Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 30, Issue 2, 2007

The focus of this paper is on immigrant minority languages in urban Western Europe. Both multidisciplinary and cross-national perspectives will be offered on two major domains in which language transmission occurs, i.e., the domestic domain and the public domain. Prototypical of these two domains are the home and the school, respectively. At home, language transmission occurs between parents and children; at school this occurs between teachers and pupils. Viewed from the perspectives of majority language speakers versus minority language speakers, language transmission becomes a very different issue. In the case of majority language speakers, language transmission at home and at school is commonly taken for granted: at home, parents speak this language usually with their children; at school this language is usually the only or major subject and medium of instruction. In the case of minority language speakers, there is usually a mismatch between the language of the home and the language of the school. Whether parents in such a context continue to transmit their language to their children is strongly dependent on the degree to which these parents conceive of this language as a core value of cultural identity.

After a short introduction, we offer phenomenological perspectives on the semantics of our field of study and some central European notions in this field. Next we discuss major agencies and documents on language rights at the global and European level. We also discuss the utilisation and effects of different demographic criteria for the definition and identification of (school) population groups in a multicultural society. Next we offer sociolinguistic perspectives on the distribution and vitality of immigrant minority languages across Europe. In this context the rationale and major outcomes of the Multilingual Cities Project, realised in six major multicultural cities in different European Union nation-states, are presented. Finally we offer comparative perspectives on educational policies and practices in the domain of immigrant minority languages in the six European Union countries under discussion. We conclude with an overview on how multilingualism can be promoted for all children in an increasingly multicultural Europe.

Immigrants have made this country more American, not less American. (George W. Bush, presidential election campaign 2004)

Studies from a range of disciplinary perspectives have highlighted how the public rhetoric of the Bush administration has shaped the representation of the conflict which has followed 9/11. However, the literature in this area raises but does not itself address the question of how the administration’s use of ‘terror’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist(s)’ contributes to this representation. This paper addresses the question by providing a preliminary analysis of how these terms participate in the grammar of twelve of George W. Bush’s speeches since 9/11. Drawing on Systemic Functional Grammar, the analysis suggests that ‘terror’ has become interchangeable with ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist(s)’, resulting in the personification of ‘terror’ as an abstract agent. The implications of this construction are explored in relation to the literature on the rhetoric associated with the ‘war on terror’.

Language learning is frequently justified as a vehicle for promoting intercultural communication and understanding, and language-in-education policies have increasingly come to reflect this preoccupation in their rhetoric. This paper will examine the ways in which concepts relating to interculturality are constructed in Japanese language policy documents. It will explore in particular the ways in which ideologies of nationalism and Japanese identity have an impact on understandings of the nature and purpose of interculturality and how these are developed discursively in Japanese language-in-education policy documents. Language policies construct a discourse of interculturality which focuses on the development of a nationalistic adherence to a particular conceptualisation of Japanese identity, which is unique, homogenous, and monolithic. These themes will be discussed in the contexts of Japanese policy documents relating to foreign language teaching and Japanese language spread.

The present article reports on research conducted during late 2004 on the language abilities of Australia’s parliamentarians and a parliamentary debate in 2005 on languages in Australia. A small questionnaire was administered to all members of the nine legislative structures of Australia comprising six states, two territories and the one Federal parliament. This is the first such survey in Australia. While the response rate was uneven, from good to poor, the survey does shed light on the range and number of languages other than English spoken by Australia’s parliamentary representatives, where their language capabilities were gained, how proficient they estimate themselves to be, and in what settings their language skills are used. The paper includes a comparison between these Australian data and equivalent, though slightly less sketchy, data from the UK. The article concludes with the text and debate of a recent private members’ bill on languages and makes comments on the responses in light of the language abilities of the parliamentarians.

One of the ways to investigate the mental lexicon is to use word association tests. Empirical studies comparing associations by children and adults have indicated a tendency for children to give syntagmatic responses, whereas adults give paradigmatic responses. In order to investigate lexical development in L2 acquisition of Swedish we collected data from two groups of students, one in MalmÖ, Sweden and one in Melbourne. Part of the Melbourne group also took the association test in their L1 six months later. Native speakers were used as a control group. The results demonstrate that learners in general tend to focus more on form than content compared to native speakers. This trend was particularly strong for the L2 group in Melbourne who also exhibited more variation in their responses compared to the L2 group in Sweden and the NS control group.