Life in a New Language, which has just been released by Oxford University Press, explores the experience of language learning in real life during the early years of a migrant’s settlement journey. International migration is at an all-time high as ever more people move across national borders for work or study, in search of refuge or adventure. Regardless of their motivations and whether they intend their moves to be temporary or permanent, for most people, migration is transformative, and for adults it means having to re-establish their identities in a new neighbourhood, a new workplace, and a new friendship group. For people from non-English speaking backgrounds, their social positioning is affected by using a language that may not roll off their tongue easily and that may signal them as ‘different’. They are trying to learn a new language at the same time as they are trying to live their life through that language, and trying to meet their settlement needs and maintain a sense of well-being by finding accommodation, pursuing employment, accessing healthcare, asserting consumer rights, and engaging in other aspects of community participation. Life in a New Language charts the highs and lows of this complex journey.
The book is an innovative collaboration between Australian researchers Ingrid Piller, Donna Butorac, Emily Farrell, Loy Lising, Shiva Motaghi Tabari and Vera Williams Tetteh. It illuminates the experience of post-migration language learning through a re-analysis of ethnographic data that was collected over a 20-year period with 130 migrants to Australia from 35 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The book is not primarily about language, but about how language intersects with what it means to be a citizen, a worker, or a parent. Within settlement English programs, the migrant learner is usually engaged with only as someone developing proficiency in English in a classroom setting. Life in a New Language applies ethnographic methods to explore the participants’ lived experience of learning and communicating in a new language both inside and outside the classroom, in the process of finding work and doing family, and in their everyday struggles with identity making in a new context.
This is not just a book for academic researchers but also for undergraduate and postgraduate students of applied social sciences and language studies, as well as migrant language learners. And it will be of special interest to TESOL teaching practitioners and teacher educators for the insights it provides into their students’ personal experiences of language learning and language use outside the classroom, as they go about their everyday life in a new language.
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