Anne Pauwels

Maintaining the Community Language in Australia: Challenges and Roles for Families

Much Australian work on immigrant languages has revealed that the family is a crucial site of language maintenance (LM). The family remains for most immigrants and their offspring the main domain for community language (CL) use. At the same time, there is no doubt that positive language, education and migration policies strengthen the maintenance of CL in Australia as described in Fishmans (1991) model of LM, Reversing Language Shift. However, as Fishman (1991) has observed, supportive policies and educational provisions will only be of value if the family initiates CL acquisition and provides a practice ground for its continued use. I consider the main favourable factors, challenges and strategies for successful CL maintenance in the family, as gleaned from case studies, and conclude with suggestions for greater attention to the role of adolescents and of technology in CL maintenance.

Gender and Language Contact Research in the Australian Context

The focus of this paper is a (re)consideration of explanations and (re)presentation of second-generation bilingual women and their discourses of identities, language choice and language maintenance in Australia in the light of new directions for gender in language contact research. Here we present a (re)view of the value, roles and directions of past and present research about gender and language contact as well as provide an example for future directions through an examination of the emergent discourses of identity of a young Australian-born woman of Greek parentage living in Melbourne.

Gender Inclusivity or ‘Grammar Rules OK’? Linguistic Prescriptivism vs Linguistic Discrimination in the Classroom

This paper explores the potential conflict classroom teachers face in their dual roles as ‘guardians of grammar’ and as ‘agents of social language reform’ with reference to third person singular generic pronouns in English. We investigate to what extent teachers (primary, secondary and tertiary) experience tensions between these roles in relation to their own and students’ use of generic pronouns, and if they do, how they resolve the issue. Drawing upon survey and interview data from Australian classroom teachers we find substantial adoption of gender-inclusive alternatives to generic he with a clear preference for and tolerance of singular they in their own and their students’ writing. Remnants of social gender and the use of generic he and generic she are found for the antecedents real estate agent and teacher respectively. Younger teachers are by and large unaware of grammatical prescriptivism arguments while all teachers have awareness of the need to address and reform linguistic discrimination. Female educators lead the way as ‘agents of change’ and intervene in students’ writing to promote the avoidance of gender-exclusive generic he.

Handbook of Language and Communication: Diversity and Change

The volume has four parts: Part I (Language minorities and inequality) analyses language contact and linguistic diversity as a global phenomenon; Part II (Language planning and language change) focuses on colonialism, imperialism and economics as factors that language policies and planning measures must account for; Part III (Language variation and change in institutional contexts) examines language-related problems in education, religion, science and the Internet; and Part IV (The discourse of linguistic diversity and language change) relates public discourses on language and racism, sexism and political correctness to different ideological positions, values and attitudes. Key features: provides a state-of-the-art description of different areas in the context of linguistic diversity and change presents a critical appraisal of the relevance of the field offers solutions for everyday language-related problems international handbook with contributions from renowned experts in the field

Gender in the construction and transmission of ethnolinguistic identities and language maintenance in immigrant Australia

The relevance and impact of gender and/or sex roles have long been recognized in the transmission of languages in situations of language contact. More recent studies of multilingualism, second language learning and language maintenance have moved beyond the investigation of gender roles to looking at gendered identities and questions of language maintenance/shift. Here we build upon these developments and examine the ways in which masculinities and femininities constrain and enable language maintenance practices and transmission of the community language among bilingual women and men who were born in Australia to immigrant parents (the so-called second generation). In particular we explore the gendered practices of ‘maintaining the community language’ among ‘second-generation’ women and men of Greek and German descent and discuss the construction of gendered ethnolinguistic identities and the survival of the respective community languages in Australia.

The teaching of languages at university in the context of super-diversity

In this paper, I explore the impact of linguistic super-diversity on the teaching of languages at tertiary level. Through a small-scale study of university-based language teachers in Australia and the United Kingdom, I examine to what extent these teachers have become aware of the changed language profiles that their students are bringing to the classroom and how they have accommodated their teaching approaches to reflect these changes. The results of the study reveal a rather limited level of engagement with the consequences of linguistic super-diversity. I provide some explanations and suggestions for how this could be changed.

Planning for a global lingua franca: challenges for feminist language planning in English(es) around the world

In this paper I outline the challenges for feminist language planning in the context of a global lingua franca – English. Drawing upon the views of speakers of ‘World Englishes’ I discuss their reactions as well as reported practices in relation to gender-inclusive language use. This reveals the complexities of managing the tension between the ‘universal’ goals of feminism(s) and the myriad of local and cultural differences affecting in the social, economic and political positions of women.

Maintaining a language other than English through higher education in Australia

The multilingual profile and the culturally diverse nature of Australia’s population are continuously reaffirmed through Census data which provide details on birthplace and ancestry as well as on languages used in the home and English language skills. Despite its shortcomings such as a change in the wording of the language question in 1986 (for more details, see Chapters 2 and 3), the Australian Census has provided invaluable information on community languages since the mid-1970s. This has facilitated the construction of a linguistic ecology of Australia including language maintenance and shift patterns in ethnolinguistic groups and macro-factors affecting the vitality of languages in Australia. For example, the most recent Census (2001) included 206 listings of languages other than English (LOTEs) with 142 of these being ‘community languages’ and the rest Australian indigenous languages. In 2001, 16 per cent of the population used a LOTE at home. Kipp’s analysis of the 2001 Census data on language (see Chapter 2) showed that Italian remains the most widely used community language in Australia with more than 3,50,000 users; Greek, Cantonese and Arabic follow Italian with more than 2,00,000 users; Vietnamese and Mandarin record around 1,75,000 and 1,40,000 users respectively.

Future directions for the learning of languages in universities: challenges and opportunities

The place of foreign language learning in education has a rich and diverse history since the introduction of compulsory schooling, with some countries including the learning of a foreign language as a compulsory part of the curriculum, whilst in others foreign language learning is seen as an optional subject suited for more academically minded students. In more recent times, the place and role of foreign or second language learning have come under increasing scrutiny, partly in response to world-wide developments in communication technologies, increased and expanded transnational mobility, global security concerns and the emergence of a global lingua franca, English. In this article, I build upon reflections from other scholars to outline the major challenges for university-level language learning in the context of a radically changing language learning environment. The focus of attention is on three key elements of language learning: the learner, the teacher and the curriculum.

Gender-inclusive Language Reform in Educational Writing in Singapore and the Philippines: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract In this paper we examine the adoption of some gender-inclusive features (generic nouns and pronouns) in two varieties of “outer-circle” Englishes. The focus is on educational texts given the importance of the educational domain in the adoption and spread of language planning. The texts are from the Singapore and Philippine sections of the International Corpus of English [ICE]. Overall results point to minimal adoption of gender-inclusive alternatives for generic he and masculine generic nouns although differences emerge in relation to variety and type of text/genre.