Our research
Centre projects
Language Inclusion Index (LI-Index): A tool to evaluate inclusion in multilingual Australia
Team: Alice Chik, Sue Ollerhead, Marc Orlando, Lauren Gorfinkel, Andrew Burridge, Yuanyuan Gu
Stream: Language learning and use in the community
The Language Inclusion Index is a survey tool for organisations to self-assess the degree to which their clients, customers, or users are included or excluded by factors of language. this will be the first tool of its kind. The aim of the project is to accelerate the piloting and validation of the LI-Index with two key partner organisations. The expected outcome is a validated self-assessment instrument to support further funding application for a large-scale assessment of language inclusion in multicultural and multilingual Australia.
Funded by the MQU Research Acceleration Scheme (2022)
Conversational interaction in Aboriginal and remote Australia
Team: Joe Blythe, Ilana Mushin, Lesley Stirling, Roderick Gardner, Francesco Possemato, Caroline de Dear, Josua Dahmen, Catherine Roberts
Stream: Australian Indigenous Languages
This project aims to re-examine claims that Aboriginal Australians conduct conversations in different ways to Anglo-Australians. It will investigate and compare ordinary conversations in these groups on the largest scale yet. The project expects to provide new evidence to explicate Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal conversational norms, pinpointing differences which may lead to intercultural miscommunication. Expected outcomes include new endangered language documentation, and evidence-based findings to disseminate to service providers, to communities and to Aboriginal organizations to improve ways of engaging with each other. In addition, the project will benefit Aboriginal communities with new approaches to language revitalization.
Funded by an ARC Discovery Project (DP180100515 "What is distinctive about Australian Aboriginal conversational style?", 2018-2022)
Blythe, J., Mushin, I., Stirling, L. & Gardner, R. (2022). The epistemics of social relations in Murrinhpatha, Garrwa and Jaru conversations. Journal of Pragmatics, 191. 175–193.
Dahmen, J., Possemato, F., & Blythe, J. (2020). Jaru (Australia) – Language Snapshot. Language Documentation and Description, 17, 142–149
Dear, C. de, Blythe, J., Possemato, F., Gardner, R., Stirling, L., Mushin, I. & Kofod, F. (2021). Locational pointing in Murrinhpatha, Gija and English conversations. Gesture.
Dear, C. de, Possemato, F., & Blythe, J. (2020). Gija (East Kimberley, Western Australia) – Language Snapshot. Language Documentation and Description 17. 134–141.
Possemato, F., Blythe, J., de Dear, C., Dahmen, J., Gardner, R. & Stirling, L. (2021). Using a geospatial approach to document and analyse locational points in face-to-face conversation. Language Documentation and Description. 20, 313-351.
Enhancing the learning outcomes of children from diverse language backgrounds: Building evidence on bilingual education
Team: Nan Xu, Jae-Hyun Kim, Sue Ollerhead, Scott Barnes, Shirley Wyver
Stream: Multilingualism, technologies and literacies in education
This project seeks to build evidence on how bilingual curricula might provide additional benefits to bilingual children by: (1) comparing literacy capabilities (controlling for cognitive, social & emotional domains) in children between monolingual and bilingual curricula, (2) operationalising bilingual curriculum implemented within NSW schools through a range of methods including case study analysis, classroom observations, analysis of classroom interactions, and teacher interviews and (3) evaluating teacher, parent, and child attitudes and engagement with learning across the different school settings. In spite of delays due to COVID-19, SERAP and MQU Ethics approval have been obtained, and a a COVID-safe plan for working in schools has been drawn up. Tests and equipment have been purchased and three bilingual Research Assistants will begin testing in 2022.
Funded by the NSW Department of Education
The geolinguistics of multilingual Australia
Team: Nick Parr, Phil Benson, Andrew Burridge, Michael Chang, Alice Chik, Jim Forrest, Sheruni De Alwis
Stream: Geographies of Multilingualism
There have been many publications on multilingualism in Australia, but there is no significant overview study of the languages of Australia, their geographical and social distribution, and their characteristics as community languages in Australia. 2016 Census statistics show that there are 119 languages in Australia with 1,000 or more speakers, and 235 with 100 or more speakers. For many of these languages, there is no significant documentation of the geographical origins of speakers, their distribution and specific characteristics in Australia, language maintenance, and use in the community. This project will address these issues through a suite of projects—using Census data and other public statistics, data on community language education, interview data with multilingual speakers, and observational data on community language use—aiming at a comprehensive documentation and analysis of Australian multilingualism from a geolinguistic perspective. To date the team has produced three Multilingual Sydney Working Papers on language in the 2016 census and two working papers on Linguistics Landscapes in Sydney. It is currently seeking external funding for a comprehensive analysis of language in the 2021 census, and a book proposal for an Atlas of Multilingual Australia.
Benson, P. (2021). Language in the Australian Census 3: The languages of Australia 1976-2016. Multilingual Sydney Working Papers 5. Sydney: Macquarie University.
Benson, P. (2021). Language in the Australian Census 2: The 2016 census. Multilingual Sydney Working Papers 4. Sydney: Macquarie University.
Benson, P., & Gaughan C. (2021). Language in the Australian Census 1: Using data in research. Multilingual Sydney Working Papers 1. Sydney: Macquarie University.
Forrest, J., Benson, P., & Siciliano, F. (2020). Linguistic shift and heritage language retention in Australia. In S. D. Brunn, & R. Kehrein (Eds.), Handbook of the changing world language map (Vol. 2, pp. 1069-1086). Cham, Switzerland: Springer, Springer Nature.
International students experiences of racism
Team: Alice Chik, Phil Benson, Michael Chang, Adele Garnier
Stream: Language learning and use in the community
This project supported a PACE project to survey international students in Ryde on their experiences of racism, with the aim of developing anti-racism information kits for international students and other CALD communities. PACE students surveyed 400 =international students, produced a report, and designed an evidence-based pamphlet to inform international students and the community on how to respond to incidents of racism. The report was published on the City of Ryde website and articles were published in the Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Mosaic . The project was extended in 2021 for PACE students to design and promote multilingual information pamphlets for international students and the Ryde community. The pamphlet has been translated into 15 languages (Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Armenian, Korean, Spanish, Farsi, Indonesian, Greek, Italian, Tamil, Urdu, Assyrian and Bangla) and 15 students from community language schools were invited to record a read-aloud of the translated pamphlet. These recordings have been produced as short videos for community dissemination. The PACE students also lobbied MQU management to support the project. A #RacismNotWelcome sign is to be set up at the Macquarie Sports Field. The MQU website now includes racism as one category of inappropriate behaviour and the student designed information pamphlet, Make a Stand against Racism, has been incorporated into the site.
Funded by Ryde City Council and aligned with the national campaign, 'Racism. It Stops with Me'.
Community Languages for the Future of New South Wales
Team: Alice Chik, Phil Benson, Michael Chang, Garry Falloon, Nick Parr
Stream: Language learning and use in the community
A project to document the economic, social and cultural value of community languages to NSW and map the provision of community language provision in the state. The outcome of the project was an advocacy report, designed for funding authorities and decision makers. The first edition of the report, What are languages worth? Community languages for the future of New South Wales, was published in 2019 and launched by Minister Victor Dominello to an audience of more than 200 at the NSW State Parliament. An updated edition was published in 2022 and launched at the State Parliament by Minister for Multiculturalism, Mark Coure.
Funded by the NSW Federation of Community Language Schools
Language assessments for multilingual students: a critical review of the literature on international practices
Team: Jae-Hyun Kim, Sue Ollerhead, Nan Xu
Stream: Multilingualism, technologies and literacies in education
This project aims to provide a comprehensive overview of practices, implemented around the world, for assessing the language skills of multilingual students in schools. Despite being a linguistically diverse country, the Australian education system remains largely monolingual and fails to acknowledge multilingual students’ integrated linguistic competence. Consolidating knowledge generated from the international education practices for assessing multilingual students can provide valuable lessons for Australian education system. This can be the initial step for developing inclusive and formative multilingual assessment approaches that can recognise the integrated linguistic competence for the large numbers of students with multilingual backgrounds enrolling in Australian schools.
Translanguaging in teaching and learning
Team: Sue Ollerhead, Alice Chik, Emilia Djonov, Gill Pennington, Louie Liang, Teguh Khaerudin
Stream: Multilingualism, technologies and literacies in education
Translanguaging, a process whereby multilingual speakers use all of their languages to communicate, whether for asking questions, providing answers, or participating in any other communication, is a valuable resource for teaching and learning in contemporary linguistically diverse classrooms. Taking a trans-sectional approach, this project will begin by investigating translanguaging practices enacted in the early grades of primary school, after which middle school secondary and tertiary settings will be explored. The chief aim of the project will be to provide case studies of translanguaging practice from early years to upper-primary, secondary and tertiary education settings, through which principles will be drawn for effective translanguaging pedagogies within Australia’s English-dominant, monolingually oriented education system, with a view to informing teaching, teacher education and research on language in education. The first phase of the project, involving the creation and publication of a multilingual storybook was completed in December 2021. In 2022, the project will involve middle school students and engage them in a digital storytelling project involving translanguaging.
Models of Bilingual Practice: The Experiences of Bilingual Speech Pathologists in Australia
Team: Peter Roger, Scott Barnes, Jae-Hyun Kim
Stream: Multilingualism in Social and Professional Life
Speech Pathology has traditionally been, and remains to some extent, a linguistically homogeneous profession. This is slowly changing and there are now increasing numbers of speech pathologists (hereafter SPs) in Australia who are able to speak and understand a language (or languages) other than English to a high level. Little is known, however, about the ways in which these bilingual (and sometimes multilingual) SPs use their knowledge of languages other than English in their professional practice. The specific aims of the project are: (1) To provide a description of the ways in which practising bilingual SPs in Australia use their knowledge of languages other than English (and associated cultural knowledge or experience) in their professional practice. (2) To identify the kinds of training, resources and support needs that bilingual SPs in Australia see as important for their own individual practices, as well as for enhancing the effectiveness of bilingual speech pathology practice in Australia more generally. (3) To identify issues that may not have been directly considered in the design of the specific interview questions but will inform the design of larger scale externally funded projects in this area. Meeting these aims will have a significant impact on the health of multilingual adults and children in Australia who experience communication disability. Ethics approval has been obtained, and the project team have completed a comprehensive literature search, which will inform the directions of the project. Participants for in-depth interviews will be recruited in early 2022.
Members' projects
OzSpace: Landscape and language in Indigenous Australia
Team: William Palmer (University of Newcastle), Joe Blythe, Alice Gaby, Maia Ponsonnet, Tom Ennever, Laurits Knudsen and Eleanor Yacopetti
Stream: Australian Indigenous Languages
This project aims to investigate how landscape interacts with culture and social diversity to build representations of physical space in the minds and grammars of speakers of Australian Indigenous languages. Its goals include the first Australia-wide survey of Indigenous spatial systems correlated with landscape; and the first systematic investigation of diversity among individuals within communities, collecting completely new experimental and natural data in six endangered Indigenous languages. This is expected to reveal what Australian Indigenous languages and cultures can tell us about the nature of human spatial cognition, have significant benefits for the maintenance and revitalization of Indigenous language and culture.
Funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project scheme (2020-23). Project web site.
Palmer, B., Hoffmann, D., Blythe, J., Gaby, A., Pascoe, B. & Ponsonnet, M. (2021). Frames of spatial reference in five Australian languages. Spatial Cognition and Computation.
Bohnemeyer, Jürgen, Eve Danziger, Jonathon Lum, Ali Alshehri, Elena Benedicto, Joe Blythe, Letizia Cerqueglini, et al. 2022. Reference frames in language and cognition: cross-population mismatches. Linguistics Vanguard 8(s1). 175–189.
Palmer, B., Blythe, J., Gaby, A., Hoffmann, D. & Ponsonnet, M. (2019). Geospatial natural language in Indigenous Australia: Research priorities. In K. Stock, et al. (eds.) Proceedings of speaking of location 2019: Communicating about space. vol. 2455:17–27. Regensburg, Germany.
Intersubjective understanding in atypical human interaction
Team: Minna Laakso (University of Helsinki), Marja-Leena Sorjonen, Markku Haakana, Barbara Fox, Scott Barnes, Suzanne Beeke, Steven Bloch, Katie Ekberg
Stream: Multilingualism in Social and Professional Life
A comparative study of repair organization in conversational interactions involving participants with cognitive, linguistic, motor, or sensory-perceptual communication disorders. The project studies how intersubjective understanding is managed in atypical interactions involving participants with communication disorders. The disorders studied are on cognitive (autism spectrum disorders, dementia), linguistic (adult aphasia and developmental language disorder), motor speech (dysarthria), and sensory-perceptual (hearing loss) levels of human communicative performance. We examine self-repairs on speaker’s own speech, and other-initiations of repair by the recipient of talk. The atypical interactions studied will be compared to typical interactions, and cross-linguistically between Finnish and English data sets. The results provide new theoretical insight to the fundamentals of human conversational interaction in connection with deficits in cognitive, interactional, linguistic, motor, and sensory-perceptual levels of human performance. The results can be used for guidance and developing conversation-based interventions. During 2021, the project team developed shared practices for data coding and processing, and piloted and implemented these practices. Scoping reviews in support of the different arms of project were also commenced.
Funded by the Academy of Finland
Identity Trajectories of Asian International Students in Hong Kong Universities: A Longitudinal Narrative Approach
Team: Matthew Sung (City University of Hong Kong), Phil Benson, Catherine Montgomery
Stream: Multilingualism, technologies and literacies in education
The project will investigate Asian international students’ academic and social integration experiences in Hong Kong universities from an identity lens. In particular, it will examine their identity negotiation and identity trajectories in their academic and social integration, as well as the impact of their language experiences on their identity negotiation. The study seeks to understand how Asian international students negotiate their identities as members of the academic and social communities in the university, how their language experiences impact on their identity negotiation in their academic and social integration, how they navigate their educational journeys over time during their studies in Hong Kong, and what factors may have contributed to the similarities and differences in their identity trajectories. The study will employ a longitudinal narrative approach, together with a multi-methods research design.
Funded by the Hong Kong General Research Fund (2022-24)
The Relationship between Learners’ Out-of-Class Autonomous Technology-Enhanced Language Learning and Their Vocabulary Knowledge
Team: Lai Chun (University of Hong Kong), Phil Benson, Ma Qing and Wang Qiu
Stream: Multilingualism, technologies and literacies in education
This project aimed to reveal quality indicators of learners' utilization of technological resources for language learning outside the classroom. Specifically, it examined the association of different out-of-class technology-enhanced learning experiences with learners’ vocabulary knowledge. A qualitative study was conducted with 46 Chinese English language learners. Based on the analysis of learners' dairy entries, interview data and vocabulary knowledge test, a few key dimensions of technology-enhanced out-of-class language learning experiences that are essential to vocabulary knowledge were identified. A model of the associations of these key dimensions with vocabulary knowledge was developed. A survey study with 480 Chinese English language learners was conducted to test the conceptual model. A paper based on the qualitative data will be published in Language Learning and Technology.
Funded by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council, General Research Fund (2018-2021)
Lai, C, Liu, Y., Hu, J., Benson, P. & Lyu, B. N (2022). Association between the characteristics of out-of-class technology-mediated language experience and L2 vocabulary knowledge. Language Learning & Technology, 26(3)
Victorian Certificate of education English as an additionAL language: Designing teaching and learning approaches to VCE EAL writing using Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
Team: Julie Choi (Monash University), Mei French, Sue Ollerhead, Kailin Liu
Stream: Learning and using English in multilingual society
This project aims to develop pedagogies and principles that enhance VCE EAL students’ performance and engagement with thesis-driven academic writing through the design and delivery of a unit of work. This unit of work will focus on one of the three types of thesis-driven academic writing required in the VCE EAL curriculum: either comparative text analysis, argument analysis or persuasive writing.
Funded by the Victoria TESOL Association (2022)
Augmented Reality in Language and Literacy Classrooms: Emerging Possibilities for Pedagogical Connections
Team: Lynde Tan (Western Sydney University), Alice Chik, Angela Thomas
Stream: Multilingualism, technologies and literacies in education
This project was the first to investigate language and literacy teachers’ knowledge and concerns in teaching multimodal literacies, followed by building teachers’ knowledge of AR affordances and ways of harnessing it to integrate language and literacy. It aimed to foster students’ inventiveness in appropriating affordances of emergent technologies by involving teachers and students in creating texts using augmented reality (AR). Using quantitative and qualitative data analysis methods, the study drew on the technological, pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) framework, and social semiotic perspectives. The project findings aim to guide teachers to evaluate AR affordances, provide principles and lesson ideas to support educational uses of AR, and recommend units of work for all stages to draw on critical and creative pedagogies to meet the Australian Curriculum: English outcomes. A monograph, Between Worlds: Extending Students' Multimodal Literacy Practices with Augmented Reality (Tan & Chik), was published in March 2022 by PETAA.
Funded by the Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA) (2019-2021)
In others’ shoes: Pre-service teachers’ cross-comparison of multilingual and multicultural experiences in Hamburg and Sydney
Team: Sylvia Melo Pfeifer (Hamburg University), Alice Chik, Sue Ollerhead
Stream: Multilingualism, technologies and literacies in education
This project explores pre-service teachers' beliefs and experience of multilingualism and multiculturalism in Hamburg and Sydney. By using language portraits as the starting points of comparison, the project captures how pre-service teachers view multicultural and multilingual competence in their educational, professional and social contexts, and discuss how such understandings differ between Australia and Germany.
Funded by the Hamburg-Macquarie-Fudan Trilateral Initiative (2021-22)
In other shoes, but how? International virtual collaboration in initial teacher education for sustainable intercultural and multilingual education
Team: Silvia Melo-Pfeifer (Hamburg University, Germany), Alice Chik
Stream: Multilingualism, technologies and literacies in education
A virtual academic collaboration project to better understand multicultural and multilingual education for both German and Australian students and academics. This project builds on the Centre's long term collaboration with Hamburg University with the support of the MQ-Hamburg-Fudan Trilateral Collaboration.
Funded by The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) (2020-21)
Melo Pfeifer, S., & Chik, A. (2020). Multimodal linguistic biographies of prospective foreign language teachers in Germany: reconstructing beliefs about languages and multilingual language learning in initial teacher education. International Journal of Multilingualism.
Plotting the emergence of young children’s learning-oriented talk in early childhood centres: an analysis of growth trajectories and individual differences
Team: Sheila Degotardi, Emilia Djonov, Fiona Zheng, Sarah Jacobson, Naomi Sweller, Mridula Sharma
Stream: Multilingualism, technologies and literacies in education
This study examines the development and use of language as a critical tool for early learning between the ages of 2½ and 3½ years in children who attend socially and culturally diverse early childhood (EC) centres in urban, regional and rural NSW. Results will be translated into professional learning resources and an assessment tool for EC educators.
Funded by the NSW Department of Education
Were we all in this together? Sub-national border closures during Covid-19 and the shifting scales of governance and resilience
Stream: Geographies of multilingualism
This project examines how sub-national Covid-19 border closures have affected governance and resilience of border communities in NSW. Border closures and changing governance of services, communication of rules, and management of mobility have shifted Australians’ awareness and understanding of taken-for-granted internal borders. Regulation of sub-national borders has transcended pandemic management with legal, sociological and political implications, contrasting the national rhetoric of communities ‘being in the pandemic together’. This benchmark study, of national relevance, will develop relationships with key stakeholders and institutions, to establish a framework for understanding the role and function of sub-national borders in creating and dividing communities.
Funded by the MQU Research Acceleration Scheme