Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 27, Issue 2, 2004

This paper compares two sets of data from the same year, 2001 – the numbers of students taking languages other than English at primary and secondary level, and census statistics for the home use of languages other than English. The data draws attention to languages that are taught principally in day schools and those taken mainly in after hours programs, and to variation between States and between education systems. While it is acknowledged that the strong presence of a language in the community is not the only reason for offering it in schools, the paper demonstrates that some important international languages are now among the major community languages and that some of them are marginal in the mainstream education systems in Australia. The presence of large numbers of speakers will facilitate the utilization of community resources in language teaching. Consideration needs to be given especially to Arabic, Vietnamese, Mandarin and Spanish, community languages with increasing numbers, the first two especially among the young.

Multicultural policies and language policies claim to provide a favourable environment for the maintenance of immigrant languages. However, the relationship between multiculturalism and multilingualism is complex and contested. Rates of language loss and shift in Australia show that the multilingual heritage is very vulnerable even within the context of a highly multicultural society. This paper examines the effect of multicultural policies on the linguistic and cultural adjustment of the Hungarian diaspora in Queensland. The research contrasts two vintages of Hungarian migrants in terms of their acculturation strategies, attitudes to the host and source cultures, ethnic identity and language maintenance and shift patterns. The conclusions drawn have implications for the theoretical framework of language maintenance and shift, as well as additive vs subtractive bilingualism. Period of arrival is singled out as a main factor in influencing patterns of social adjustment, as well as language maintenance and shift. The paper argues that the wider social and policy context plays a significant role in the language development of ethnolinguistic minority communities. It provides some evidence that the Anglo-Celtic host society in Australia is seen as favourable for minority language maintenance, and this potentially leads to increased societal bilingualism.

How would translators approach a process in which they have to make decisions on mapping the grammatically enforced regular number mechanism of a language such as English onto a system like Japanese, where there is no regular coding of number in a noun phrase? Utilising the concepts of motivation for representation of number, and of ‘formal-shift’ (Catford, 1965), this paper demonstrates that in spite of the lack of a grammatical category of number, there is a coherent mechanism that expresses number distinction in Japanese, either implicitly or explicitly, and that in order to achieve the full semantic and pragmatic intent expressed in English in terms of the number of referents, translators have quite a complex task in deciding ‘when’ and ‘how’ to mark number in Japanese. The paper shows that the ‘one’ and ‘more than one’ opposition regularly coded in English is interpreted into a more complex system of number conception in Japanese, namely ‘one’, ‘more than one’, ‘collective image’ and ‘unspecified’. It also draws attention to the various linguistic devices used in Japanese to express number distinction outside the scope of a noun phrase. The paper advocates the usefulness of the approach suggested here for examining instances of transfer of meaning between two typologically distinct languages.

The concurrent trends of globalisation and ‘indigenisation’ affecting the English language (varieties) around the world pose some interesting questions for language planning and reform issues (e.g. Phillipson, 1992; Pennycook, 1994; Crystal, 1997). With this project we examine the impact of these competing trends on corpus planning relating to gender-inclusive language use in the Englishes of Singapore and the Philippines, categorised as ‘outer-circle’ Englishes by Kachru (1992,1997). In this paper we present some findings on aspects of gender-inclusive language reform based on an analysis of the student and academic texts in the Singapore and Philippine components of the International Corpus of English [ICE]1. Education, particularly higher education, has been identified as a leading site of contact with and trajectories of change for gender-inclusive language reform. We focus in particular on one of the main features of gender-inclusive language reform: generic pronouns. The results of the ICE corpus analysis suggest that adoption of gender-inclusive and gender-neutral generic pronouns is not yet profiled in these ‘outer-circle’ Englishes. Generic he remains the pervasive generic pronoun in the student and published academic writing in the Singapore English corpus. The Philippines data reveal a similar trend although there is some emergence of s/he forms as the preferred gender-inclusive alternative.

On the basis of 572 examples taken from seven million-word corpora of written English the present study—which complements the spoken data-based studies of Oberlander & Delin (1996) and Weinert & Miller (1996)— explores the relationship between information structure and discourse role with reversed what-dzfts. The study confirms the typically summative, internal-referencing, and stage-ending-roles of the informational type upon which previous studies have concentrated (the statistically dominant type, with minimally informative highlighted element and relative clause). A second type observed by Oberlander & Delin (1996), with an ‘informative presupposition’ or ‘comment clause’, is found to occur stage-medially rather than as an ending, and furthermore to have a ‘pivotal’ (both backward-and forward-looking) discourse role. Two further types of reversed what-cleft with an informationally new highlighted element are identified. Both can occur stage-initially, and share some similarities with basic what-clefts and it-clefts in their discourse behaviour.

This paper1 will examine the discourse of one experienced teacher of Indigenous children in lessons observed as part of the Conductive Hearing Loss (CHL) project conducted by Edith Cowan University in Perth2. In the classroom observed, all the children were Indigenous and the teacher was aware that some children were suffering from CHL. This analysis will identify some features of the discourse of this teacher, who was very experienced in this context and who was identified as successful by her peers and the school community, with the aim of describing some of the strategies which contribute to her success. These strategies include constructing an inclusive classroom environment, empowering the students, avoiding authoritarianism and being responsive to the students. How these techniques are expressed in the discourse will be discussed here.

Most studies in the area of doctor-patient communication focus on the talk that doctors perform during the consultation, leaving under-researched the discourse developed by patients.1 This article deconstructs and identifies the functions and forms of the voices (i.e. specific forms of talk) that Chilean patients employ in their interactions with general practitioners. Patients use four different voices in the interaction: Health-related Storytelling, Competence, Social Communicator and Initiator. Health-related Storytelling and Competence are the voices most frequently used by both female and male patients and constitute the object of analysis and interpretation for this study. The use of these voices reflects the patients’ role in the Western medical institutions, knowledge about health issues, social identity and aspiration to better understand health problems. I conclude that medical communicative practices that favour the development of patients’ discourse can improve patients’ knowledge of medical issues which in turn may have a positive impact on patients’ health.