are quick to point out, upwards of 180 countries also have official languages, some more than one. Standing alone, that argument sounds convincing. In well-functioning democracies, however, those pronouncements are carved into the nation’s constitution from the beginning or by subsequent amendment, or they’ve been adopted by the national legislature, again through democratic deliberation. At times they’ve been triggered by a particular event. France added the French language to its constitution in 1992 for fear that English would threaten French national identity with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union. Exactly what is triggering the current move in the United States? The answer is quite transparent. It’s immigration.

Some countries, like Brazil and the Philippines, allow for regional languages. Other approaches are less formalized. In the Netherlands and Germany, the official language operates through the country’s administrative law. In Italy, though the Italian language is not officially recognized in the constitution, the courts have inferred constitutional status from protections expressly afforded linguistic minorities. Other countries, including the United Kingdom, Mexico, Australia and Argentina, the latter two also “settler countries,” recognize a de facto official language as the United States has done since its beginning.

Clinton Order Protections

While the official English declaration might mistakenly pass for mere symbolism, the revocation of the Clinton order quickly turns that notion on its head. Rather than “reinforce shared national values,” as the Trump order claims, revoking the Clinton order protections undermines a fundamental commitment to equal opportunity and dignity grounded in the Constitution and in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From that Act and its regulations prohibiting  discrimination on the basis of national origin, the Clinton Administration drew its authority, including using national origin as a proxy for language, to protect language rights. In an insidious twist, the Trump executive order uses language as a proxy for national origin, i.e. immigrant status, to pull back on those same protections.

The Clinton order, together with guidance documents issued by the Department of Justice, required federal agencies and other programs that receive federal funds to take “reasonable steps” to provide “meaningful access” to “information and services” for individuals who are not proficient in English. As advocates argue, removing those requirements opens the door for federal agencies and recipients of federal funds, including state and local governments, to deny critical language supports that assure access to medical treatment, social welfare services, education, voting rights, disaster relief, legal representation and even citizenship. In a virtual world of rampant disinformation, it is all the more essential that governments provide non-English speakers with information in emergencies, whether it’s the availability of vaccines during a flu pandemic or the need to evacuate during a flood or wildfire, as well as the facts they ordinarily need to participate in civil life.

With current cutbacks in federal agency funding and staff, rising hostility toward immigrants, and the erosion of civil rights enforcement, one can reasonably foresee backsliding on any of those counts. One need only look at the current state of voting and reproductive rights to figure out where language supports may be heading when left to state discretion with no federal ropes to rein it in.

Multilingualism for All

The Trump order overlooks mounting evidence on the value of multilingualism for individuals and for the national economy. Language skills enhance employment opportunities and mobility for workers. Multilingual workers permit businesses to compete both locally and internationally for goods and services in an expanding global market

It takes us back to a time not so long ago when speaking a language other than English, except for the elite, was considered a deficit and not a personal asset and national resource. It belies both the multilingual richness of the United States and the fact that today’s immigrants are eager to learn English but with sufficient time, opportunity and support. They well understand its importance for upward mobility for themselves and for their children. That fact is self-evident. With English fast becoming the dominant lingua franca globally, parents worldwide are clamoring for schools to add  English to their children’s language repertoire and even paying out-of-pocket for private lessons.

Rather than issuing a flawed pronouncement on “official English,” the federal government would better spend its resources on adopting a comprehensive language policy that includes funding English language programs for all newcomers, along with trained translators and interpreters for critical services and civic participation, while supporting schools in developing bilingual literacy in their children. Today’s “American dream” should not preclude dreaming in more than one language. In fact, it should affirmatively encourage it for all.

In the meantime, the Trump order promises to provoke yet more litigation challenging denials in services under Title VI and the Constitution, burdening the overtaxed resources of immigrant advocacy groups and of the courts. Worst of all, it threatens to inflict irreparable harm on thousands of individuals and families struggling to build a new life while maintaining an important piece of the old.

It’s not the English language or national identity that need to be saved. It’s the democratic process, sense of justice and clear-eyed understanding of public policy now threatened by government acts like the official English executive order.

Related content

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Rosemary Salomone chats with Ingrid Piller about her book The Rise of English.

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

Anyone who has ever travelled to or from Australia will agree that the last thing you want after getting off a long-haul flight is any further barriers between you and the outside world, a shower, and a bed.  However, given the ever-increasing securitization of borders across the global north, international travellers must first succeed in convincing border officials that they do not pose any type of threat to the nation.

This may be much easier for some people than others. In a recent study, we examined the various aspects of individuals’ language, identity and behaviour that are made salient by border officials in their work, when deciding whether particular people are suspicious or can be trusted. To explore this question, we collected and analysed 108 encounters between border officials and travellers arriving at Australian airports, filmed, produced and broadcast as part of the long-running, popular television series, Border Security: Australia’s Front Line.

In our new article, we show how in these encounters, border officials carry out evaluations of travellers’ credibility, much like those used in other migration processes, such as the assessment of asylum claims.  We find that different individuals are unequally positioned to construct a trustworthy identity based on the way they speak, their social capital, their (perceived or actual) nationality or ethnic origin, their knowledge, and material factors, like the clothes they wear, the money they have, or the other items in their possession.

Officer: (to camera) “This gentleman has arrived on an Italian passport. Speaking to him our officers realized that he’s not a native Italian speaker. The question is now what is his nationality.”

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

These factors are made salient in ways that are unreliable and inconsistent, and we critically examine and denaturalize the problematic assumptions underlying them. For example, in the encounter above, Italian citizenship, a political/legal status, is imagined to involve specific social and linguistic experiences and practices, being born and raised in an Italian speaking context, to the exclusion of others, such as migration and naturalization.

In each case, we also compare how border officials are in a stronger position to mobilize the same categories of resources to construct identities for themselves that are trustworthy and credible.

This, we argue, is due largely to the privileged position they have on two different levels, both in terms of how they can control the discourse within their interactions with individual travellers, but also at the level of the television show, in how discourse about these interactions is produced and disseminated.

At the level of the encounters, officials obviously have a very specific role to play: they are the ones who decide who to stop, how to question them, what technologies to use, and, ultimately, how they interpret what they see and hear.

Officer: When we commenced our interview, I specifically stated to you that pursuant to Section 234 of the Migration Act, you’re required to provide me with truthful information. Can you demonstrate to me conclusively that you did work on that farm? I’ll give you this opportunity again, Declan, I’m a pretty fair sort of a guy.

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

Not only this, but officers wield power over travellers in terms of the outcomes of these encounters: they may issue fines or warnings, cancel people’s visas and have them deported, or refer them for police investigation. This power undoubtedly influences the way travellers interact with them, and their perceived and actual levels of discursive agency.

However, the inequality does not end there: the television show itself produces discourse about traveller credibility, both in relation to the individuals who appear in the various encounters, but also in terms of the general messages that come from the combination of such interactions. At this level, we identify a range of discursive strategies, including giving the floor to officials to explain to camera the reasons for their suspicions and final decisions, and the use of an omniscient narrator who plays a similar role.

Such is the level of discursive inequality that, for instance, two friends returning to Australia after an overseas trip and going through passport control separately – as required for non-family groups – can become a “hidden” fact to be uncovered and construed as suspicious.

Narrator: Officers have just discovered what seems like a strange coincidence. A passenger at another bench has virtually IDENTICAL travel movements. […] Officers now suspect that these two passengers may in fact know each other.

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

This adds another layer of credibility to officials’ border work: along with the show’s narrator, they have a chance to explicitly describe their reasoning processes and the accommodations they offer travellers, to perform procedural fairness for the viewing public.

At the same time, it also provides an additional opportunity to teach the viewing audience to suspect certain types of people and problematize certain attributes or behaviour. We learn, for instance, that people who hold an Italian passport should speak Italian natively, and that not doing so is cause for suspicion.

We learn that travellers from particular countries or ethnicities should be treated with a higher level of suspicion and that their behaviour or explanations require closer scrutiny. The two friends mentioned above weren’t just travelling together – they were travelling to countries in South-East Asia and are themselves of Asian ethnicity. These facts contributed to framing their trip together and their behaviour in the airport as suspicious, where these may otherwise appear completely innocuous.

This is apparent in the individual encounters themselves and how they are narrated, but this is also the case cumulatively, across the television show as a whole: non-white, non-Australian people and those who don’t speak English as a first language are overrepresented as travellers in the show, and can be contrasted with border officials who are predominately white, and “Australian-accented” English speakers (as we discuss in another article).

Screenshot of passenger being placed under suspicion on “Border Security”

Detection of wrongdoing is also overrepresented: in 61 percent of the encounters in our collection, there was a “guilty” outcome: people are detected, fined, have food or goods confiscated, or are arrested or deported. We can imagine that this is vastly disproportionate with the percentage of “wrongdoers” detected in reality. The combined effect of this is that viewers are taught that there is a high level of wrongdoing, meriting a high level of suspicion, and that this needs to be directed primarily at society’s linguistic and racial “others”.

These findings have implications beyond the television show itself: such discourses of suspicion have the potential to encourage viewers to take on personal responsibility for everyday bordering in their own social contexts. They also help to reinforce and garner trust in border policy, procedures and practices, even as it has moved towards criminalizing asylum seekers and other migrants and adopting a “culture of suspicion”.

References

Piller, I., Securing the border of English and Whiteness. Language on the Move, 8 November 2021, https://www.languageonthemove.com/securing-the-borders-of-english-and-whiteness/
Piller, I., Torsh, H., & Smith-Khan, L. Securing the borders of English and Whiteness. Ethnicities. 2023; 23:5, 706-725. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968211052610
Smith-Khan, L., Five language myths about refugee credibility. Language on the Move, 6 May 2020, https://www.languageonthemove.com/five-language-myths-about-refugee-credibility/
Smith-Khan, L., Piller, I., Torsh, H. Trust at the border: identifying risk and assessing credibility on reality television. Journal of Law and Society. 2024; 51:4 513–538. https://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12505

Prof Catherine Travis launches “Life in a New Language” at ALS2024

The annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) is a gathering of like-minded academics and presents a wonderful opportunity to see old friends and meet new ones, and to be intellectually encouraged to engage with language in all its forms and context. This year’s conference at the Australian National University was no different and offered an exciting program.

Our new book Life in a New Language featured prominently, including receiving a second launch (to learn more about the first launch, go here). At ALS, our book was launched by Professor Catherine Travis, the Chair of Modern European Languages in the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at the ANU.

Catherine’s reflections on the book were a thoughtful heart-warming invitation to read Life in a New Language. This is part of Catherine’s testimony:

Many of the stories told are very familiar to me, as I’m sure they will be to all of you – many of you are migrants to Australia, and may have had similar experiences yourselves, and all of you will have been made aware of these kinds of experiences from migrants in your own families, close friends and colleagues.

And the message equally rings true to me, as I hope it will to you. I will just highlight three elements here.

Migrants are too often seen through a deficit lens – what is highlighted is their lack of English that adheres to a standardised norm; their lack of appropriate qualifications; their lack of local experience. This is in contrast to what they bring, which is their multilingual repertoire, qualifications in different settings, and their international experience. We need to address this deficit narrative and recognise that migrant families are raising the multilingual communication mediators of the future; and we need to support them in that endeavour, as our future depends on it.

Life in a New Language already has a veritable fan club

The responsibility for communication is too often placed on the migrant. As the authors state, language is viewed as a “cognitive skill, the level of which can be measured through proficiency tests. But it is also a communicative tool that interactants share to collaboratively achieve common goals” (p.124). This perspective shifts the burden of responsibility onto both parties involved in the interaction, and the authors call for more attention to be given to what it means to communicate well in a linguistically diverse society, to be more aware of the importance of inclusive communication.

And, crucially, the conversation needs to be taken out of the academy. This book goes a long way to doing that, as a highly readable and rich account of migrant stories. I hope that it is read widely, that the migrant stories here are heard, and are listened to.

Life in a New Language is an ethnographic data-sharing and re-use project and so it was also appropriate that we engaged strongly with the themed session on The Wealth of Resources on Migrant Languages in Australia organised by Professor Heike Wiese (Chair of German in Multilingual Contexts in the Humboldt University in Berlin), her doctoral researcher Victoria Oliha, and Dr Jaime Hunt (University of Newcastle).

This themed session aimed to provide a centralised forum for researchers on migrant languages in Australia to connect and present their findings as well as spark a conversation around the resources created through their projects. The following central questions were discussed:

• What empirical resources on migrant languages in Australia have been created? How can we make these resources accessible to the wider research community?
• From what theoretical and conceptual perspectives have migrant languages in Australia been studied? How can such studies inform each other?
• What methods have been used to study migrant languages in Australia? What can we learn from each other methodologically? What new methods could we use to gain further insights?

It is wonderful for Life in a New Language to be part of this conversation. As one of our biggest fan says in this unboxing video: “it teaches you how people develop.”

In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, I speak with Dr Clara Holzinger (University of Vienna) about her PhD research investigating how employment officers deal with the day-to-day communication challenges arising when clients have low levels of German language proficiency.

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.

Employment Office, Vienna

Further reading

Holzinger, C. (2020). ‘We don’t worry that much about language’: street-level bureaucracy in the context of linguistic diversity. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(9), 1792-1808.
Holzinger, C. (2023). “Wir können nicht alle Sprachen der Welt sprechen”. Eine Studie zu Street-level Bureaucracy im Kontext migrationsbedingter Heterolingualität am Beispiel des österreichischen Arbeitsmarktservice [“We can’t speak all the languages of the world”. A study of street-level bureaucracy in the context of migration-induced heterolingualism as exemplified by Austrian employment services]. PhD thesis. Universität Wien.
Holzinger, C., & Draxl, A.-K. (2023). More than words: Eine mehrsprachigkeitsorientierte Perspektive auf die Dilemmata von Street-level Bureaucrats in der Klient*innenkommunikation. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 52(1), 89-104.
Scheibelhofer, E., & Holzinger, C. (2018). ‘Damn it, I am a miserable eastern European in the eyes of the administrator’: EU migrants’ experiences with (transnational) social security. Social Inclusion, 6(3), 201-209.
Scheibelhofer, E., Holzinger, C., & Draxl, A.-K. (2021). Linguistic diversity as a challenge for street-level bureaucrats in a monolingually-oriented organisation. Social Inclusion, 9(1), 24-34.

Transcript (coming soon)

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!

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.

Meet each of the 130 migrants in our book over the next months in a serialized Twitter thread

2nd: Lena from Russia
Lena realized her white privilege from observing casual racism and selective incivility towards Asian people at her new tennis club in Australia.
2/n pic.twitter.com/BqiinZX2Nl

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 8, 2023

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

Michiko from Japan cultivated a unique English language learning and practice strategy: she set up stalls at flea markets. In addition to interaction opportunities, she also gained insights into everyday life in Australia, including casual racism …
13/n pic.twitter.com/HOlZy9HJHI

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 22, 2023

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.

Tina from China already had two law degrees and experience as a corporate lawyer when she arrived in Australia, but she could only get work as a paralegal because her degrees were not recognized.
118/130 pic.twitter.com/HGsqEBmS76

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 20, 2023

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

Maria, a Chinese Brazilian, came to Australia via Japan. A savvy business woman and devout Christian, she told us she needed "many faces" to successfully navigate interactions, and foreground or background her multiple identities according to context
26/n pic.twitter.com/AtLZyvjtTW

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 13, 2023

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://www.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://www.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.

Extract from cover of “Life in a new Language” by Sadami Konchi (©Sadami Konchi)

Are you excitedly waiting for the publication of Life in a new language?

Life in a new language is our new book about 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. Coauthored by Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, and Vera Williams Tetteh, the book will be out from Oxford University Press early next year.

In the meantime, we have now published a Twitter mini-portrait of each of the 130 participants on whose experiences we draw in our research. To save you heading over to Twitter, we’ve brought these together here in this post for your reading pleasure. (There are 131 tweets so the page might take a bit longer to load than usual.)

The portraits are ordered chronologically in order of publication on Twitter from the first one about Katja from Poland, which we published on March 07, to the last one about Abenet from Ethiopia, which only dropped a few hours ago.

Within the broad topic of language learning and settlement, the themes addressed in these mini-portraits are the same that animate the book: the initial language shock; the struggle to find employment consonant with one’s qualifications and skills; the challenge to make new friends and find a voice in interaction; building new family relationships and raising bilingual children; facing racism and discrimination; and finding a new sense of belonging and home.

The cover art for Life in a new language is once again produced by the amazing Sadami Konchi, who also is the artist whose work is on the cover of Intercultural Communication and Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. This extract from her cover art for Life in a new language offers a sneak peak of her collage for our book cover. We believe the image perfectly captures a cross-section of Australia’s diverse society and the people behind Life in a new language.

To keep informed about publication updates related to Life in a new language make sure to subscribe to our newsletter when you get to the bottom of this page (in the right corner of the footer).

Meet each of the 130 migrants in our book over the next months in a serialized Twitter thread

2nd: Lena from Russia
Lena realized her white privilege from observing casual racism and selective incivility towards Asian people at her new tennis club in Australia.
2/n pic.twitter.com/BqiinZX2Nl

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 8, 2023

Meet each of the 130 migrants in our book over the next months in a serialized Twitter thread

#4: Nina from Sierra Leone
Nina had trained as an auto mechanic back home. In Oz, sexist and racist harassment pushed her out of the trade.

4/n

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 10, 2023

Migrants are often made to feel out of place

Dagmar from Austria was told to "Go back home" when she made a passing observation about Australian drinking culture in a pub
6/n pic.twitter.com/RRKeTAAXbG

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 14, 2023

Yumiko from Japan came to Australia to find love

As a teenager, Yumiko developed a crush on Tom Cruise. In Australia, she hoped to meet people like him
8/n pic.twitter.com/KFqE2LF1fH

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 16, 2023

Bernardo from the Philippines also came to Australia for work
The IT technician makes prefabricated homes ready for computer set-up. The job does not pay enough to allow him to bring his wife and 4 kids to Oz to be with him.
10/n pic.twitter.com/GW7sP57ddy

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 20, 2023

International #HigherEd is Australia's 3rd largest export

Aiko from Japan first came to Australia as an international student. After graduation, she stayed on and now works in a senior management role.
12/n pic.twitter.com/lAJIZbeP1Y

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 22, 2023

Ishetu from Congo spoke 5 languages when she arrived in Australia. Despite her disrupted education, learning English did not daunt her. After graduating from TAFE with a hairdressing degree, she now runs her own African hair salon.
14/n pic.twitter.com/OoEX6vdWd5

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 24, 2023

Benjamin from Sudan pined for the "pure" British English he had learned back home, instead of the incomprehensibly fast Strayan he encountered in Australia.
16/n pic.twitter.com/mdIFQ20d6O

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 28, 2023

Roxana from Iran appreciated freedom of speech in Australia, yet felt her English wasn't good enough to express her "cheeky" personality. Sometimes, she felt like she had a "big lock" on her lips.
18/n pic.twitter.com/zN9zF3PdFH

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 31, 2023

"Where are you from?"
Most of our participants resented that question so much.
Paulo from Portugal pushed back by responding “Why do you ask?” And they say, “Oh because you have an accent.” And I say, “Does that bother you?”
19/n pic.twitter.com/CHQltIIctn

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 2, 2023

Sally from Zimbabwe was complimented for having a driver’s license (as do 95% of middle-aged Australians …) “Aren’t you a clever girl?!” her neighbour cooed. In the moment, Sally couldn’t think of a good comeback.

What would you have said?
21/n pic.twitter.com/mUOECZYDf7

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 5, 2023

Donaldo from the Philippines has been celebrating Easter Sunday mass away from his family. Attending church with his family is what he misses most in Australia.
23/n pic.twitter.com/6eQXDBa1do

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 9, 2023

Osman from Ethiopia was a trained and experienced teacher when he arrived in Australia in 1999. Despite completing additional Australian teaching qualifications and a teacher shortage, he never found a job as a teacher and made a living as a casual accountant.
25/n pic.twitter.com/rQNWjCXGNl

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 12, 2023

When do migrants belong to their new country?

Julio from Chile celebrated how he no longer felt self-conscious about speaking English after about 2 years in Australia. He believed he belonged in Australia, when his English voice started to feel natural.
27/n pic.twitter.com/Udg5qMQr9n

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 14, 2023

Like Daryoush, Diba, an engineer from Iran, avoided interacting with fellow parents in her daughter's school because she perceived herself as a "boring" interlocutor with "poor" English.
29/n pic.twitter.com/xaP0M7uKQ1

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 17, 2023

Loss of self-confidence was a big topic for our participants.
Elham from Iran communicated in English at work before coming to Australia. Once here, she avoided interacting in English because she didn't know what to say and how to say it.
30/n pic.twitter.com/cMNFvJZWom

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 18, 2023

Elizabeth from Ghana had a good start to her settlement journey: a volunteer tutor took her under their wing, and together they went shopping, sightseeing, chatted on the phone, shared meals. This gave Elizabeth the confidence to rebuild her social life in Australia.
31/n pic.twitter.com/1BupaLp8ZO

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 19, 2023

Cyrus from Iran struggled to find interlocutors with whom he could practice English. One of his constraints was that he believed only native speakers were desirable and worthy interlocutors.
33/n

How do you feel about non-native interlocutors when practicing a new language?

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 24, 2023

Language as a pretext for racial discrimination?

When Daisy from Kenya applied for a receptionist job, she was told that the company would lose customers if they hired her because of her "accent." They suggested she apply for a backstage job that was coming up.
34/n pic.twitter.com/Mg3uvcgx3c

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 24, 2023

Career loss in migration is a huge problem

Danica, a university-qualified early art teacher from Russia, had to change careers because her profession does not even exist in Australia.
35/n pic.twitter.com/Wm49FBT4Ik

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 25, 2023

7% of the Australian workforce are migrants on temporary visas.

Domingo from the Philippines is one of them. He is employed in Australia's booming construction industry as a carpenter building prefabricated portable homes.
36/n pic.twitter.com/36ZLeMi3jM

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 26, 2023

Some of our participants had severely disrupted schooling. Low literacy complicated English language learning, finding work, and settling well for women like Doris from Sudan, whose life still felt on hold even 5 years after arrival in Australia.
37/n pic.twitter.com/zWiH9kQ7DG

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 27, 2023

How do you maintain a strong parent-child bond when you are still struggling to learn English but your child is fast losing the heritage language?

Ehsan from Iran was one of our participants who struggled with this problem, as her English relationships felt "artificial."
38/n pic.twitter.com/rmWLbttz1M

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 30, 2023

Eric from Sierra Leone was a 1st year law student when the civil war disrupted his life and education. Upon resettlement in Australia, he received no support to resume his education and now works as a meat packer in an abattoir.
39/n pic.twitter.com/tQQk2nNxwW

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 1, 2023

Non-recognition of overseas qualifications is the most consequential form of discrimination faced by migrants

Ernestine, a nurse from DR Congo, has not been able to re-establish her career in Australia despite a shortage of healthcare workers.
40/n pic.twitter.com/bRV0A1v5vJ

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 3, 2023

The civil war in Liberia destroyed Ruth's middle-class life. After resettlement in Australia, she worked as a cleaner in an abattoir to help support her family left behind in transit in Guinea.
41/n pic.twitter.com/NUXQjOrxmN

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 3, 2023

Middle- and upper-class backgrounds of African migrants are often erased. Samuel from Congo had a BA in Psychology and had been active in politics. In Australia, he could not reestablish his career. He undertook a certificate in Aged Care for quick workplace entry.
42/n pic.twitter.com/1qVeJgw0EK

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 5, 2023

"Learning English in the classroom is like swimming in a pool. Learning English while going about your daily life in Australia is like being thrown into a raging river." That's how Goudarz from Iran summed up the migrant language learning and settlement experience.
43/n pic.twitter.com/DbQ2SZYxU1

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 8, 2023

Iman from Iran was afraid to speak English to his daughter so that she would not pick up his "inauthentic" English with all its "deficiencies."
44/n pic.twitter.com/fqO01vlEnE

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 9, 2023

When Goran arrived in Australia as a refugee from Bosnia who had never learned any English, he started to see himself through the eyes of others. He came to believe that all people saw in him was a "stupid idiot."
45/n

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 10, 2023

Migration to Australia changed many of our female participants from successful independent professionals and business women to homemakers and stay-at-home mums. One of them was Homa, a project analyst from Iran.
46/n pic.twitter.com/vxng02x5sO

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 10, 2023

Isabella from Sudan never went to school, yet passed a real-life literacy test with flying colors: she planned, financed and took a trip to USA all by herself, to spend Christmas with members of her dispersed family.
47/n pic.twitter.com/XctbAxYeHZ

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 12, 2023

Jaime from Chile was the victim of a racist assault on his first night out in Australia in 1976. He never went out to a pub or club or public entertainment venue for the next 30 years.
48/n pic.twitter.com/stxt0rKleM

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 15, 2023

Julie from Singapore thought that if she spoke to her kids in Aussie English, they'd open up to her more and communicate their true feelings. Her model for parent-child interaction came from reading Australian author and artist Sally Morgan's memoir "My Place."
49/n pic.twitter.com/F8Ek5b8CtT

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 16, 2023

Age at migration is a crucial factor in settlement. Abiba from Sierra Leone arrived in Australia in her late teens, went to uni, studied nursing, and found a satisfying career in a large hospital.
50/n pic.twitter.com/xz1EeK9IIH

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 17, 2023

Alexa from Spain accidentally moved into a drug house where she had to sleep in the garage when she first arrived in Australia. Escaping from that situation unscathed boosted her confidence in being able to fend for herself in a new language.
51/n pic.twitter.com/dC1Q3ifEgo

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 17, 2023

To receive a visa most participants had to take English language proficiency tests

Amin, an engineer from Iran, took IELTS classes for 3 years before he finally scored the required 6.5 on his 5th attempt.
52/n pic.twitter.com/f2k5liRxic

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 19, 2023

Some of our African participants were highly multilingual. One of them was Amina from Sierra Leone, who learned 6 languages (Temne, Krio, Klao, Kono, Madingo, Susu) as a street trader in West Africa. In Australia, all that people seemed to see in her was her poor English.
53/n pic.twitter.com/yNA6k1Ga4w

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 22, 2023

Family relationships change in migration.

Amot from Ethiopia found it difficult to accept that her husband took on his share of the housework. She felt the kitchen was no place for an African man.
54/n pic.twitter.com/hkL2Be9IEW

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 22, 2023

For Anna from Serbia, migration was an opportunity to live her ideal of traditional feminity. Back home, she had a career as an electrical engineer. In Australia, she became dependent on her husband, and fulfilled her dream of being "a woman, a wife, a mother."
55/n pic.twitter.com/VsuIx9Tf9o

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 24, 2023

For many African participants, "English" was a synonym for "formal education." Those with little formal education dared not claim proficiency. One of them was multilingual Ahmed from Sudan. Although an engaging storyteller in English, he thought his English was poor.
56/n pic.twitter.com/MCKHX8CG2B

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 24, 2023

Pre-migration, many participants had spent a lot of time learning English in school. Even so, they felt "School English" had not prepared them for using English in Australia. One of these was Cetareh from Iran, who believed English teaching in her country was low quality.
57/n pic.twitter.com/dFm6cQWii4

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 26, 2023

Charity from Sudan was the 1st woman in her family to go to school. Leaving school after Year 7, she was considered well-educated and apprenticed as a childcare worker. In Australia, she was able to upgrade to a formal childcare certificate and worked as a bilingual aide.
58/n pic.twitter.com/ANR0GPV93n

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 29, 2023

Before coming to Australia, Bijan from Iran had dreamt of a busy “social life” where he would go to parties often and “take holiday trips with Australians, and things like these.” This was far from the reality he encountered.
59/n pic.twitter.com/n6v6cB30Bb

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 29, 2023

When Oldouz from Iran first arrived in Australia, she felt like she was "deaf" and "mute."
60/n pic.twitter.com/9evwisGZan

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 31, 2023

Obi from Ethiopia was a university-educated teacher who arrived in Australia with “perfect” English. After 5 years in Australia, he was still doing odd jobs, studying, and losing hope that he would ever be able to re-establish his career.
61/n pic.twitter.com/juhfjWDHJf

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) May 31, 2023

Paulina from the Philippines coped with her homesickness by subscribing to the Filipino Channel @KapamilyaTFC.
62/n pic.twitter.com/1CcbLihMf1

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 2, 2023

The education of Philip from Sudan was cut short by the war. As a refugee in Egypt, he supported himself as a bricklayer. In Australia, he found neither casual laboring jobs nor a pathway to more stable work.
63/n pic.twitter.com/ft3SUwqKqP

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 5, 2023

Pia from Italy first came to Australia as a tourist, fell in love with the country, and ended up staying.
64/n pic.twitter.com/PfVqbsC3so

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 5, 2023

Qasem from Iran volunteered as parent helper at his daughter's school. His offer was rebuffed, and he was unsure whether he had volunteered too late or whether he was intentionally excluded.
65/n pic.twitter.com/lIrDXfTCHq

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 7, 2023

As a secondary applicant on her husband's skilled visa, Qazal from Iran had the choice to score 6.0 on IELTS before migration or prepay for 510 hours of English language tuition post-migration. She chose the latter option.
66/n pic.twitter.com/tzuEM9mWxY

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 7, 2023

The move to Australia was not the first international migration for many participants. Ramin from Iran, for example, had lived in India for many years before coming to Australia.
67/n pic.twitter.com/4lHjRpM46j

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 9, 2023

Australia's building boom throughout the 21st century has been fuelled by migration and sustained by a migrant workforce. One of them is Roberto, a civil engineer from the Philippines, who works as a plasterer for one of Australia's largest builders.
68/n pic.twitter.com/7bmPM4AFcR

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 12, 2023

Rosa from the Philippines is sustained by her Mormon faith. She takes great pride in the fact that she learned to speak American English from Mormon missionaries back in Manila. Sadly, her shift work makes church attendance difficult for her in Australia.
69/n pic.twitter.com/N0AsjK2Shg

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 12, 2023

When Rouya from Iran first arrived in Australia, she became depressed whenever she left the house because the English she heard around her bore no similarity to the English she had studied back home.
70/n pic.twitter.com/vNoyA6mGKF

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 13, 2023

"Do you have tomatoes in Africa?"

This was one of many stupid questions, Serena from Sudan was asked in Australia.
71/n pic.twitter.com/e7MEBVBMoE

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 14, 2023

Women's work becomes harder in migration.

A mother of 4 young children, Shirley from Sudan missed the support from her mother, sisters, sisters-in-law, and extended family she would have expected back home.
72/n pic.twitter.com/bYXkeh8OeA

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 16, 2023

In Australia, linguistic diversity is seen as a problem. Violet from Sudan compared this to her experience in Africa, where people just get on with it: "We were using English and other language. Acholi, and other language, like Arabic, Swahili, and Bari. Many, many of them.”
73/n pic.twitter.com/3Vt1k88GOY

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 18, 2023

Like many participants from refugee backgrounds, Vida from Sudan found that her linguistic and vocational skills were erased in Australia. The trained secretary who had spent time in Uganda and USA never got hired for a white-collar job.
74/n pic.twitter.com/O0vFKMWDHQ

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 19, 2023

Vesna from Bulgaria was a qualified and experienced hospital midwife when she came to Australia, but she was not allowed to practise midwifery because the Nursing Board did not recognise her qualifications and expertise. She eventually found work as a phlebotomist.
75/n pic.twitter.com/9HiVUv0mbE

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 20, 2023

When her qualifications were not recognized, Veronica, a teacher from Zimbabwe, switched to aged-care work in Australia.
76/n pic.twitter.com/8B4MDpzLMe

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 21, 2023

An avid traveler with broad cultural interests in theatre, opera, and books, Verena from Austria could not find friends in Australia who were willing to go beyond “the basic, you know, chit chat, small talk.”
77/n pic.twitter.com/UVdA8gr1Pz

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 22, 2023

Lonely and without a social circle in Australia, Jessie from Taiwan joined bible study classes 2-3 times a week; just for the human interaction.#ISB14
78/n pic.twitter.com/Enh2psS9YK

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 25, 2023

Jane was orphaned by the war in Sudan. Still, she felt lucky that she had escaped to Uganda rather than Egypt because the English she learned there allowed her to find her feet quickly once she was resettled in Australia.
79/n#ISB14 pic.twitter.com/NkYusjO7y7

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 26, 2023

A single mother with a newborn baby, June from Sierra Leone, had to give up on her English classes due to a lack of childcare.
80/n#ISB14 pic.twitter.com/CtGYSCOn4N

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 27, 2023

Jutta from Austria migrated to Australia in 1970 at the age of 23. By the time we met her in 2003, she had made Australia home: “I’m Australian. I like Australia. It’s my home. My children are here, so that’s my country. My most life was here. I belong here.”
81/n#ISB14 pic.twitter.com/iC0LqxP05C

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 28, 2023

Kambiz, a software developer from Iran, had lived in Ireland and UK before settling in Oz. He struggled with the Australian accent but was philosophical about linguistic diversity: "There are different Englishes, and then you come here and it’s also different."
82/n#ISB14 pic.twitter.com/6JPpmkswSm

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) June 29, 2023

Kevin came to Australia from the Philippines to wire up prefabricated homes.
83/n pic.twitter.com/R12aG40OQn

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 2, 2023

Kimia, a software engineer from Iran with extensive work experience, became a stay-at-home housewife in Australia because she couldn't find a job.
84/n pic.twitter.com/AaAi1RNaMZ

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 3, 2023

Kumiko from Japan moved to Australia with her Australian husband. Although he speaks Japanese fluently, he switched to English more and more in Oz. In English he seemed like a different person to the guy she fell in love with.
85/n pic.twitter.com/kzMpfXf3pR

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 4, 2023

Ladan from Iran was freaked out that her daughter would have to attend ESL classes in Australia. She put in great efforts to teach the 4-year-old English and was proud that her efforts paid off and her daughter never had to attend ESL classes.
86/n pic.twitter.com/CBktzqUbMh

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 5, 2023

Lewis from Liberia came to Australia as a refugee but doesn’t recognise himself in deficit representations of refugees he sees in Oz. He would like refugees’ abilities and contributions to be properly valued.
87/n pic.twitter.com/DvrP82geKL

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 6, 2023

Mamuna is a matriarch from Sierra Leone, in the mold of strong African women. In Australia, she's a respected elder, whose advice is widely sought after in her community.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 9, 2023

Mustapha from Sudan taught himself English from books and by practicing with acquaintances during the 2 years he spent in Egypt waiting for his visa to be approved.
89/130 pic.twitter.com/gljK1NbEXl

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 10, 2023

Nahid from Iran wanted her daughter to speak Persian at home, but her daughter stopped complying from a young age. Nahid blamed her husband for this failure, as he preferred English, too.
A common struggle in bilingual families
90/130 pic.twitter.com/3YWhdP2DNp

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 11, 2023

Many humanitarian entrants to Australia start their settlement journey in the AMEP, where they attend government-sponsored English language classes. Peter from Sudan is one of them. He knew Dinka and Arabic when he first arrived but no English.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 12, 2023

Rita is a nurse from the Philippines whose 9 years of work experience in Scotland before her move to Australia made it easier for her to adapt to her new environment.
92/130 pic.twitter.com/EVE7WWyKFb

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 13, 2023

Even after a few years in Australia, Saman from Iran described a typical "Aussie kid" as someone with blue eyes who speaks "unaccented" and "correct" English.
93/130 pic.twitter.com/KsOo9ykw2x

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 16, 2023

Sarah from Sudan did not finish primary school because the war disrupted her schooling. She became a mother at a young age. Her children continued to be her priority in Australia, and she was determined to secure a better future for them.
94/130 pic.twitter.com/xbRWcZ0GCe

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 17, 2023

When Anita from Iran came to Australia, she lost her self-confidence because she could not understand what people were saying to her. Unable to find work in her field as a software developer, she switched to casual childcare.
95/130 pic.twitter.com/vdEU7YAvXO

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 18, 2023

Agatha from Georgia developed agoraphobia when she first came to Australia. She believed it had to do with not understanding the Australian accent and being unable to reestablish her professional career.
96/130 pic.twitter.com/jE4B9ncFkS

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 19, 2023

Ajara from Sudan came to Australia as a refugee. She now gives back as an aged-care nurse.
97/130 pic.twitter.com/HrXez8QVZQ

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 20, 2023

Behnaz from Iran was disappointed with the English language course she took in Australia. She wanted practical English for everyday life in the new society but found the course filled with "childish" and irrelevant projects that failed to meet her needs.
98/130 pic.twitter.com/mpL9naoR9Z

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 23, 2023

Creating full and productive employment and decent work for all is one of the @UN sustainable development goals.

Migrants are often excluded. Franklin from Sudan poignantly summed up what the lack of decent work meant for him: "Without a job, you are nothing," he said.

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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 24, 2023

Language workers are hit particularly hard when forced to migrate to a new linguistic environment.

Genevieve, a journalist from DR Congo, who had worked in French, had to completely reinvent herself because a writing career in English was out of her reach.

100/130 pic.twitter.com/CCYiap0j0Y

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 25, 2023

Gesang, a PhD student from Indonesia, enjoyed learning about Chinese politics from conversations with his flatmate. He found it ironic that he had more opportunities to learn about China than about Australia while in Sydney.
101/130 pic.twitter.com/aVni4QUZkn

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 26, 2023

Golara from Iran was livid about the pressure her school-aged children experienced in their pull-out ESL programs. She was annoyed by the lack of coordination between the regular curriculum and ESL programs, and how ESL kids missed out on class lessons.
102/130 pic.twitter.com/YtdCLl2tnV

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 27, 2023

Farah, a network engineer from Iran, felt her English was “at the right level” to start a new life in Australia when she was granted a skilled independent visa. This changed on arrival when she discovered she couldn’t communicate in English "at all."
103/130 pic.twitter.com/MCtC5nELpN

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 30, 2023

Farzad, a medical doctor from Iran, waited over 3 years before his qualifications were reaccredited in Australia.

104/130 pic.twitter.com/lg8asOumTS

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) July 31, 2023

For many Africans, English is associated with formal education.

Fatima from Ethiopia counts Oromo, Amharic, Kiswahili, Dinka, and Arabic as her 5 languages. Although she speaks English fluently, she insists she has no English because she's not literate.

105/130 pic.twitter.com/JBBpOXHNLY

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 1, 2023

Felicia from Sudan started to study for her childcare certificate once she had enough English to enroll in a TAFE course.

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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 2, 2023

Although Lucy from Sierra Leone had been educated through the medium of English, her settlement coordinator made her do an English language course. “They were learning these things that I’ve learnt in primary school," she scoffed, "ABC and what."

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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 3, 2023

Majok from Sudan is an employment success story. With a teaching degree from Egypt, he continued teaching in Australia without too many hurdles.

109/130 pic.twitter.com/YIgx7WWbJa

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 6, 2023

Mercy, a low-educated woman from Sudan, hoped to be a cleaner in Australia. However, without the literacy skills to get the required certificates and licences, the path even to low-skilled work was barred for her.

109/130 pic.twitter.com/bkb0znNgbE

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 7, 2023

Bilingual parenting was a challenge for many participants. Parvin from Iran used a creative strategy to make her children speak Persian: she responded in Turkish to their English to make them feel that the language was "wrong." It didn't work …

110/130 pic.twitter.com/tFEglZ3iOV

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 8, 2023

Sofia arrived in Australia from Colombia when she was 14 years old. An extrovert before her family's migration, she recalls being "a little afraid” of her new classmates and “very afraid” to speak with anyone.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 9, 2023

Soraya is a member of Iran's Turkish minority. Like many parents from bilingual backgrounds, she neither used Azeri nor Persian with her children in Australia because she felt 3 languages was too much.
112/130 pic.twitter.com/d9AWYeuXGS

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 10, 2023

Suda from Thailand worked as a delivery driver for a Thai restaurant and shared a flat with other Thai women. The disappointing result of all these arrangements was that she lived in Sydney but had “no chance to practice English.”
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 13, 2023

When Sylvia from Sudan encountered a young girl wandering the streets alone at night, she did not look away. The hand she extended that night ultimately led to her fostering the 15-year-old homeless teenager. Her motivation was ubuntu – building community.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 14, 2023

Tania from Spain was denied a promotion because of her accent. Tania threatened to sue under equal opportunity and anti-discrimination legislation. She was successful: she got her promotion, a pay rise, and her supervisor was transferred to another role.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 15, 2023

New and emergent migrant communities face specific hurdles settling in Australia. They have fewer networks and less access to information. Language brokers and community interpreters like Thomas from Burundi play an important role in helping them adjust.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 16, 2023

For Timothy from Sudan engaging with a racist neighbor became a road to good employment.https://t.co/WJCcnwf4GJ
117/130

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 17, 2023

Tina from China already had two law degrees and experience as a corporate lawyer when she arrived in Australia, but she could only get work as a paralegal because her degrees were not recognized.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 20, 2023

Torre, a butcher from the Philippines, takes great pride in his knife skills, which got him hired as slicer in an Australian abattoir.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 21, 2023

Trinh from Vietnam was 10 yrs old when she arrived in Oz, and monolingual in Vietnamese. When we first met her 10 years later, she was English-dominant and her Vietnamese was "rusty": she had difficulty following complex conversations and her accent sounded "foreign."
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 22, 2023

Nicolas, who had fled Communist Poland in the 1970s, was deeply affected by the suicide of a fellow exile, the film director Aleksander Ford. Talking about his death allowed him to reflect on his own loss through the feelings he attributed to Ford.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 23, 2023

Mina from Iran implements a strict Persian-Only language policy in her family to ensure her children remain fluent in the language.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 24, 2023

Milena from the Czech Republic was often complimented on her English and within 2-3 years of her arrival was passing as a "real Aussie." That she was blond and blue-eyed probably helped …
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 27, 2023

Being part of validating conversations is incredibly important for newcomers.

Marlene from Germany was "really nervous when we’re sitting with a new group of young people our age.” Her confidence increased with each successful conversation.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 28, 2023

Mark, a Sudanese community elder, is concerned that mainstream monolingual ESL teaching is failing language learners, particularly women from low education backgrounds. He wants bilingual language teaching to be adopted instead.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 29, 2023

Loshrab from Iran came to Australia with her 4-year-old daughter. The little girl was 10 by the time Loshrab's husband was granted a visa, too, and the family could be reunited.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) September 4, 2023

TV can be a great resource for language learners

Lou from China passionately watched Australian shows like "Neighbours" and "Home and Away" to improve his English.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) September 4, 2023

Home is complicated for migrants

Laura from Italy likes to express her dual identity by designing Italian-Australian-themed cakes.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) September 4, 2023

Venus, an executive assistant from Liberia, was dismayed to discover that in Australia she was seen as someone without English, without qualifications and without professional experience.
128/130

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) September 4, 2023

When Azim from Pakistan first came to Australia as an 18-year-old, he was so homesick that he stopped eating and developed selective mutism.
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) September 4, 2023

When Abenet from Ethiopia first came to Australia, he had 3 priorities:
1: Find a house close to public transport
2: Find a good school for his children nearby
3: Join a church

This way, he got himself and his family off to a good start in their new life
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— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) September 5, 2023

(Image credit: Eurekastreet)

Editor’s note: This article is based on a presentation delivered as part of a plenary panel, ‘Transdisciplinary Approach to Forensic Linguistics’, at the 16^th Biennial Conference of the International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics, held at the University of Santo Tomas, Manila.

Questions and comments from our readers and conference participants are welcome.

***

Navigating migration procedures in Australia and other countries of the global north can be very challenging. Australian migration law and procedure are incredibly complex and restrictive, and the rules change constantly – some almost on a daily basis.

Processes are also linguistically demanding: making sense of the law itself and then navigating the application process requires a very high level of proficiency in written, legal English, and strong computer literacy. Depending on the type of application, individuals may also need to attend an interview and discuss personal and sensitive parts of their life in great detail, as a way to prove their credibility.

Intercultural communication is a common feature in this setting, in multiple ways. First, and perhaps most obviously, different participants usually come from different national, ethnic, racial and/or linguistic backgrounds. Second, the immigration department and its officials have their own specific bureaucratic culture that, more often than not, will be unfamiliar and challenging for many visa applicants.

This means that while applicants are allowed to apply for a visa on their own, having professional assistance can often be crucial to a smooth and successful application (Jacobs 2022; Reynolds 2020; Smith-Khan 2021c). In Australia, practicing lawyers can assist with visa applications and first-stage appeals. Non-lawyers may also assist. To be authorised, they must complete a Graduate Diploma in Migration Law, pass external examinations, and then register as a migration agent. Together I call these two groups “migration practitioners”.

Despite their importance, there has been very little research about Australian migration practitioners (van Galen-Dickie 2021). My research on asylum procedures found that official texts also pay little attention to how practitioners shape applicant testimony and mediate institutional communication (Smith-Khan 2020). To find out more, my current project explores practitioners’ beliefs and practices when communicating with and on behalf of their clients. I started by examining relevant law and institutional texts and then conducted qualitative interviews with current practitioners, and students training to become registered migration agents. I also observed student practical activities where they role-played migration agents conducting client consultations.

“Life From A Suitcase” sculpture installed at Pyrmont dedicated to immigrants in Australia (Image credit: Wikipedia)

To better understand how intercultural communication is understood in this context, I follow Ingrid Piller’s (2017) approach to examine who makes language and culture relevant, to whom, in which context, and for which purposes. I identified multiple and conflicting discourses about intercultural communication, which emphasise and understand language and culture in different ways, and reflect on the potential impacts of these divergent understandings.

Difficult work

Current practitioners shared insights into the challenges they face in their day-to-day work, particularly emphasising contextual factors. They pointed to the ever-changing and increasingly restricted visa options as a key difficulty: they must carefully balance different professional goals. They must stay up-to-date with changes to migration law, and emphasise their value to their clients. They must also manage their clients’ expectations and clearly communicate the limits of their power within the system. As visas options become increasingly limited, this can be difficult for clients to accept.

Another key challenge is that the channels through which practitioners and applicants can communicate with the immigration department are increasingly inaccessible. Participants explained how in the past, each visa application was assigned an individual departmental case officer who was identified by name, and had a direct email address and telephone number. If practitioners had a question or update about an application, they could easily contact that person. Now instead there are only general contact details for various sections of the department, limiting applicants’ and practitioners’ access and agency. One participant talked about keeping an Excel sheet with old individual contact details she saved in the past and using this to try to reach out to officials directly. What once was standard practice, that list of contacts is now a treasured and rare resource.

Deviance and deficiency

These challenges intersect with another: that practitioners are more tightly regulated now than ever before, leading to stress and in some cases even fear. My analysis of government discourses goes some way to explaining this. In a recent parliamentary inquiry report, migration practitioners are presented as policy problems: they pose a threat in terms of their competence and ethics. Migrant clients are also problems: in particular, “culturally and linguistically diverse” clients are framed as vulnerable and in need of protecting from practitioners. The report opines that they are “socially, legally and financially vulnerable and are open to exploitation from the actions of unscrupulous, unlawful and unethical registered migration agents.”

Immigration is Bolstering Australia’s Population Growth (Source: Statista)

This institutional discourse zooms in on two groups of actors, presenting particular deficiencies they are said to bring to migration processes. Rather than focusing on the complex legal structures and procedures that exacerbate or even create difficulties and vulnerabilities, this discourse places the spotlight on migration practitioners, justifying tighter regulation. They also make language and culture individually salient for migrants, and present these as individual attributes that apparently create vulnerability (Smith-Khan 2021b).

Testable and valued language skills

Language becomes salient in other ways too, connected with migration practitioners. One rule aimed at controlling and excluding incompetent and unethical practitioners regards English language proficiency. Yet this rule is problematic and potentially discriminatory in its application to different groups (Smith-Khan 2021a), as can be demonstrated with an example of two students in the project.

One student is multilingual and came to Australia as a skilled migrant. He grew up in South India, speaking a family language at home, and a regional language in his community. All of his schooling from the beginning of primary school until the end of university was strictly in English, to the point that the students were punished if they were caught speaking another language even in the playground. He used English during work travel to other parts of India, later when working overseas, and then finally in Australia. Proving his English proficiency through testing was a requirement for his Australian skilled permanent visa. He reports that his migration and travel experiences helped him become aware of different ways of speaking English, and communicating with people from different backgrounds.

Another student is a monolingual English-speaker, born in Australia. He too was educated in English, with fewer opportunities to learn any other languages. He has only worked in Australia. While he speaks fluent English and was friendly and engaging in the role-plays I observed, on various occasions, he used Australian English idioms that his role-play partners did not understand, affecting their interaction.

To become registered migration agents, both individuals must successfully complete the Graduate Diploma and pass two externally-administered written and oral exams. These are specifically designed to evaluate their occupational competencies, including their profession-specific communication skills. However, only the Australian-born candidate is assumed to have sufficient English language proficiency. The other, despite his education and work history, must again sit an IELTS test to fulfil the registration requirements.

Country of birth of Australian residents (2021) (Source: Wikipedia)

Here, language and migration history become salient to who legislators trust as competent and reliable. These rules assume that being multilingual and from a particular country of origin are potential threats to English language proficiency, and further, that ensuring English language proficiency helps ensure competent practice and protect vulnerable clients.

Invisible language work

In contrast to the hypervisibility and importance of English proficiency, other language skills and practices are much less visible in official discourses. Yet in reality, many practitioners use other languages in their day-to-day work. All current practitioners in the study who have English as a second language report using other languages in their work. Some serve almost exclusively clients from the same language background or country of origin, while others have more diverse client groups.

Significantly, the Australian immigration regime is almost completely officially monolingual: law and policy are published in English only, all application paperwork must be completed in English. Applicants must simply manage, regardless of their own linguistic resources, and officials are not expected to know or use other languages in their work. This means that when practitioners use languages other than English, they provide a benefit not only to visa applicants, but also to the department, filling a substantial institution-wide communication gap.

Both monolingual and multilingual practitioners also describe the importance of mobilizing other types of intercultural communication skills in their work. They discuss their awareness and management of linguistic issues when working with interpreters, or when speakers use different varieties of a language. They talk about their strategies to check and address issues with understanding. They also describe strategies like switching between different languages for different parts of their interaction to best suit their clients’ needs, for example providing written advice in English, but supplementing this with an oral explanation using another language. Code choice and switching are also discussed as means of identity performance and rapport building.

Relevant sociocultural knowledge is also valued. Those with a migrant background identify their lived experience and insider knowledge as important assets in interacting with and representing their clients. Practitioners who don’t identify a shared background also value this type of knowledge, but report developing an understanding of their clients’ country of origin, ethnic, linguistic and other social groups.

Navigating different types of interpersonal and power dynamics can also be more challenging and complex than official discourses envisage. For example, one young non-white female practitioner shares her experiences assisting high-powered CEO clients. She must carefully balance her professional duties, with maintaining good relationships with the client companies, who can be very demanding, and satisfying her managers, who closely scrutinize and control every detail of her interactions.

While this diverse range of sociolinguistic resources can influence client-practitioner interactions, and therefore the application process, they are not officially acknowledged or addressed in the way that a “testable” level of English proficiency is. Therefore, I argue that migration practitioners carry out important invisible language work that much of the institutional discourse does not explicitly recognize, and is sometimes even discursively transformed into risk rather than benefit (see also Cho 2023).

Developing counter discourses through education

However, the study also found that practical experience and education can help future practitioners to push back against harmful discourses, and to value their own communication skills.

For example, one student reflected on how the role-plays helped build her confidence. English is her second language and she describes herself as a nervous person when it comes to public speaking. She was hesitant to participate in the project, and kept her laptop camera switched off when participating in her first role-play. She said that it allowed her to pretend “I’m just talking in the dark to myself.” Turning her camera on during the next round of role-plays later in her study was evidence for her that she had become more confident. But her gain in confidence did more than just increase her class participation. At the end of her study, she passed her external oral exam on her first attempt, and even reported having an enjoyable chat with the examiner afterwards.

Significantly, she reports that her formative experience during her study also broadened her career plans. In her first research interview she said that she could not work with asylum-seeker clients, as she didn’t feel equipped to assist people who may have experienced trauma. But by the time she’d graduated and was awaiting her registration, she’d applied for work experience with an organization that specifically assists refugees.

Student participants also shared critical reflections on migration profession registration rules.

For example, they critiqued assessment design, arguing that time-restricted external exams don’t reflect the nature of the real work environment. Others made similar comments about English language tests, questioning why they needed to take them again, and why Academic IELTS was required for migration practice, when the tests were not actually designed to evaluate the skills needed for their work.

Other students developed a sense of the bad reputation that migration agents have amongst some government departments and policy-makers. While some embraced the idea that more stringent entry requirements would help prevent “dodgy” agents, others regarded this more critically. One suggested an ideological link between attitudes towards migrants and migration agents: “I think they see us as unnecessary… Because I think they are very anti-immigration, and I don’t think they really care for anybody helping migrants whatsoever…I just think that the Government’s deliberately making it difficult for people to get into the profession”.

So where does this leave our understanding of intercultural communication in migration law practice?  Undoubtedly, migration practitioners play complex and important roles in assisting people applying for Australian visas, mobilizing a range of sociolinguistic resources in the process. Yet there is a huge variation in how their contributions are viewed, based on diverging ways of making language and culture salient in this setting.

As I’ve argued, on the one hand, official discourses present intercultural communication with a focus on particular individuals: migration practitioners become risks that need managing, and clients are vulnerable to exploitation.

On the other hand, the research uncovers considerable counter discourses from current and future practitioners, who value their own skills and suggest that legal and procedural structures should be the target of greater scrutiny. Happily, my research suggests that students’ learning experiences can help equip them to have confidence in their own professional capabilities and to develop this critical focus on broader context.

Finally, with a recent change of government in Australia, significant reforms have been announced, acknowledging some of the big structural issues within the migration system. This creates a great opportunity for improvements to be made so that migration practitioners and the clients they serve can have a more positive and empowering experience.

References

Cho, J. (2023). Bilingual workers in a monolingual state: Bilingualism as a non-skill. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (ahead of publication).
Jacobs, M. (2022). The metapragmatics of legal advice communication in the field of immigration law. Pragmatics, 32(4), 537-561.
Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction (2^nd ed), Edinburgh University Press.
Reynolds, J. (2020). Investigating the language-culture nexus in refugee legal advice meetings. Multingua: Journal of cross-cultural and interlanguage communication, 39(4), 395-429
Smith-Khan, L. (2020). Why refugee visa credibility assessments lack credibility: a critical discourse analysis. Griffith Law Review, 28(4), 406-430.
Smith-Khan, L. (2021a). ‘Common language’ and proficiency tests: A critical examination of registration requirements for Australian Registered Migration Agents. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 97-121.
Smith-Khan, L. (2021b). Deficiencies and loopholes: clashing discourses, problems and solutions in Australian migration advice regulation. Discourse & Society, 32(5), 598-621.
Smith-Khan, L. (2021c). “I try not to be dominant, but I’m a lawyer!”: Advisor resources, context and refugee credibility. Journal of Refugee Studies, 34(4), 3710–3733.
van Galen-Dickie, M. (2021). The Protégé Effect:Learning from the Experience of Graduates in an Online Community of Practice, Doctoral Thesis, University of Southern Queensland.

Video recording of this lecture now available on YouTube (27/12/2023)

The Australian of the Year 2021 Local Hero Awardee and recipient of the Order of Australia Medal 2022 proudly launched the book at the Embracing Equity Forum organised by the Community Migrant Resource Centre to celebrate International Women’s Day 2023.

In addition to being an author, Rosemary works as Multicultural Community Liaison Officer with the NSW Police, serves as Swahili-English interpreter, is co-founder of the African women’s group for women at risk of domestic and family violence, and engages in film making, including the documentaries The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe and Rosemary’s Way.

In her memoir A Joyful Life, Rosemary, who was born in Kenya, takes the reader through her survival story back home in Africa of a life strewn with hardship, grief, and trauma, to her migration to Australia. She shares her initial settlement challenges and how she made Australia her home.

The overall message is how Rosemary has found a joyful life, which she generously shares with everyone she meets.

Rosemary taps deeply into the experiences that have shaped her into a courageous person who champions the cause of vulnerable people by advocating for migrant women and women of refugee backgrounds. In the telling of her story, Rosemary is quick to point out, though, that she does not seek to be pitied. On the contrary, she lets the reader know that “these experiences did not break me. If anything, they are what sparked and then fuelled the fire inside me. They have allowed me to help others and live a truly joyful life.”

Rosemary Kariuki OAM has just published her memoir “A joyful life”

Over the years, in her desire to empower vulnerable people with whom she crosses paths, Rosemary has identified new arrivals’ information gaps as their biggest problem. For Rosemary, information is vital to growth, “when you have information you have the power of choice, when you have the power of choice you can earn money when you have money, you can earn independence, you can do anything you want.”

A true believer in embracing people, sharing, and learning from each other, Rosemary also co-founded the African Women’s Dinner Dance, which is now in its 16^th year. Through the event many Australian women from African backgrounds have connected, have gained confidence, and their lives have been positively influenced.

With so many accolades to her name, Rosemary has indeed blazed the trail as a truly inspirational migrant woman, a woman of African descent, a survivor of hardship, grief, and trauma. Having healed, she now uses her past to carve out a future that is joyful for her, and to give back to other vulnerable women, so that they can find their own healing and their own joyful lives.

Hearty congratulations again, Rosemary!

International Women’s Day is a great opportunity to share news about the book and reflect on the strength of women’s academic collaborations.

***

Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, Vera Williams Tetteh

***

Life in a new language

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.

The aim is to understand the dual challenge of learning a new language while living one’s life through the medium of that language. This is a challenge that remains poorly understood and non-migrants tend to underestimate its severity and the hardships involved.

1. There is the shock of finding oneself in a new linguistic environment where you may not understand much of what is going on around you, while all the time being cognizant of the fact that not understanding what is going on may have acute repercussions for your wellbeing.
2. There is the difficulty of finding work that will not only pay the bills but also sustain your ambitions and self-worth. Most participants took years to recapture their careers, many never did.
3. To improve proficiency in the new language, migrants need to interact in the new language, a task that is made difficult by the frequent absence of interlocutors willing to indulge newcomers, a lack of common topics, and the pervasiveness of misunderstandings. Misunderstandings may go on to reverberate through future interactions as each misunderstanding leads to a loss of confidence that needs to be reclaimed over time.
4. Migration intrudes even into the most intimate domains of life and alters family roles and relationships. It is not only that familial obligations and duties are redistributed but also that new family tasks emerge. Prominent among these are new ways of parenting, including setting an—implicit or explicit—family language policy, and managing child language learning of both new and heritage languages. As children usually learn the new language faster, the potential impact of their superior (oral) proficiency on parental authority can become another tribulation for adult migrants.
5. Migration continues to be imagined as a point of difference from the idealized sedentary mainstream population of their destination. This difference often marks those with a migration history as perpetual outsiders to their new society. Difference may be audible in their ways of speaking and visible where they are differently racialized. Experiences of Othering, exclusion, discrimination, and racism based on such differences create another level of adversity, as migrants need to cope with micro-aggressions, invalidations, insults, and sometimes even assaults.
6. Migration severs the self into a before and after. As pre-migration habits and identities have disappeared, new selves with a new sense of belonging, home, and community need to be fashioned.

Through the voices of our participants, we document the magnitude and anatomy of these challenges. Understanding them leads to an appreciation of migrants’ courage, perseverance, and resilience.

Ethnographic data-sharing and re-use

The research behind Life in a new language was conducted over a period of more than 20 years in six separate sociolinguistic ethnographies. For this book project, we revisited those six projects, shared our data, and re-analyzed them to answer questions about language learning, employment, interaction, parenting, experiences with racism, and sense of belonging.

Our methodological approach was inspired by open science principles and the desire to share our data and to pool our existing resources to be able to paint a bigger picture of language and migration. While most researchers now accept the value of data sharing and reuse, implementation and practice remain patchy, particularly when it comes to qualitative data in the humanities and social sciences. In ethnographic research, data sharing and reuse is in its infancy as researchers struggle with questions on what open research might even mean for them and how to implement FAIR principles, i.e., making their data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. These problems are compounded by time pressures and the absence of tried and tested workflows for reanalyzing and bringing to publication shared datasets.

During one of our rare in-person writing workshops

As such, Life in a new language ventures into unchartered methodological territory. We explain the academic motivations, affordances and limitations we encountered in the book. Here, we want to share a more personal story.

The story behind the book

Life in a new language is co-authored by six academic women, who have collaborated over an extended period as members of the Language on the Move research team. Donna, Emily, Shiva, and Vera conducted their PhD research under Ingrid’s supervision, and Loy was mentored by Ingrid as an early career researcher.

As such, Life in a new language shows what can be done with linguistic ethnography and provides a working model for how to combine existing small datasets into larger longitudinal studies of a social phenomenon or practice. It also provides a framework for supervising academics and their doctoral students to create a research and publishing community of practice that connects separate higher degree research projects under a single, post-award project umbrella. Similarly, our study provides a model for early career and experienced scholars to work together to create and analyze big datasets from qualitative methods of inquiry.

Life in a new language is personal in yet another way. For the six of us, the intersection of language learning and settlement is not only an academic research topic. Beyond our academic expertise, we share with our participants the experience of being migrant speakers. Like our participants, our group of authors reflects the diversity of 21^st century Australia. All of us are settlers on Indigenous land. We or our ancestors have come to Australia from Germany, Ghana, Iran, Ireland, the Philippines, and Yugoslavia. Those four of us who came to Australia as adults share with our participants the experience of settling in a new country through the medium of a new language. Our experience as English language teachers and teacher trainers also informs our account. We hope that the way we have pooled our lived experiences in a unique intercultural team to write this book will add richness and depth to our account.

Meet each of the 130 migrants in our book over the next months in a serialized Twitter thread

First up: Katja from Poland
Katja’s engineering degree was not recognized in Australia. She retrained as a beautician. Tremendous skills loss for herself and our society
1/n https://t.co/ehvPDznp6f

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) March 7, 2023

Good things really do take time

Data collection on the first project to feed into our analysis started in 2000, but the idea for the book and the reanalysis of previously collected datasets started to take shape in 2018, just around the time one of us had a baby. Seeing this little person ready to start school now, has been the yardstick for how long it has taken us to turn a brilliant idea into a completed manuscript.

We not only got derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but we also discovered that writing a truly co-authored book with a team of six authors, who are not even co-located, is more challenging than anticipated. It is also much more rewarding and fun.

We learned that the principles of open science can be best brought to life through the spirit of collaboration, engagement, dialogue, and friendship that guided our endeavor. And we warmly recommend collaborative writing to all academic women this International Women’s Day because pooling strengths can better keep us all afloat.

What’s next?

We hope we have whetted your appetite for Life in a new language. The academic publication process is a protracted one and we will share key dates here on Language on the Move as they come to hand.

For now, people in Sydney might want to pencil our International Symposium on Bilingualism workshop devoted to the project into their diaries. For everyone else, we have started a Twitter series @lg_on_the_move, where you can meet one of each of our 130 participants per day while we count down to publication.

Related International Women’s Day content

• 2021, Remembering cancelled women
• 2020, Female academics and shamans face the same glass ceiling
• 2019, Why are there so few notable academic women?
• 2018, Why do female academics publish less than their male peers?
• 2013, Migrant women’s empowerment in the city
• 2012, Strange Academic women