Timothy Jowan Curnow

Educational responses to multilingualism: an introduction

Linguistic and cultural diversity is a feature of most, if not all, modern societies, whether it results from historical processes of state formation, from the aggregation of colonial possessions and their subsequent independence or from human mobility. Diversity therefore shapes the context in which education occurs and the processes through which teaching and learning happen. However, educational systems understand and respond to diversity in different ways. This volume focuses on contemporary implications of linguistic and cultural diversity for education at school level and in higher education. It recognises that different countries and regions have experienced diversity in education at different times and in different ways. In some cases, diversity has become a new, immediate concern for education systems that are unprepared for it, while for others it is the age-old backdrop against which education has been developed. It also recognises that educational responses to diversity change over time and that different countries and regions have different histories of involvement with diversity. The recent increase of diversity in Europe, for example, has produced a sense of urgency, with European educational systems planning for some form of productive coexistence of different linguistic and cultural groups. Despite a parallel increase in diversity in Australia, a similar sense of urgency does not seem to play a role in the education system. In fact, in Australia educational responses to diversity have a longer history, but education seems to have refocused away from linguistic diversity towards a narrower monolingualism. On the other hand, while recognition of diversity in both Europe and Australia is relatively recent, countries in South Asia and Africa have been engaged with the management and mismanagement of diversity in education for centuries. Each of these contexts has a chance to learn from these different histories, trajectories and experiences of linguistic diversity in education. The articles in this volume survey the issue of educational responses to linguistic diversity from a range of perspectives. Each examines a different aspect of education and the role for languages within education. Some engage with general issues, while others examine specific cases. They show educational responses to linguistic diversity to be both complex and problematic and in so doing raise issues for consideration in framing debates around the relationship between linguistic and cultural diversity and education. In their article, Liddicoat and Curnow examine the issues that influence how policy documents position non-dominant languages in schooling. They argue that the curriculum is a space constrained by prevailing ideologies and discourses about languages that consign non-dominant languages to marginalised positions in schooling. These discourses find their origins in monolingual understandings of the nation state: as nation states view schooling as an instrument of state formation, monolingual understandings of the nature of the state inevitably shape education as a monolingual, or rather monolingualising, environment. They also argue that in any society prevailing language ideologies influence the ways that particular languages are seen as being valued or valid for particular purposes and that discourses that construct non-dominant languages as being less ‘useful’ International Journal of Multilingualism, 2014 Vol. 11, No. 3, 269–272, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2014.921174

Communication in Introductory Linguistics

Linguistics is the study of language, and for most non-linguists (including linguistics students), language is about communication. This paper examines the use of the terms communication, communicating and communicative in introductory linguistics texts to uncover the underlying assumptions about communication which they encapsulate. There are, in fact, relatively few mentions of communication in these introductory texts, and possible reasons for this are also examined.

Maung Verbal Agreement Revisited: a Response to Donahue (1998)

Donohues (1998) recent unarticle developed an Optimality Theory analysis of the verb prefix ordering of the general tense form of Maung, a non‐Pama Nyungan language of northern Australia. However, that analysis, with constraints based on grammatical relations and alignment categories, required one of the prefixes to be considered as an exception; it was treated as an absolutive prefix despite being formally and functionally an accusative prefix. An alternative Optimality Theory analysis, based on syntactic function and person, is developed which avoids the necessity of treating any form as exceptional. Donohues (1998) analysis also oversimplified the Maung data, claiming that the complications arose from morphophonemic rules. In fact, some of the prefix forms cannot be developed in Donohues analysis via morphophonemic rules, regardless of how complex these rules are. However, an analysis of these forms is possible, using ideas from Correspondence Theory. In particular, the tools available within this t...

Can you be gay and lesbian in Australian English

The use of the expression gay and lesbian in a corpus of televised spoken Australian English is examined. It is shown that speakers treat this as a lexicalized expression, rather than a productively created conjunct of gay and lesbian . The meaning of the whole expression is not predictable from the meaning of the parts, in that gay and lesbian is used to refer to a broader set of people than the sets covered by the terms gay and lesbian individually. Gay and lesbian is also used in reference to a single non-specific individual, where a disjunct phrase with or would normally be appropriate. Additional support for the lexicalized status of this expression comes from the occasional use of gay and lesbians, with a single marker of plurality on what appears to be a conjoined noun phrase.