The Penny McKay Memorial Award is jointly offered by the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA), the Australian Council of TESOL Associations (ACTA) and the Association for Language Testing and Assessment of Australia and New Zealand (ALTAANZ). This award honours Penny’s contribution to research and development in second/additional language education.

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the Penny McKay Award for 2023 is Dr Leonard Freeman for his doctoral thesis undertaken at the University of Melbourne entitled Fair vs. useful: Evaluating the fairness and validity of interpretations and uses of remote Aboriginal students’ national reading test performances, supervised by Emeritus Professor Gill Wigglesworth and A/Prof Carsten Rover. 

Many congratulations to Leonard and his supervisors on this outstanding record of achievement.

The Penny McKay Memorial Award is jointly offered by the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA), the Australian Council of TESOL Associations (ACTA) and the Association for Language Testing and  Assessment of Australia and New Zealand (ALTAANZ). This award honours Penny’s contribution to research and development in second/additional language education. We are delighted to announce that we have Dr Denise Angelo be declared the winner (details below).  

Many congratulations to Denise and her supervisor (Professor Jane Simpson, Australian National University) on this outstanding record of achievement.

Winner of Penny McKay Memorial Award 2022

Denise Angelo, awarded her PhD by the Australian National University in 2021 

Thesis Title: 

Countering misrecognition of Indigenous contact languages and their ecologies.

Supervisor:

Professor Jane Simpson

Abstract: 

This interdisciplinary thesis by publication centres on the phenomenon of misrecognition of contact languages in Australia and its real world ramifications such as the invisibility of First Nations students with these language backgrounds in the classroom. Students’ languages are pivotal to their ability to engage and achieve in classroom learning, so the potential effects of misrecognition are manifold here. At a system level, misrecognition of contact languages means teachers are not supported with relevant advice and students’ language strengths and additional language learning needs are not acknowledged. Despite the considerable presence of the contact language type in the Indigenous language landscape, this thesis shows that across the board there is little that responds to contact languages in systematic or constructive ways. This thesis shows us that we can respond and should do so. The wicked problem of contact language misrecognition is explored through a suite of interdisciplinary studies, harnessing multiple methodologies. The studies deal with policy analysis, language description, socio-linguistics, historical research, classroom education and community co-design. Each study contributes different perspectives on misrecognition and is suggestive of different paths to countering it. Motivating and guiding this research are grounded experiences with First Nations communities’ contact languages ecologies. These encompass a variety of classroom language puzzles, blockages and successes. On the flip side, this thesis finds that recognition of contact languages and their speakers can be fostered in just as many ways as misrecognition occurs. Examples developed and illustrated in this thesis include the Indigenous Language Ecology framework for policy makers and professional services deliverers such as educators. Another tool is the Community Vernacular Language Posters which focuses on fostering community and classroom language awareness. These have also proven a rich source of language and historical data for describing hitherto unrecognised contact languages.

ALANZ-ALAA-ALTAANZ 2022 Conference will be held at Rutherford House in central Wellington City, New Zealand

Dates: 25-27 November, 2022

We will be bringing an exciting programme of applied linguists from New Zealand, Australia, the Asia-Pacific region, and (we hope) the rest of the world, here in what’s been christened the coolest little capital city in the world. Explore the website, register early, and start making plans to join us in November 2022.

Prof John Macalister, Convenor

This year's theme: Applied linguistics in the Asia-Pacific region 

Website: https://www.alanz2021.co.nz/

Call for Papers Opening Soon! 

Congratulations to the winners of the 2021 Three Minute Thesis!

1st ($500): Bosheng Jing (UNSW). Long-term impacts of a Personalised English Language Enhancement (PELE) Cour

2nd ($200): Putri Gayatri (Newcastle). Blended Learning Model for EFL Teaching in Indonesian Higher Education

3rd (200): Van Tuyen Nguyen (Newcastle). An Exploration of Developing ICT-related Pedagogical Strategies in the Professional Development of EFL Teachers in Vietnam

For more information about the ALAA 3MT competition, see here

Presented by ALAA Distinguished Scholar and Service Award recipient

Professor Emeritus Joe Lo Bianco

This lecture will be scheduled in two parts:

1. Pre-recorded lecture, available one week prior to the online forum
2. Online Q&A forum, 23 November, 4.30-5.30pm (AEDT)

What kind of political activity is applied linguistics? 

What kind of political community are applied linguists?

What are the language problems we aim to solve?

Click on the following Eventbrite link to register:

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/alaa-candlin-lecture-2020-tickets-125582293019

Following your registration, and closer to the date, links to the pre-recorded lecture and online forum will be sent to registrants.

Please note that the online forum will be followed by the ALAA AGM, 5.30-6.00pm (AEDT). Participants are welcome to remain or leave at this point.

This is a free event and we encourage you to distribute this information to interested colleagues and post-graduate students.

Contact: Michelle.Kohler@unisa.edu.au

Abstract:

In the Christopher N. Candlin Memorial Lecture for 2020 I want to interrogate an advanced version of an old idea about the relation of knowledge and power.  I will probe who are we, as applied linguists, what is our claim to influence language teaching, language testing, or language policy, and what are the problems we aim to solve.  What power and status do we expect what we know, our technical expertise, to have in the polity of which we are part, the community of public life?  What are the language problems we are trying to understand and, dare I say it, solve?  Whether in political practice or political theory, just like in academic research and teaching, we encounter the dilemma of describing the world and wanting to intervene to change it. For applied linguists, in common with other academics, wanting to apply the knowledge we generate to social improvement raises the question of what kind of a 'political community' we are, and what claim we make for the knowledge we produce

In 1988 I was asked by Chris Candlin and Tim McNamara to contribute a chapter to a Festschrift they were editing in honour of the career of Terry Quinn, who had recently retired due to ill health.  My chapter was entitled Science or Values: the Role of Professionals in Language Policymaking, and appeared in their book titled Language, Learning and Community, (NCELTR, Macquarie University, 1989).  In the chapter I explored a concept some policy analysts identified as the 'technical-political' dichotomy, in which they imagined that the contours and content of knowledge were shaped by its ultimate destination aligned along a continuum from political purposes at one extreme and technical scholarly purposes at another.  I want to re-inform and re-frame key arguments of this understanding of knowledge focused more on who applied linguists are, and what the knowledge of applied linguistics is and does.  In doing this I will reactivate the dormant but critically important, issue of what is a language problem. 

The distinction between action and knowledge, power and information, is as old as antique philosophy.  This distinction isn’t an abstract rumination as posed by political philosopher Hannah Arendt in her 1958 meditation on the human condition.  In the wake of the horrors of war and hatred, she asked intellectuals to strive for a vita activa in preference to the socially disengaged vita contemplativa.  In each generation we frame the challenge of knowledge and action, and the problems these are directed towards understanding, in a new way, but always carrying similar elements. The dichotomy may be forced, or even extreme, but can we deny there is tension between the functions of knowledge for and in policy and politics, on the one hand, and in academic, scholarly or educational settings, on the other?   In language planning research and theory this issue, like the related but even more problematic idea of language problems, is a sleeper.  Scholars might deny the utility, robustness or validity, or even the very existence of 'language problems', but in policy and political settings some notion of language problems motivates most of the activity and the justification for paying any attention to language at all