Challenges of Adult Language Learners in Australia

In this interview, we talk to Ingrid Piller about her forthcoming co-authored book Life in a New Language.

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References for Episode 39

Kachru, Braj B. 1985. ‘Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle’, in English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures, ed. Randolph Quirk and Henry George Widdowson, pp. 11–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Piller, Ingrid. 2023. ‘Scholarly sisterhood: Collaboration is our academic superpower’. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/scholarly-sisterhood-collaboration-is-our-academic-superpower/

Transcript by Luca Dinu

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language [00:13] Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:18] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:22] Today we’re joined by Ingrid Piller, who’s Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Australia. [00:29] Ingrid has many different areas of expertise within the vast field of applied linguistics, [00:35] including in intercultural communication, language learning, multilingualism, and bilingual education. [00:42] Ingrid’s also the co-founder and one of the leading contributors to the multi-author scholarly [00:48] blog Language on the Move, which has recently branched out into a podcast, [00:54] and she’s going to talk to us today about her latest book project, a collective volume [00:59] that she’s co-edited with several colleagues from Language on the Move, about the experience [01:05] of learning a new language and making a new life in that language after migrating to another [01:10] country. [01:11] This book will appear soon with Oxford University Press under the title Life in a New Language. [01:18]

So Ingrid, to get us started, could you tell us a bit about your forthcoming book? What [01:22] is it about, and what approach does it take? [01:25]

IP: OK, well, thanks, James, for having me on the show. [01:29] So Life in a New Language, first thing I should say, it’s not a co-edited book, but a co-authored book. [01:35]

JMc: OK. [01:36]

IP: And I think that’s really special about it. [01:40] So it answers the question: what does it mean to start a new life through a new language [01:48] and what kind of settlement challenges do new migrants face? [01:53] And this is a question that myself and my students and my Language on the Move colleagues, [01:59] as you’ve said, has been a key research question for us over more than 20 years. [02:07] And in the late 2010s, a couple of us were getting together and were saying, ‘Well, look, [02:15] we’ve got a number of really interesting but separate studies, and we’ve collected all [02:21] these data, we’ve interviewed and sat with and spent time with and conducted participant [02:27] observation with so many migrants from so many different contexts over so many years. [02:35] Why don’t we actually get together and reanalyse those data?’ [02:39]

And so methodologically, it’s a real innovation in that we are actually reusing data from [02:46] existing sociolinguistic ethnographies, and so it’s a data-sharing project, and there [02:54] are six projects from which we bring together data. [03:01] So there is one that I started in the early 2000s at the University of Sydney, and that [03:11] was an ethnography with highly achieving second language learners. [03:16] So at the time, I was particularly interested in people who had learned English to such [03:22] high levels that they could pass for a native speaker, and so that was the first cohort of people who went into it. [03:31] Then another PhD, data from a PhD that focused on the experiences of European migrants to [03:38] Australia, that was done by Emily Farrell and completed in 2010. [03:46] Then three other PhDs completed here at Macquarie University, one by Vera Williams Tetteh about [03:54] the language learning and settlement experiences of African migrants to Australia, [03:59] one by Shiva Motaghi Tabari about the experiences of Iranian migrants, and she was particularly focusing [04:11] on parenting and heritage language maintenance in that context. [04:16] And then data from another sociolinguistic ethnography with female migrants and how… The focus [04:23] of the PhD was on how gender influences the migration experience. [04:29] And then the sixth project that went into it was a project that was funded by a New Staff Grant here at Macquarie University to Loy Lising [04:38] about the experiences of skilled migrants from the Philippines [04:44] who arrived here under a temporary skilled work visa and went [04:49] straight into workplaces and what their experiences were. [04:53]

And so we brought all these data together that we’d collected for separate projects. [04:58] I mean, I have to say, I was involved in all of these projects. [05:01] I either was the PhD supervisor or the researcher or the sponsor or mentor of the research. [05:08] So I was involved in all of these. Even so, they were actually… I mean, in hindsight, [05:13] they were very disparate and some of the challenges in terms of data sharing, you only notice [05:19] them like in hindsight. ‘Oh, if we’d done this more consistently or that more consistently, would have been easier.’ [05:26] But anyway, so we set ourselves the challenge of actually bringing all this data together [05:32] and reanalysing them with a new set of research questions focused on language learning experiences, [05:41] interactional practices, like how do you make friends, how do you actually find someone [05:45] to talk to? Which is a not trivial problem. Experiences of finding work; that was relevant [05:53] to everyone. Regardless of how we had originally set up the research, everyone wanted to talk [05:59] about… I mean, we have so many data about finding work and not finding work at the [06:03] level you want to find work, then experiences with making family in a new context because inevitably your family changes, right? [06:13] Some people are left behind, but even like the people with who you migrate, you know, [06:19] your relationship changes, new challenges arise like parenting, bilingual parenting, [06:24] do you pass on the heritage language, do you focus on English, experiences with racism [06:31] and experiences with belonging — how do you create belonging and a sense of connection? [06:37] And so these were the research questions we asked of these data and so overall now [06:44] we then have an analysis based on data with 130 migrants from 34 different countries [06:54] on all continents, pretty much over a period of 20 years, the earliest of these arrived [07:02] in Australia in 1970 and the last to arrive was someone who arrived in 2013. [07:12]

JMc: But in every case the country that they moved to is Australia, is that correct? [07:17]

IP: Yes, that’s correct, yeah. [07:18]

JMc: And do you think language is a key feature of the migrant experience that you’ve analysed? [07:25]

IP: Yeah, so, I mean, we’re only looking at migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, so all of them had to learn English. [07:33] So that was a key feature of their experience because, you know, when you move to a new [07:41] country where even if you’ve learned the language for a long time, you now need to do things [07:48] through that language, and so that’s the dual challenge, right? [07:52] You need to still learn the language and extend your repertoire or some people arrive with [07:57] pretty much zero English, so you learn English, but at the same time it’s not like you’re [08:03] in a classroom. [08:04] You’re in real life. [08:06] You need to achieve things, you need to be able to rent a house, to find a job, to interact with customers, to, you know, go to the supermarket, [08:18] maybe go to hospital, maybe have an emergency, but even also accomplish really trivial things. [08:25]

We start with one trivial-sounding example that has really deep repercussions for the participants. [08:36] So this is the story of a young woman from Japan who arrived in Australia when she was [08:42] in her late teens, and the idea was for her to come here to, you know, improve her English, essentially. [08:49] So she had learned a bit of English back in Japan, and when we first met her, she had been [08:56] in Australia like 10 years or so, so after the study abroad experience, she had actually [09:02] settled down, and one of the… [09:04] She had this traumatic memory of the first year of her [09:10] time in Queensland that she was only able to drink apple juice and it was like this [09:16] absurd trauma, like, ‘Oh, I could only drink…’ No, sorry, not apple juice, orange juice. [09:22] So why only orange juice? [09:24] And she goes, ‘Well, I never liked orange juice, but whenever I asked for apple juice, no one ever understood me.’ [09:31] And so we kind of reconstructed that probably apple juice would have sounded something like, in a very Japanese accent, something like ‘apuru juice’. [09:41] And you know, I mean, she didn’t utter that word randomly. [09:45] She always asked it in the context of some hospitality encounter, but no one ever understood [09:51] her and so people would shout back like, ‘What?’ [09:54] And, you know, she imitated this like loud kind of people being rude or saying this rapid-fire, ‘What do you want?’ And, you know, so… [10:03] She never got… Or just, you know, ignoring her. [10:09]

So all she could ever drink for the longest of time was orange juice, but that was sort [10:13] of the example for actually being ignored, being, you know, not given opportunities [10:22] to learn the language when you are actually there in real life. [10:26] So people are not necessarily sympathetic to adult language learners. [10:31] I think that’s the other challenge because as adults, you know, we’re supposed to be competent. [10:36] You want to… You’re not focused on your language. [10:41] That’s for little kids. [10:43] You know, I mean, we set up the world for children so that they actually learn language [10:49] at the same time that they are being socialized into whatever it is that a child needs to do. [10:56] But a child really has, you know, huge responsibilities. [11:01] And so when, as an adult, you’re kind of thrown back to that language learning situation where [11:08] you’re basically in the shoes of the little child, except you have responsibilities, you [11:15] have serious things to do, and you’re supposed to be competent to know how to order a drink [11:21] in a restaurant, right? [11:22] I mean, that’s… No one gives you any… cuts you any slack there. [11:28] And so that sort of encapsulates the story, encapsulates the challenge that all our participants [11:36] experienced, really, to regain their adult competence through a medium that they were [11:45] still learning, going along, mastering. [11:49]

JMc: And do you think you could make any generalizations from these studies [11:52] to the migrant experience sort of internationally? [11:56] Because in some ways, maybe Australia and other English-speaking countries are a special [12:00] case, because English has this status today internationally as a sort of neutral default [12:07] language that is used in international encounters. [12:10] So do you think that the experience in Australia can be generalized more broadly? [12:14]

IP: Yes and no. [12:16] So no in the sense that, as you’ve pointed out correctly, English is a very different [12:23] beast than any other language, [12:25] and hardly any of our participants really arrived with zero English. [12:32] Some had learned English for years and years and years as a foreign language, and you and [12:40] your listeners are probably familiar with kind of Kachru’s circle model of English. [12:46] And we sort of used that as a guide because it was really quite helpful in the sense [12:51] that some people come from these postcolonial societies where English has some official [12:57] status and they had all encountered some English, [13:02] but in those contexts English is strongly associated with formal education. [13:08] And so we have people, particularly from African postcolonial countries, who actually had [13:15] a lot of oral proficiency in English, had a lot of experience actually communicating [13:21] multilingually, picking up new languages as they kind of went along. [13:28] And they arrive in Australia, and all of a sudden their English no longer counts. [13:36] That high oral proficiencies that they have, they’re not recognized, so all that people [13:43] seem to see in them is either that they are low literacy, because some of them had very [13:48] disrupted education, or if they did have good levels of formal education, still they were [13:56] often treated as if their English wasn’t real or as if no one could understand them. [14:01]

So we have this example, for instance, from a participant from Kenya who actually had [14:08] all her education through the medium of English. [14:12] I mean, her English was, she had a slight kind of East African accent, but essentially [14:18] it was British English. [14:19] I mean, it was more formal than the way most Australians speak English. [14:23] And she had this experience that she was applying for a job in some customer-facing role, and [14:33] then the person who interviewed her said, ‘You know, you’re fantastically qualified, [14:38] but you know what, I can’t actually give you that job because my clients won’t understand you.’ [14:46] And there really is no way this was a problem of understanding, because, I mean, if you [14:56] hadn’t seen her, then you would have understood. [15:01] So it’s this kind of McGurk effect problem that you judge the proficiency of people also [15:08] on their embodied identity and what kind of stereotypes you may have about that embodied identity. [15:18]

So going back to these multilingual experiences, the other thing that I’ve said about this [15:24] group from the postcolonial countries where English has an official status, so they were [15:30] highly multilingual, and they were really quite used to learning new languages. [15:35] There was nothing special to them, as it often is sort of in Western contexts. [15:41] However, in Australia, all of a sudden, that didn’t work anymore, because it wasn’t this [15:47] kind of multilingual repertoire that people could build on, but it was all this monolithic [15:54] monolingual English, [15:57] and so although they had a lot of English, still the kind of English that they brought [16:05] was very different from the kind of English that was needed here, [16:10] and so that created all kinds of challenges and mismatches, particularly in terms of education, [16:17] in terms of credentialing, in terms of finding jobs. [16:21]

And the other group that we had were from countries that would conventionally call countries [16:27] in the expanding circle. [16:29] So they had learned English through the school system, like as a school subject, often over many years. [16:36] They’d done tests and tests and tests. [16:38] In fact, the testing was reinforced by Australian migration regulations [16:44] that actually in order to get a Skilled Independent visa, you need to demonstrate a particular proficiency level of English. [16:53] So these people actually, they came to Australia, they felt, ‘My English has been certified [16:58] by the Australian state, you know. I’ve got a visa on the strength, amongst other things [17:05] of course, that my English is OK. [17:07] So I have certified competent English.’ That gets you like 10 points for the visa. [17:13] And then they arrived and they had this huge shock because they felt they couldn’t understand anything. [17:20] So they didn’t have the kind of oral proficiency or communicative competence. [17:24] And some of them were saying it’s because, you know, Australian accent is so different. [17:29] It’s not Oxford English or whatever kind of British or American English they’d learned. [17:34] But it was also just really, you know, being in different communicative situations. [17:41] Like for instance, one of our participants told us the story about how she arrived in Australia and needed to get a phone. [17:49] And she had very high IELTS level, goes to get a phone, and just, ‘I didn’t understand a word [18:01] of what that salesperson was saying to me.’ [18:03] Just couldn’t get a phone, right? [18:06] And that seems like a trivial thing, [18:09] but again, you know, the kind of English that people bring is very different from what you [18:15] actually need in real life, so to speak, or in this kind of real life. [18:22] So in that sense, English or the language learning and settlement challenges are also [18:27] similar to learning another language. [18:31] Whatever kind of proficiency you bring, you will have a whole lot of adaptation challenges. [18:38] But there’s no doubt about it that for most other languages, people start at zero or [18:46] are likely to start closer to zero than they are for English. [18:50]

JMc: Yeah. [18:51] Or perhaps other postcolonial languages like perhaps French. [18:55]

IP: That’s right. [18:56]

JMc: And you’ve sort of touched on this point, but do you think it’s fair to say that migration [19:01] is not just about a person or people being transplanted from one land to another, but [19:07] is a formative process that affects the identity not only of the person who’s migrated to the [19:14] new country, but of the society that they move into? [19:18] So are there any generalizations that we can make about that, [19:21] about how migration and identity and language interact with each other? [19:27]

IP: Yeah, look, absolutely. [19:29] So that’s what we try to say in the title. [19:32] You start a new life, right? [19:34] Migration, in many ways, is a break with your former life. [19:40] It’s a break with the daily habits you had. [19:43] It’s a break with the career you might have built. [19:49] It’s a break with your family and friends, your social circles, because they will be away. [19:58] I mean, even if nowadays where we have all these virtual contacts and social media, which [20:03] weren’t available for many of our people in the participants in the early migration [20:10] phase, even then, you no longer have this actual face-to-face contact, and having… [20:19] Even if you maintain daily contact with someone left behind on WhatsApp, it’s [20:23] very different from actually being in the same place with that person and being able [20:29] to do things together, to have a meal together, to just sit together. [20:34]

So in that sense, migration is a fundamental break. [20:38] And you have to re-establish yourself. [20:40] You have to re-establish your routines, understanding your neighborhood, all your financial, socioeconomic responsibilities. [20:52] You have to build a new home. You have to find new… So if you… [20:58] I mean, one other generalization I would say, I would make, is, there was a clear difference between [21:04] people who migrated as individuals and those who migrated with a partner or as part of [21:09] a couple or couple with children. [21:13] So that really makes a difference in terms of whether they had a ready-made partner available, [21:23] whether they maintained the language, and so on and so forth. [21:26] But even if you migrate as a couple, the couple relationship changes, because… [21:32] Like one thing that many of our African participants in particular said, at home, you have a lot [21:39] of support for looking after the children and keeping house, and there would always [21:45] be other family members and mothers and sisters, and that would be a lot of help, particularly for women. [21:54]

Many of the women really found themselves in more traditional gender roles post-migration [22:00] than they were pre-migration, regardless of where they were from. [22:04] Partly that had to do with, you know, that there’s just much more reproductive labor [22:10] that needs to be done after migration, because you may no longer have that help, but also… [22:19] like maids may no longer be affordable or something like that. [22:22] So there is more work to do, and it’s just the two of you or even the one of you. [22:27] So that was a problem then, because many, actually most, of our participants, if they [22:35] already had professional qualification, their professional qualification was unlikely to [22:41] be accepted or re-accredited at the same level in Australia, and women in particular ended [22:48] up either just kind of doing jobs instead of re-establishing their career or, you know, [22:57] deciding that actually this was now the time for them to become homemakers and just concentrate on their families. [23:06] And so that’s why so many women ended up in more traditional gender roles, very surprisingly. [23:14]

JMc: To get back to sort of the methodological questions about your study, could you tell [23:19] us a little bit more about the data you’ve recorded in the ethnographies that form the basis of the book? [23:25] So what form do the data take? [23:28] And you mentioned that you’ve tried to make the data open and reusable. [23:34] How does this work with qualitative data? [23:37] Because it’s not just numbers that you can run through a Python script. It’s something [23:41] that has to actually be read and interpreted. [23:43]

IP: OK, so when I say ‘open’, we’re not making the data openly accessible. [23:52] We were sharing the data amongst ourselves, if you will, so we created a joint dataset, [24:00] but we’re not going to make that openly available for all kinds of reasons, including that we [24:08] don’t have the ethics approval to do that and we have actually really no clue how we would anonymize that. [24:16] So there is no intention to make the full data set available as an open data set. [24:23] So the data sharing is sort of amongst our projects, the projects that came together in that book. [24:31] Now your other question, what kind of data do we actually have? [24:34] So that’s really sort of your whole gamut of ethnographic data from participant observation data, [24:45] recordings of naturally occurring conversations, interviews, lots and lots of individual and [24:53] group interviews, formal and informal interviews. [24:58] In some cases, we ask participants to keep diaries of particular experiences, so we have those data. [25:09] We have all kinds of artifacts that they engaged with or that they shared with us. [25:16] So yeah, that’s the corpus, essentially. [25:19]

JMc: So the sort of, the sharing within your group comes about through a shared practice of analysis [25:24] and discussion of how the various forms of data can be analysed. [25:30]

IP: That’s correct. [25:31] Plus we did actually create a specific corpus based on bringing together all these data. Yeah. [25:39]

JMc: Yeah. OK. Those are all the questions I was going to ask. [25:42] So thank you very much for answering them. [25:44]

IP: Well, can I just say the book will come out online in May, and then the actual physical [25:52] book should be out by June, so watch this space. [25:56]