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Introduction: Place, Politics and the Social: Understanding Temporariness in Contemporary Australian Migration
No full textUnsettling the Settler State: The State and Social Outcomes of Temporary Migration in Australia
No full textThe exponential growth of temporary migration to Australia since the late 1990s has unsettled the model of permanent migration, state supported settlement and multicultural citizenship on which Australia has been built. This article draws attention to the emergence of a gulf between Australia’s immigration policies and social policy frameworks for migrant integration in the course of Australia’s transition from a permanent to a temporary migration paradigm. It does so through an analysis of interviews with migrants, government officials at federal and local levels, and migrant service providers. It argues that the system by which temporary migration has been governed in Australia has enabled the Australian state to strategically divest itself of responsibility for the social welfare of temporary migrants and the long-term outcomes of temporary migration policies. Specifically, this has been achieved through the construction of temporary migrants as disposable, risk-bearing subjects, the exclusion of temporary migrants from social policy frameworks for migrant integration, and the elision of long-term social outcomes of migration policies through a focus on short-term economic outcomes. It concludes by pointing to changes required for instituting a temporal re-orientation of government policies from short-term economic outcomes towards the long-term social outcomes of migration
Native Speakers’ Attitudes towards Conversations in Language Textbooks
No full textThis paper examines the structure of conversations in Spanish textbooks compared to conversations in real life context. According to Scotton, a conventionalized exchange is an interaction for which there is a general sense of “script” (1988). The sequences presented in textbooks are usually well-structured and grammatically accurate, but they often lack pragmatic appropriateness. The current study focuses on three aspects: how dialogues are presented in Spanish textbooks, the perceptions of native speakers towards these dialogues, and their attitudes when listening to them. Four different recordings (two from textbooks, one from a Spanish speaking soap opera and one from a Spanish movie) were listened to by 10 native speakers of Spanish from different countries and backgrounds. The recordings presented three types of situations: introductions, invitations, and casual conversations between friends. After listening, the participants were asked to express their perceptions of the naturalness of the conversations using a Likert scale and open and closed-ended questions. The results showed that participants perceived some unnatural features in the conversations from the textbooks with regards to speech rate, conversation sequence, and grammatical structure. It is argued that teaching material developers and teachers should consider the differences between the linguistic and pragmatic aspects of a language, in order to provide students with the pragmatic competence for successful communication in the target language
