LINGLINE 103 June 2017

LINGLINE 103 June 2017

LINGLINE is the departmental newsletter of the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. It focuses on the interests and concerns of staff and postgraduate students in the department. LINGLINE aims to keep staff and students across the world in touch with the department and with one another, and welcomes contributions from all staff and students. Please send submissions to the editor, Haidee Kruger, at haidee.kruger@mq.edu.au. Suggestions for and feedback about the newsletter are welcome.

Inside this edition

Hello again

Staff news

  • Three new books
  • Snippets

HDR news and achievements

Reports: Conferences, workshops and special events

  • Asia-Pacific Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) and Professional Communication Conference (Victoria University of Wellington, 26-28 April 2017) – Stephen Moore
  • NEAS Management Conference (Sydney, 11-12 May 2017) – Phil Chappell
  • Translation and Interpreting in Transition 3 Conference (TT3) (Ghent University, 13-14 July 2017) – Haidee Kruger
  • 16th Symposium on Second-Language Writing (Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 20 June-2 July 2017) – Mehdi Riazi
  • The Developing Lexicon Workshop (Macquarie University, 26-27 April) – Titia Benders
  • HEARing CRC Research Symposium (University of Melbourne, 29-30 May 2017) – Nan Xu Rattanasone

Features

  • Field work to collect Gija conversation – Joe Blythe
  • Linguist in the limelight: Dr Adrian Buzo – Adrian Buzo

News from Language on the Move – Ingrid Piller

Upcoming events

Publications by staff and HDR students (March to May)

Hello again

This edition of LINGLINE celebrates the outstanding achievements of HDR students, and features an exciting line-up of new books and conference reports. Happy reading!

– Haidee Kruger

Staff News

Three New Books

Professor Mehdi Riazirecently published a new book, Mixed Methods Research in Language Teaching and Learning (Equinox, 2017). Congratulations, Mehdi!

The product of more than eight years of work, Exploring Discourse in Context and in Action, co-authored by late Emeritus Professor Chris Candlin, Associate Professor Stephen Moore and Dr Jonathan Crichtonwas recently published by Palgrave Macmillan (2017).

The book combines an authoritative examination of the field of discourse-based research with practical guidance on research design and development. The book is not prescriptive but instead invites expansive, innovative thinking about what discourse is, why it matters to people at particular sites and how it can be investigated. The authors identify a set of questions that, they argue, are crucial for understanding discourse. Part I of the book explores the implications of these questions, providing a comprehensive survey of relevant scholars, theories, concepts and methodologies. Part II addresses these implications, setting out a multi-perspectival approach to resourcing and integrating micro and macro perspectives in the description, interpretation and explanation of data. Part III offers wide-ranging resources to support further reflection and future research. Ultimately, this book offers a new research approach for students, researchers and practitioners in Applied Linguistics to encourage and support research that can be truly impactful through its relevance to social and professional practice.

Associate Professor Ilija Casule’s Burushaski Etymological Dictionary of the Inherited Indo-European Lexicon(LINCOM Press, 2017) recently appeared in the LINCOM Etymological Studies series.

Snippets

Janice Ford, a Scholarly Teaching Fellow (TESOL) in the department was recently featured as Teacher of the Week on Teche, Macquarie’s Teaching and Learning blog. Head over to Teche to find out more about Janice, including her favourite pastime: Scottish country dancing.

HDR News and Achievements

Dr Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, who graduated at the April 2017 ceremony, is the winner of this year’s Michael Clyne Prize.

The Michael Clyne Prize is awarded annually by the Australian Linguistics Society for the best postgraduate research thesis in immigrant bilingualism and language contact. Shiva received the prize for her thesis on Bidirectional language learning in migrant families.

Dr Alexandra Grey is one of two joint winners of the 2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics. The Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics is awarded annually to PhD research which demonstrates methodological and theoretical innovations in Australian linguistics. Alex was awarded the prize for her thesis entitled How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change. The thesis also received a Vice-chancellor’s Commendation in recognition of its exceptionally high standard.

Read more about Shiva’s and Alex’s work in the Language on the Move report, elsewhere in this newsletter. Congratulations on these exceptional achievements!

Yet another Linguistics HDR student, Longjiao Sui, who also graduated in April, received a Vice-chancellor’s Commendation for her MPhil thesis Are simultaneous interpreters subject to the central processing bottleneck during language production? The research was completed under the supervision of Dr Haidee Kruger, Associate Professor Jan-Louis Kruger, and Dr Helen Slatyer. Well done, Longjiao!

Congratulations to Julien Millasseau from the Child Language Lab on the recent completion of his PhD thesis: The acquisition of voicing contrasts in Australian English-speaking 4-year-olds, supervised by Distinguished Professor Katherine Demuth and Dr Laurence Bruggeman.

PhD candidate Laura Smith-Kahn and husband Bilal welcomed their first child, a son called Adam, on 7 February 2017. Welcome, Adam!

In the picture below, Adam is shown attending his very first academic event (the Bridging Language Barriers Symposium) at the tender age of five weeks. By all accounts, he drew quite the crowd – boding well for a future academic career!

Reports: Conferences, Workshops and Special Events

Asia-Pacific Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) and Professional Communication Conference (Victoria University of Wellington, 26-28 April 2017)

At the Asia-Pacific Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) and Professional Communication Conference 2017, hosted by the Victoria University of Wellington from 26-28 April 2017, there was a special 2-hour symposium in honour of Chris Candlin, late emeritus professor in the Department of Linguistics. The symposium was an excellent tribute to the influence and impact Chris has had and continues to have on the field of LSP and professional communication.

Photo: Symposium speakers (left to right): Nicky Riddiford, Janet Holmes, Cynthia White, Alan Jones (Macquarie), Winnie Cheng and Stephen Moore (Macquarie). Not pictured is video presenter Srikant Sarangi.

– Contribution by Stephen Moore

NEAS Management Conference (Sydney, 11-12 May 2017)

On 11-12 May, the Department of Linguistics was a sponsor of the NEAS Management Conference, with brochures placed in conference bags, ads in the program book, and an exhibition booth in a prime location. NEAS is the leading quality assurance body for English Language Teaching in Australia. Dr Phil Chappell and Janice Ford attended the conference and hosted an advising booth in the exhibition area for conference delegates interested in postgraduate or research degrees in Applied Linguistics.

According to NEAS, it was the best attended conference in over a decade, with 350 ELT academic managers in attendance. Indeed, we had many enquiries about Macquarie programmes, with a good deal of interest in the Graduate Certificate of TESOL by TAFE delegates. There was also strong interest in the Masters program and HDR possibilities.

Phil co-presented with a colleague from Perth on innovativemethods of professional development activities for EnglishLanguage Teachers – a full house. Barbara Craig and Sandra Pitronaci from the English Language Centre presented a talk on college management which was also well attended. Janice was able to initiate several very useful partnerships for colleges to host our practicum in TESOL.

Many of the conference delegates are graduates of Macquarie linguistics programmes and dropped by the booth to ask about various academic staff – a good reminder of the impact our programs have on the English Language Teaching communities.

Macquarie will sponsor the English Australia Conference in Adelaide in September, and also AsiaTEFL in Indonesia in July, KOTESOL in Korea and JALT in Japan later in the year. This is a tried and trusted model of community engagement that results in ongoing interest in our coursework and research programmes.

– Contribution by Phil Chappell

Translation and Interpreting in Transition 3 (TT3) (Ghent University, 13-14 July 2017)

After successful editions in Copenhagen in 2014 and Germersheim in 2015, the third Translation and Interpreting in Transition Conference was hosted on 13-14 July 2017 at Ghent University (Belgium). Dr Haidee Kruger was invited as keynote speaker to this conference, presenting a talk on “Translation and/as language contact”, in which she presented a dialogue between contact linguistics and translation studies, framed from a usage-based theoretical perspective informed by cognitive sociolinguistics. She also highlighted  the importance of multivariate statistical analysis in corpus-based studies of contact varieties, including translation.

Other keynote speakers included Associate Professor Dorothy Kenny (Dublin City University), who spoke about neural machine translation; Professor Kilian Seeber (University of Geneva), who reflected on methodological questions in interpreting research, and Professor Silvia Hansen-Schirra (Johannes Gutenberg University), who focused on recent work investigating language processing in translation using EEG.

The organisers describe the conference as follows:

The ongoing digitalisation of our world has caused translation to transition from a mostly manual task to a semi- or even fully automated task. Translation research has gone through a comparable transition, with advanced research methods and statistics allowing researchers to study the translation process and product more thoroughly than ever, thereby bridging the gap between translation and interpreting research and related fields such as corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics and bilingualism studies. The conference offered a forum to researchers involved with the theory-informed empirical study of empirical study of translation, interpreting and hybrid forms (audio-visual translation, live-subtitling, sight translation, sign language interpreting), and included papers focusing particularly on

  • Multivariate statistical analysis of translational and interpreting data
  • Corpus-based translation and interpreting research
  • Reading, writing and post-editing processes in translation and interpreting
  • Translation and interpreting cognition
  • Speech recognition and translation
  • Intelligent machine translation

– Contribution by Haidee Kruger

16th Symposium on Second-Language Writing (Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 20 June-2 July 2017)

The 16th Symposium on Second Language Writing was hosted by the Faculty of Education, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand from 30 June to 2 July 2017. The theme of the symposium was “Assessing Second Language Writing”.Professor Mehdi Riaziorganised and presented a colloquium at this symposium. The colloquium was the outcome of part of his 2016 OSP: a two-month visit at the Language and Literacy Education Departmentof the University of British Columbia. Together with Professor Ling Shi and one of her PhD students (John Haggerty), Professor Riazi reviewed and analysed all the empirical papers published in the Journal of Second Language Writingover its life cycle (1992-2016). In the colloquium, they reported on the overall findings as well as three distinct periods of 1992-1999, 2000-2010, and 2011-2016 in terms of the following themes:

  1. Contexts and participants
  2. Research focus and theoretical orientation
  3. Research methodology

The colloquium was well received and Professor Riazi and his collaborators have now received an invitation by the Journal of Second Language Writing to submit it as a paper on the 25th anniversary of the journal.

– Contribution by Mehdi Riazi

The Developing Lexicon Workshop (26-27 April, Macquarie University)

The Child Language Lab hosted local, national, and international guests for the two-day workshop “The Developing Lexicon: Representations and Processes”. The “lexicon” is our mental dictionary of words, and the workshop presenters spoke about their research into its development. A topic of interest was the bilingual lexicon, with research revealing that representations from one language influence word recognition in the other language.

International guests were Professor Bob McMurray (University of Iowa, USA), who discussed how children may not yet recognise words as easily and quickly as adults; Professor Paul Boersma (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands), who discussed deep learning computer simulations of the lexicon; and Professor Paula Fikkert (Radboud University, The Netherlands), who spoke about the surprising phenomenon that infants and toddlers notice a change from “p” to “t”, but not vice versa!

Photo: Invited speakers and organisers at The Developing Lexicon Workshop held at Macquarie University (from left to right): Distinguished Professor Katherine Demuth (Macquarie), Professor Paula Fikkert (Radboud University), Professor Bob McMurray (University of Iowa), Dr Laurence Bruggeman (Macquarie), Professor Paul Boersma (University of Amsterdam), Dr Titia Benders (Macquarie).

The workshop was sponsored by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), the Centre for Language Sciences (CLaS) and the ARC Laureate Fellowship held by Distinguished Professor Katherine Demuth.

- Contribution by Titia Benders

HEARing CRC Research Symposium (University of Melbourne, 29-30 May 2017)

Distinguished Professor Katherine Demuth and Dr Nan Xu Rattanasonefrom the Child Language Lab attended a two-day symposium hosted by The HEARing Cooperative Research Centre (Hearing CRC) at the University of Melbourne. The HEARing CRC is a collaboration of 21 internationally recognised research organisations with the aim to lay the foundation for a new era of hearing healthcare for Australia.

At the meeting, Nan presented work from Ben Davies’ PhD thesis on grammatical development of children with hearing loss. The talk received lots of interest especially on using the iPad as a fun and interactive testing tool. This study will provide the basis for larger scale studies on examining language abilities of children with hearing loss. The meeting also provided many opportunities to hear about cutting edge work from other collaborators. This work includes new methods on testing and training children’s pitch perception especially relevant for tone language speakers (including large population of Chinese around the world); new materials for cochlear implants that will allow for better fitting and hence better outcomes; and various digital testing and intervention tools for telepractice delivered over the internet to reach more children.

– Contribution by Nan Xu Rattanasone

Features

Field work to collect conversational data in Gija

In April Dr Joe Blythe conducted a short ten-day fieldtrip to Warmun in Western Australia. Joe was recording informal multiparty conversation with elderly speakers of Gija, an endangered Jarragan language of the East Kimberley region. Joe is working with Jarragan expert Frances Kofod, from Kununurra. Their objective is to build a corpus of conversation for interactional linguistics research and for use in applied language revitalisation projects. The research is being funded under Joe’s Macquarie University New Staff grant “Multiparty conversation in Gija, an endangered language of the East Kimberley, WA.”

– Contribution by Joe Blythe

Linguist in the Limelight: Dr Adrian Buzo

Dr Adrian Buzo took some time to tell LINGLINEabout himself.

Language, travel and world affairs were part of my upbringing, and so it’s not really surprising that I’ve ended up in Translation and Interpreting. My father’s first language was Albanian, but in the course of an English medium education in Turkey and the US he became totally bilingual. And my mother, whose background was solidly Australian, made her way to Sydney University in the 1930s and then to Italy – quite an unusual path to tread in those days.

For me it all began at the age of 13 when I was uprooted from country NSW to Geneva Switzerland due to my father’s job with the World Health Organisation. I landed in the English medium stream of the Ecole Internationale de Geneve where excellence in French was serenely expected, and I duly took up the challenge. The day I first really began to understand what was going on around me is etched in my memory for the thrill it gave me.

So, armed with a love of languages I entered Sydney University and on a whim signed up for Chinese alongside more orthodox choices. The attraction to doing French vanished with the very unattractive 9.00 am lecture start times. But more seriously, there seemed little point in being a fluent French speaker in Australia. And as I grew more and more disappointed in my other subjects, I grew more and more attracted to Chinese, and I ultimately majored in Japanese as a possibly more practical option. Both subjects focused strongly on literature translation, and my professors were A.R. Davis and Geoffrey Sargent, both literature translators of international repute. I was terrible, but luckily I did watch, listen and learn from these masters, and translated a short story by Higuchi Ichiyo for my Honours degree.

It was so easy to bounce into employment in those days, and I was snapped up by Foreign Affairs for a short diplomatic career. I was always curious about Korea, and since no one else was, I went there as a language student. I can truthfully say that Korea has never disappointed, and it has led to a working life full of ups and downs, but far more rewarding than I think I deserved.

Five years in Foreign Affairs was enough to convince me that I belonged elsewhere, and I returned to academic study, studying in London and doing a Masters in Korean Language and Literature in Seoul, essentially embedded in the Korean academic world. I translated a broad cross-section of Korean literature, and was lucky enough to have as my supervisor Professor Nam Pung-hyun, a man of enormous patience and scholarship.

Returning to Australia to embark upon family life, I found Korean Studies in Australia very much received the cold shoulder in those days and so I found myself doing a fair bit of translation and interpreting. Around 1983 I was approached by NAATI to become the first chair of the just-formed Korean panel and was happy to preside over the process of building up the earliest cadre of NAATI-accredited Korean Translation and Interpreting professionals.

Then a chance meeting with Dr Mira Kim in 2003 led to an invitation to teach on Macquarie’s Translation and Interpreting program. I already had a full-time job teaching research skills at Wollongong University’s Sydney campus, but as I always tell my students, never say no unless you are genuinely incapable of doing the job, and I’m very glad that I practised what I preached in this instance. I’m basically a historian and literature translator, but being here has opened my mind to very rich new academic challenges.

– Contribution by Adrian Buzo

News from Language on the Move

Dr Shiva Motaghi-Tabari wins the 2017 Michael Clyne Prize for her thesis about bidirectional language learning in migrant families

Dr Shiva Motaghi-Tabari, who graduated at the April ceremony, is the winner of this year’s Michael Clyne Prize.

The Michael Clyne Prize is awarded annually by the Australian Linguistics Society for the best postgraduate research thesis in immigrant bilingualism and language contact. Shiva receives the prize for her thesis on Bidirectional language learning in migrant families.

Abstract

The process of migration to and settlement in a new country entails linguistic, cultural and identity changes and adjustments. These changes and adjustments at an individual level are related to changes and adjustments in the family. This thesis offers a qualitative exploration of such changes and adjustments in migrant families in Australia by focusing on their language learning and use processes.

Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, the study draws on concepts from family studies, particularly the notion of ‘bidirectionality’, as well as sociocultural theories related to second language acquisition within the poststructuralist paradigm. The emphasis is on the ways in which language learning and use in the family relates to wider social and political contexts and language ideologies.

Data for the study come from semi-structured in-depth interviews with nineteen migrant families of Persian background in Australia, including thirty-three parents and twenty-one children.

Overall, the findings of the study show that language socialisation processes within the family in migration contexts are complex and intricately interwoven with parental and child language beliefs and attitudes, which in turn are influenced by language ideologies and attitudes prevalent in the wider society.

Specifically, the research addresses four research questions. First, parents’ experiences of language learning and use before migration are examined. Findings demonstrate how participants’ multiple desires for English learning were socially shaped, and how they invested into English language learning at different points in time, particularly with the prospect of an imagined future in Australia and upward socioeconomic mobility. Second, parents’ experiences of language learning and use after migration are explored. Findings suggest that under the influence of ideological forces in the wider society, particularly those related to the ‘native/non-native speaker’ dichotomy, learners may perpetually be perceived, by themselves and by others, as deficient language speakers and peripheral members in the new society.

After analysing parental language learning and use experiences, children’s experiences of language learning and use are examined. Children’s English language learning trajectories are diverse and relate to the degrees of English competence and the age of participants at the time of arrival. Children exercise their agency in different ways to learn the new language and to become a legitimate member in their new communities of practice. Finally, the thesis explores how parents’ and children’s language learning and use intersect. Language ideologies and the imbalanced values attributed to languages along with inequitable power relations determine the conditions under which parents struggle to achieve bilingual outcomes both for themselves and for their children.

Overall, the study argues for a holistic approach to investigations of language socialisation processes in migrant families and problematises the ways in which language beliefs, attitudes, and practices of parents and their children are shaped by the wider social and ideological context. The study has multiple implications for both adult and child language learning, parent-child interactions in migration contexts, and Australian migration studies.

Advances in sociolinguistic knowledge

Bidirectional language learning in migrant families advances sociolinguistic knowledge in at least three distinct ways:

Conceptually, the focus on bidirectionality in language learning is highly innovative given that language learning continues to be widely seen as something the individual undertakes. Usually, where language learning directions are considered, they are seen to flow from teacher to student or from parent to child. By examining how families engage in language learning as a group and by also considering child influences on parental language learning the thesis breaks new ground conceptually.

Methodologically, the holistic approach to data collection from children and parents, both individually and in groups, extends qualitative interview-based research to include an interactional dimension that is often missing from this kind of approach.

Sociologically, the research advances our knowledge of Persian-speaking skilled migrants to Australia, an emerging but rapidly growing community. By examining pre- and post-migration language learning experiences the thesis illuminates the ideological and practical bases for the language learning trajectories of this group once they have settled in Australia.

Further information

The full thesis is available for download from the Language on the Move PhD Hall of at http://www.languageonthemove.com/phd-theses/.

This is the second time the award goes to a member of the Language on the Moveresearch group. Donna Butorac won the 2012 Michael Clyne Prize for her thesis about Imagined identity, remembered self: Settlement language learning and the negotiation of gendered subjectivity. Furthermore, Vera Williams Tetteh’s thesis about Language, education and settlement: A sociolinguistic ethnography on, with, and for Africans in Australia was the runner-up for the 2016 award. Both these theses are also available at http://www.languageonthemove.com/phd-theses/.

Dr Alexandra Grey wins 2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics for her thesis about language rights and minority languages in China

Dr Alexandra Grey is one of two joint winners of the 2017 Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics. The Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics is awarded annually to PhD research which demonstrates methodological and theoretical innovations in Australian linguistics. Alex was awarded the prize for her thesis entitled How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change. A summary of the research and a link to the full thesis is available here. The thesis also received a Vice-chancellor’s Commendation in recognition of its exceptionally high standard.

Overview

The thesis is an ethnography of language policy; that is, it’s about the lived experiences of state practices regarding a minority language. Rather than merely analysing what the minority language polices say, or what language practices everyday people have, it combines these angles in a case study of the Zhuang language, the language of China’s largest official minority group, a group who have autonomous sub-national government over the Guangxi Zhuangzu Autonomous Region. The thesis investigates what language ideologies are produced and reproduced in official language rights discourses and policies, and how social actors receive, resist or reproduce these.

The research takes an ethnographic approach and draws on interviews with over sixty participants, texts collected from public linguistic landscapes, fieldwork observations and a corpus of Chinese laws, policies and official policy commentaries.

The analysis commences with a critical examination of the procedures of Zhuang language governance, finding that the language policy framework neither empowers Zhuang speakers nor the institutions tasked with governing Zhuang because authority for language governance is fractured and responsiveness to changing conditions is limited. Furthermore, the Zhuang language governance framework entrenches the normative position of a ‘developmentalist’ ideology under which Zhuang is constructed as of low value. Next, the analysis follows Zhuang language policy along its trajectory into practice. The thesis examines how language policy is implemented at different levels of government, and how Zhuang language governance is understood and experienced by social actors, concentrating on two key mechanisms of language policy: first, the regulation of language displayed in public space; and, second, the regulation of language in education.

With regard to public space, the thesis examines a municipal legislative intervention under which Zhuang has been added to public signage. It finds that Zhuang language is rarely displayed outside areas under Zhuang autonomous regional government, and that even within these areas Zhuang is almost exclusively displayed on government signage. The thesis then extends the linguistic landscape approach, analysing the various ‘readings’ of Zhuang landscape texts by viewers, including some who negatively evaluate the signage as tokenistic and many who simply do not ‘see’ the displays of Zhuang. This is one of the more surprising findings: it’s so easy to assume (as a policy-maker, an academic or a passer-by) that a bilingual street sign will be read and used by bilingual viewers who speak that language, that it will be seen as bilingual, that it will be seen at all. As the research discovered, these are notwell founded assumptions.

Finally, the thesis examines education policy under which Zhuang is introduced as a study subject at a limited number of universities after its near-total exclusion from primary and particularly secondary schooling. It finds that students who – against social norms and values – choose to study Zhuang at university nevertheless largely adopt the language ideologies of the pre-tertiary schooling system, namely the belief that Zhuang is not an educated person’s language and not useful for socio-economic mobility.

Overall, the study finds that Zhuang language rights and policies, despite being powerful official discourses, do not challenge the ascendant marketised and mobility-focused language ideologies which ascribe low value to Zhuang. Moreover, although language rights and policies create an ethno-linguistically divided and hierarchic social order seemingly against the interests of Zhuang speakers, Zhuang speakers may nevertheless value the Zhuang identity discursively created and invested with authority by this framework.

Sociolinguistic innovation

How do language rights affect minority languages in China? An ethnographic investigation of the Zhuang minority language under conditions of rapid social change is a highly innovative thesis in at least three distinct ways.

Conceptual innovation: This language policy study traces language laws along a trajectory from constitutional-level statements of “language rights” via regional legislation and local officials’ decisions about how to implement the minority language framework to the ways in which minority language speakers perceive and take up those language rights.

Methodological innovation: The thesis pushes a highly innovative approach to the linguistic landscape in two ways. Firstly, it extends the notion of how languages are embedded in the built environment beyond the presence of scripts, to look at how various ethnic symbols evoke the presence and absence of different languages – this is a highly perceptive methodological innovation, particularly in the case of China, where despite the absence of minority scripts from the built environment, minority populations and their languages are nonetheless frequently indexed through other symbolic means. Secondly, the thesis extends the study of linguistic landscape to an examination of its perception by the people who inhabit that linguistic landscape.

Interdisciplinary innovation: The thesis makes an innovative contribution not only to (socio)linguistics but also Chinese and minority studies. This engaging fusion of disciplines, which is based in political economy and political science literatures, enables novel perspectives on the role of language laws and policies in the rapid socioeconomic transformation of China.

Further information

The full thesis is available for download from the Language on the Move PhD Hall of at http://www.languageonthemove.com/phd-theses/

Spotlight on Language on the Move

If you would like to know what the Language on the Move team does when we don’t celebrate graduations and weddings, check out the spotlight on our team in This Week at MQ: you can find out who we are, what we do and why we do what we do, who we work with, what we are proud of and what we are looking forward to.

One of our recent achievements not mentioned in the Spotlight feature is the fact that our research blog has, once again, been voted a Top Language Lovers blog. This year we came in #17 in this global competition.

Our exciting research blogging content in the second quarter of 2017 included the following posts.

On the occasion of NAIDOC week 2017, this post provides an overview of the ups and downs of bilingual language policies in the Northern Territory.

This post about Dubai’s “other languages” and their use in money transfer advertising includes a sneak preview of a fascinating new book devoted to Urban Sociolinguistics due out from Routledge later this year.

This post examines the representation of refugees in the New Zealand press.

This post introduces Laura’s recent research on guidelines for credibility assessments for refugee review tribunals just published in Discourse and Society.

This post engages with a particular facet of contemporary media representations of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: the supposed benefit of bilingualism as giving the speaker two world views.

This post takes a look behind the scenes of the multiple marginalizations experienced by hearing-impaired Muslim women in Australia. Although Ramadan is now over, you can also learn how to sign “Ramadan Kareem” in Auslan – maybe for next year?

This post shows how the media frame international students as deficient speakers of English who pose a threat to academic and professional integrity in Australia.

This post reflects on the exclusion of Asian languages from discourses about modern language learning in the UK.

In our pitch for the 2017 Language Lovers blogging competition we share some secret and some not-so-secret language learning tips that will supercharge your language learning.

This post includes a sneak preview of the second edition of Ingrid’s bestselling book about intercultural communication, which is due out from Edinburgh University Press in July.

In this post, Dave gazes into the crystal ball and speculates on technology-enhanced communication across different languages in the future.

This post examines the social and ideological context of the recent book burning incidents in Inner Mongolia.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Language on the Movein the ‘Subscribe to Blog’ form in the footer of our site; make sure to join our ever-growing Twitter audience of close to 16,000 followers @lg_on_the_move or find us on Facebook @languageonthemove.

Upcoming Events

Department of Linguistics Research Seminar Series

Broaden your linguistic horizons at our monthly seminars!

The programme for the departmental research seminar series for 2017 is now available. All seminars are webcast live, and recorded. To access the live webcast for any of these seminars, or to catch up on one you missed, visit the Linguistics Seminar 2017 echo website

CLaS-CCD Workshop on maximising the potential for proficient reading in young people with hearing loss: What does the evidence tell us? (Macquarie University, Sydney, 7-8 November 2017)

Overview
Learning to read is arguably a child’s most important academic achievement, comprising a large portion of instruction in the early school years and contributing throughout the subsequent academic journey. It is of significant concern, therefore, that children with hearing loss typically underachieve in reading. In this workshop, organised by the Centre for Language Sciences, we will address two related issues concerning the development of reading skills in children and adolescents with hearing loss.

  1. Which cognitive and linguistic skills and abilities are associated with good reading outcomes in this population?
  2. What methods of reading instruction are most effective?

To address these issues, the workshop brings together researchers who work in diverse settings, both nationally and internationally, to gain a better understanding of reading development and instruction in children and adolescents with hearing loss.  Submissions are welcome on all research exploring these reading-related issues in children or adolescents who communicate using oral language or sign. The workshop will include keynote addresses and invited talks by experts in the fields of psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, and audiology.

Invited speakers

  • Professor Amy R Lederberg (Georgia State University, USA)
  • Dr Fiona Kyle (City University of London, UK)
  • Professor Greg Leigh (Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children, Sydney, Australia)
  • Dr Megan Gilliver (National Acoustic Laboratories, Sydney, Australia)

Venue

Level 1 Lecture Theatre, Australian Hearing Hub, Macquarie University

Abstract submission

We invite submissions of abstracts for oral presentations of 15 or 30 minutes duration. Oral presentations can describe research, practice or education work related to the workshop themes. Regardless of your primary focus, the abstract should make clear how your project adds to current knowledge.

For registration and abstract submission, please use links to templates provided on the workshop webpage.

Organisers

  • Professor Linda Cupples
  • Associate Professor Rosalind Thornton
  • Associate Professor Mridula Sharma

Sponsors

Macquarie University Centre for Language Sciences (CLaS)
ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD)

Australian Eye-tracking Conference 2018 (Macquarie University, 26-28 April 2018)

The Australian Eye-Tracking Conference 2018 is an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary conference with the primary goal of providing a forum for cutting edge eye-tracking (ET) research.

Advances in eye-movement technology have allowed researchers to engage with previously impregnable research questions across diverse disciplines and areas, including developmental science, neuro-cognition, linguistics, communication, education, applied perspectives and clinical research.

Progress in knowledge and technology, as well as ever-evolving methods of data analysis, are bringing new opportunities as well as challenges. These advances will be explored in depth at AusET2018, providing opportunities for researchers to discuss the latest approaches to eye-tracking research including various co-registration methods with neurophysiology and electrophysiology.

The conference will bring together international and local researchers from academia and industry to engage with eye-movement research, and encourage new collaborations across disciplines and institutions. This network of diverse backgrounds, expertise and methodologies will enhance innovation, and contribute to a dynamic future for eye-movement research.

Confirmed keynote speakers

  • Professor Scott Johnson, Director of the Baby (University of California)
  • Professor Simon Liversedge, Professor of Psychology, Deputy Head (Research) and Co-Director of the Centre for Vision and Cognition (University of Southampton)
  • Dr Valerie Benson, Senior Lecturer Psychology (University of Southampton)

Talks, posters and symposia

We invite abstracts of original research using eye-tracking or co-registration with neurophysiology or electrophysiology. Abstracts across disciplines and research areas are invited, including but not exclusive to:

  • Developmental science
  • Language science (e.g. reading and writing processes)
  • Neuro-cognition (e.g. inhibitory control, attention)
  • Hearing and communication
  • Translation and interpreting processes
  • Education (e.g. cognitive load, instructional design, learning mechanisms)
  • Performing arts and media
  • Applied perspectives (e.g. webpage usability, marketing)

See the Submissions page for more details.

Publications by Staff and PhD Students (March-May)

Books

Candlin, C. N., Crichton, J., & Moore, S. H. (2017). Exploring Discourse in Context and in Action. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Casule, I. (2017). Burushaski Etymological Dictionary of the Inherited Indo-European Lexicon. Munich: Lincom Europa. LINCOM Etymological Studies 06.

Riazi, A.M. (2017). Mixed Methods in Language Teaching and Learning. London: Equinox.

Journal articles

Aljahdali, S. A. (2017). Style, context and translated narratives: A socio-semiotic profile for studying style in translated narratives. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7(1), 176-180. doi:10.17509/ijal.v7i1.6871 http://ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/IJAL/article/view/6871

Aryadoust, V., & Riazi, A.M. (Editorial-2017). Role of assessment in second language writing research and pedagogy. Educational Psychology, 37(1), 1-7.

Aryadoust, V., & Riazi, A.M. (Epilogue-2017). Future directions for assessing for learning in second language writing research: Epilogue to the special issue. Educational Psychology, 37(1), 82-89.

Auton, J., Wiggins, M.W., Searle, B.J., & Xu Rattanasone, N. (2017). Utilization of prosodic and linguistic cues during perceptions of nonunderstandings in radio communication. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38(3), 509-539. doi:10.1017/S014271641600031X

Chen, S. (2017). Note-taking in consecutive interpreting: New data from pen recording. Translation and Interpreting, 9(1), 4-23. doi:10.12807/ti.109201.2017.a02

Dube, S., Kung, C., Brock, J. & Demuth, K. (in press). Perceptual salience matters for the processing of subject-verb agreement in 9-11 years-old English-speaking children: Evidence from ERPs. Language Acquisition.

Han, C., & Chen, S. (2016). Strategy use in English-to-Chinese simultaneous interpreting. Forum, 14(2), 173-193. doi:10.1075/forum.14.2.01han

Hussain, Q., Proctor, M., Harvey, M. & Demuth, K. (in press). Acoustic characteristics of Punjabi retroflex and dental stops. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. (accepted May 18, 2017).

Hagedorn, C., Proctor, M., Goldstein, L., Wilson, S. M., Miller, B., Tempini, M. L. G., & Narayanan, S. S. (2017). Characterizing Covert Articulation in Apraxic Speech Using real-time MRI. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1-15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2016_JSLHR-S-15-0112

Johnson, R., & Riazi, A.M. (2017). Validation of a locally created and rated writing test used for placement in a higher education EFL program. Assessing Writing, 32, 84-105.

Kellogg, D. (2017). Thinking of feeling: Hasan, Vygotsky, and some ruminations on the development of narrative sensibility in children. Language and Education. doi: 10.1080/09500782.2017.1306074 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2017.1306074

Kellogg, D. (2017). The ‘D’ Is for Development: Beyond Pedagogical Interpretations of Vygotsky’s ZPD. Applied Linguistics, 1–7. doi:10.1093/applin/amx006

Kellogg, D. (2017). The ‘D’ Is for Development: Beyond Pedagogical Interpretations of Vygotsky’s ZPD. Applied Linguistics. Published online 13 March 2017, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx006

Kellogg, D. (2017). Thinking of feeling: Hasan, Vygotsky, and some ruminations on the development of narrative sensibility in children. Language and Education, 31(4), 374-387.

Khetrapal, N. & Thornton, R. (2017). C-command in the grammars of children with high-functioning autism. Frontiers in Psychology, 8,402. doi: 10.3389?fpsyg.2017.00402

Kruger, J.L & Doherty, S. (2016). Measuring cognitive load in the presence of educational video: Towards a multimodal methodology. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology. 32(6), 19-31.

Knox, J. S. (2017). Participant perspectives and critical reflections on language teacher education by distance. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 42(5), 66-86.

Mandikal, Vasuki P., Sharma, M., Ibrahim, R.K. and Arciuli, J. (2017). Statistical learning and auditory processing in children with music training: An ERP study. Clinical Neurophysiology (accepted 17th April, 2017).

Mandikal, Vasuki P., Sharma, M., Ibrahim, R.K. and Arciuli, J. (2017). Musicians’ online performance during auditory and visual statistical learning tasks. Frontiers Hum. Neuroscience, 11,114. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00114 (accepted 07/03/2017)

Myles, A. J. (2017.) The clinical use of Arthur Boothroyd (AB) word lists in Australia: Exploring evidence-based practice International Journal of Audiology, doi: 10.1080/14992027.2017.1327123

Rabbidge, M.L. (in press). Assumptions, attitudes and beliefs: Tracing the development of teacher beliefs about classroom L1/TL. Journal of Asia TEFL.

Rabbidge, M.L., (in press). Embracing reflexivity: The importance of not hiding the mess. TESOL Quarterly.

Riazi, M. (2017). Editor. Educational Psychology: An international journal of Experimental Educational Psychology, 37. Issue 1: Second Language Writing.

Skopal, D. P. & Herke, M. (2017). Public discourse syndrome: reformulating for clarity. Text & Talk, 37. doi: 10.1515/text-2016-0041

Smith-Khan, L. (2017). Telling stories: Credibility and the representation of social actors in Australian asylum appeals. Discourse & Society.

Smith-Khan, L. (in press). Different in the same way? Language, diversity and refugee credibility. International Journal of Refugee Law.

Stoehr, A., Benders, T., Van Hel, J., & Fikkert, P. (2017). Second language attainment and first language attrition: The case of VOT systems in immersed Dutch-German late bilinguals. Second Language Research, 1-36. doi:10.1177/0267658317704261

Tang, P., Xu Rattanasone, N., Yuen, I. & Demuth, K. (in press). Phonetic enhancement of Mandarin vowels and tones: infant-directed speech and Lombard speech. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. (accepted May 27, 2017).

Tomas, E., van de Vijver, R. & Demuth, K. (in press). Acquisition of nominal morphophonological alternations in Russian. First Language. (accepted Feb 20, 2017).

Chapters in edited volumes

Chappell, P. (2017). Genres and dialogic inquiry for promoting speaking and thinking. In A. Burns & J. Siegel. (Eds.), International Perspectives on Teaching the Four Skills in ELT. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Crock, M., Smith-Khan, L., McCallum, R. & Saul, B. (2017). The legal protection of refugees with disabilities: Forgotten and invisible? Elgar Studies in Human Rights. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Davidse, K., Brems. L. & Smith, A. (2017). Charting ongoing change: The emergent complex subordinators the moment (that) and for fear (that). In S. Hoffmann, A. Sand & S. Arndt-Lappe (Eds.), Exploring Recent Diachrony: Corpus Studies of Lexicogrammar and Language Practices in Late Modern English. University of Helsinki.

Karimi, N., Moore, A. R. & Lukin, A. (2017/in press). Cancer care as an integrated practice: Consultations between an oncologist and patients with advanced, incurable cancer. In L. Fontaine & A. Baklouti (Eds.), Perspectives from Systemic Functional Linguistics. London: Routledge.

Kruger, H. & Kruger, J.L. (2017). Cognition and reception. In J. W. Schwieter & A. Ferreira (Eds.), The Handbook of Translation and Cognition (pp. 71-89). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Moore, S. H. (2017). A case study of assessment in English medium instruction in Cambodia. In B. Fenton-Smith, P. Humphreys & I. Walkinshaw (Eds.), English Medium Instruction in Higher Education in Asia Pacific (pp. 173-191). Dordrecht: Springer.

Skopal, D. P. (2017). Public information documents: Understanding readers’ perspectives. In A. Black, P. Luna, O. Lund & S. Walker (Eds.), Information Design: Research and Practice (pp. 463–476). Abingdon: Routledge.

Conference presentations and posters

Benders, T. (2017, April). Phonological competition effects for known words: Evidence from Dutch 18-month-olds. Paper presented at the Developing Lexicon: Representations and Processing Workshop, Macquarie University, Sydney.

Chappell, P. and Blake, N. (2017). Blended and Flipped PD: a framework for sustainable CPD. NEAS Management Conference, Doltone House, Sydney, 11-12 May.

Coleman, P., Wiebusch, F., Magee, C., O’Keefe, S. & James, R. (2017). Where does empowerment begin? World cafe on

Content owner: Department of Linguistics Last updated: 29 Oct 2024 10:01am

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