This paper investigates the communication strategies of schools to engage linguistically diverse parents through enrollment information on their websites. The importance of the study is due to the known educational disadvantage experienced by migrant children as well as the known positive influence of parental engagement on educational…

In Australian higher education, there is a tension between international students' English language proficiency (ELP) seen as inadequate, thus prompting the need for firm gatekeeping for quality control, and on the other hand, the financial dependence on international student revenues, and therefore, striving to attract international applicants.…

This article discusses family language policy and the tensions between mothers' and children's language beliefs in two Vietnamese immigrant families in Melbourne. These tensions have frequently been discussed from the parental perspective, but it is less common to include the children's voice. We draw on a larger in-depth qualitative study of…

This study is located in a lesser-known educational context and investigates aspects of migration, religion and multilingualism. Focusing on the discourse of second-generation adolescent migrants in a Tamil Hindu temple school in urban Australia, I discuss how flexible language practices manifest in this migrant faith setting. I argue that the use…

In contemporary Western societies, parenting has become the subject of a substantial body of advice and self-help literature. Within this literature, questions of bilingual parenting have begun to add yet another dimension to parental anxieties. Against this background, we examine how parents in a general Australian online parenting forum discuss…

This study explored stories of intergenerational language maintenance narrated by first- generation Hungarian immigrants in Australia. It sought an understanding of Hungarian immigrants' positioning "vis-à-vis" their language ecology during the assimilationist post-war era of Australia. The narratives reveal that some families accepted…

Increased attention to urban diversity as a site of study has fostered the recent development of linguistic landscape studies. To date, however, much of the research in this area has concerned the use and spread of English to the exclusion of other global languages. In a case study situated in Box Hill, a large suburb of Melbourne, we adopted a…

Australian schools are increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse places, and yet, the monolithic weight of the "monolingual mindset" (Clyne, 2008) still hulks at the centre of Australian education systems. Despite this, there is increasing recognition of the value of multilingualism, and the importance of incorporating students'…

Employing the language management framework, this paper reports on multilingual use among the staff of a major metropolitan university in Melbourne and covers both simple and organised management. It describes a top-down attempt to survey staffs' (academic and general) background in Languages other than English (LOTE), LOTE usage and evaluative…

This article is derived from a small study conducted within a larger qualitative study into the nature of the responses of mainstream primary teachers in a non-metropolitan area in Australia to the Sudanese refugee English Language Learners (ELLs) in their classes. It reports on findings in relation to teachers' attitudes toward the use of their…

This volume brings together research carried out in a variety of geographic and linguistic contexts including Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States and explores efforts to incorporate linguistic diversity into education and to "harness" this diversity for learners' benefit. It challenges the largely…

English as a second language (ESL) is taught in Australia to adult learners of mixed language backgrounds through the medium of English, and there is currently no requirement that ESL teachers speak another language. This paper reports on a study which asked what advantages there may be for ESL teachers to have proficiency in two or more…