The increasing internationalization of education has brought diversification to university student populations. The demographic changes pose great challenges to interview practice as interviews are increasingly occurring in cross-cultural contexts and often involve participants from diverse cultural backgrounds. Recent research has demonstrated…

Benefits of the study-abroad (SA) experience have been reported in many studies. However, most prior studies on EFL students' SA experiences track students in relatively short ESL programs during school vacation months. In addition, EFL learners' SA experiences in non-English-speaking countries, where English is not the L1, remain underexplored.…

In a 2013-2014 Australia-China Council project, middle school students in Australia and China shared digital stories about their everyday lives and local cultures, and traditional tales with a modern twist. This article reports on research that aimed to explore the successes and challenges associated with this digital story exchange between…

This paper presents the findings from a study that examines the motivations of adult Australians of non-Italian origin to learn Italian in continuing education contexts in Sydney. The study embraces a view of motivation as a multifaceted phenomenon that is produced in a social environment through the interaction between the second language…

This paper explores the role that translation may play in developing the symbolic competence of advanced-level bilingual learners. To this end, it examines how a group of bilingual learners engaged with a translation task that was assigned to them as part of their study in an advanced-level Japanese language class at an Australian university.…

This article scrutinises language discourse in transnational culture and considers theories on "reflexive modernity" (Beck et al. 2003) for analysis. I introduce symbolic meanings of language in transnational Communities of Practice constituted by salsa dance, where, depending on dance styles and on local, national and transnational…

While there is widespread agreement on the expected benefits of hands-on access to corpora for language learners, reports abound of the difficulties involved in realising those benefits in practice. A particular focus of discussion is the challenge of transferring the skills of the corpus linguist to learners, so that they can explore this type of…

This article explores the construction and shifting of "expert" and "novice" roles between and within two languages (Japanese and English). Taking a language socialization perspective while drawing upon insights from conversation analysis on epistemics in interaction, it analyzes seven hours of audio recordings of dinnertime…

Test-takers' voices in relation to high-stakes language tests have received growing attention in recent years. While the perspectives of this stakeholder group can be utilised to improve test quality, test-taking experience, and test impact, we argue that this goal needs to be achieved by considering a fundamental shift in our conceptualisation of…

International students have continued to be the focus of simplistic stereotyping in media discourse where they are frequently identified as one of the forces behind declining academic standards in Australian universities. Their English language skills, in particular, have continued to be the focus of debate both in the mainstream media and in…

This paper seeks to explore the risks of providing preservice teachers with professional experiences in remote communities. In particular this paper focuses on the risks associated with this kind of professional experience. Twelve pre-service teachers were interviewed whilst on a three-week practicum around Katherine and in Maningrida in the…

There is a general recognition that learning of foreign languages is in decline in Australia. This paper uses the social constructivist theory as a conceptual framework to report on a project where university language students supported their high school peers in the learning of their specialist language in New South Wales, Australia. The project…

Student attrition and falling tertiary education enrolments afflict languages education across the "inner circle" English speaking world. In the southern hemisphere, in New Zealand and Australia, Japanese has become one of the most successful languages of education. However, numbers of students are now declining. This paper examines why…

Pathway programs exist to prepare students for progression into university degrees but the transition experience for many students may not be as smooth as is suggested by the notion of the pathway. While attending a pathway program and at the beginning of their university degree, students may be in a third space, a liminal space where they engage…

The goal of this study is to identify new dimensions of language attitudes to allow for both their multidimensionality and possible language-specificity stemming from local sociolinguistic environments. Adopting a two-step methodology comprising (1) elicitation of adjectives in group interviews and (2) employment of the semantic differential…