Louisa Willoughby
Biographic Data
| ID | 659593 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Louisa Willoughby |
| GIVEN NAMES | Louisa |
| FAMILY NAME | Willoughby |
| SIGNATURE | WILLOUGHBY L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6823-0791 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Camel in the news: A corpus-based analysis of English language newspapers in Saudi Arabia, Australia and China
The Saudi Arabian Council of Ministers declared 2024 the ‘Year of the Camel’. This inspired us to consider the perception of camels across English speaking newspapers in three countries with strong connections to camels: Saudi Arabia, Australia and China. Our goal is to explore the underlying cultural metaphors that shape the way camels are conceptualized in each social context. Our corpus of 402 newspaper articles yielded 656 references to the w…
When heritage meets religion: Parents’ perspectives on Arabic language education in Australian Islamic schools
Arabic language education is a core component of study at Australian Islamic schools. Students bring highly varied proficiency and connections to Arabic, creating myriad challenges for schools in catering to these learner profiles. This article explores these issues through questionnaire and interview data collected from 45 parents with children at Australian Islamic schools. We ask whether parents who speak Arabic as their first language (L1) (i…
Multilingual parents’ language development concerns in the early years
Doing multilingualism through transnational linguistic landscaping: The MultiDiv experience
Linguistic Landscape (LL) is a valuable pedagogical approach and tool. • LL allows students to link political and social processes with language use. • LL can usefully link project-based learning and students’ linguistic repertoires. • Student autonomy and student-led learning needs to be scaffolded properly. • LL can lead to student agency and empowerment. This paper explores Linguistic Landscape (LL) as a pedagogical approach that fosters stude…
One cohort or two: Enjoyment, anxiety and study behaviours among intermediate language learners in tertiary language classes
Foreign language anxiety and enjoyment have been shown to correlate with each other ( Botes et al., 2022 ), but few studies to date have considered whether distinct groups of learners within the one class may experience these variables differently. This article considers whether learners who have arrived in Australian university intermediate language classrooms via two different pipelines, either having studied the language at university the year…
Sign language for all? Profile and retention of students in a beginner sign language program
Around the globe, beginner sign language programs have seen surging enrolments in recent years. Yet relatively few learners progress to higher‐level sign language study. In this article, we explore factors shaping retention and attrition among a cohort of 70 beginner Australian Sign Language (Auslan) students studying in a vocational education context. We explore the influence of both demographic variables and measures of study approach via a que…
Deafblind interpreter practice and training
Deafblind people have complex interpreting needs that often go beyond interlingual transfer. Their communicative profiles vary across various modes — visual, tactile and verbal — yet comparatively little is known about the repertoire of modes used by interpreters who work with deafblind people. Existing research shows that the communicative capacities and preferences of deafblind people encompass close-range signing, visual frame signing, tactile…
Representation of migrant accents in media discourse: A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis
This study looks at how migrants’ accents are portrayed, labelled, and constructed in media discourse, investigating media coverage of migrants’ accents in the Australian press from 2007 to 2017, a period highlighted by changes in Australian citizenship policies and public discourse. While language has been extensively discussed in policy discourse, there has been a notable dearth of research on the coexistence of dialects and accents within offi…
The GeSCA repository: Gesture and Sign Corpus of Australia
The Monash node of the LDaCA project has established the GeSCA repository for researchers to deposit multimodal video-based annotated corpora collected in Australia or the Asia Pacific region–both for sign languages and for spoken languages where multimodal features have been annotated. In this article we discuss three initial datasets augmented and deposited as part of this project which include the newly expanded Auslan Corpus of over 300 h of …
Building L2 social connections: The case of learners of Auslan (Australian Sign Language)
Social interaction, and the attendant negotiation of meaning, is of prime importance for developing second language (L2) skills. Yet how learners go about building L2 social networks – and why some have more success than others in doing so – remains underexplored. This article explores this phenomenon via a 12-month longitudinal case study of three hearing adult learners of Auslan (Australian Sign Language) who were studying the language in a voc…
Australian public health Covid-19 messaging is missing its mark in some vulnerable communities and people who reject Covid-19 safety advice
Background: There are groups in our community who may be more vulnerable to contracting, transmitting, or experiencing negative health impacts of COVID-19 than the general community. They may also have greater difficulty accessing, accepting, and acting upon COVID-19 public health information. Our aim was to understand if vulnerable communities and those who express "COVID-risk" behavioural intentions seek and respond differently to COVID-19 publ…
Handling Turn Transitions in Australian Tactile Signed Conversations
This article explores how deafblind Australian Sign Language (Auslan) users, who communicate through an alternative range of modalities including tactile (hands) and kinetic (body movement) inputs, manage turn transitions. Studies of deafblind communication have typically employed a signal-based approach. In contrast, this article applies broader Conversational Analysis (CA) frameworks, which have been developed based on interlocutors who primari…
Citizenship, language tests, and political participation
This article critically examines the argument that language testing for citizenship is necessary in order to ensure that naturalized citizens have sufficient language proficiency to participate in democratic life. First, we contend that as they are currently designed, language tests are normally unsuitable to assess the ability of would‐be citizens to participate in the complex linguistic interactions that characterize democratic life. We further…
Intersubjectivity and (non-)shared modes of interaction in Australian tactile signing
Australian English Reimagined: Structure, Features and Developments
Are you trying to be funny? Communicating humour in deafblind conversations
Humour is a prevalent feature in any form of human interaction, regardless of language modality. This article explores in detail how humour is negotiated in conversations among deafblind Australians who are fluent users of tactile Australian Sign Language (Auslan). Without access to the visual or auditory cues that are normally associated with humour (e.g. smiles, laughter, eye crinkles and ‘smile voice’), there is a risk that deafblind interacta…
The challenges of multimodality and multi-sensoriality: Methodological issues in analyzing tactile signed interaction
Young people's perspectives on the mobility of Australian English accents
This paper draws on lines of sociolinguistic theory that have arisen in response to globalisation and current thinking about mobilities in the social sciences. Using the constructs of space, scale and centre‐periphery, we set out to analyse 564 Australian high school students’ responses to a questionnaire item which asked: ‘If you moved to another country, how important would it be for you to keep your Australian accent?’ Our exploration of the s…
What their friends say about the way they talk: The metalanguage of pre-adolescent and adolescent Australians
Adolescence is a time in young people's lives when identities are being constructed and what their friends say is particularly important. The teenage years are a critical period in terms of attitudes to language, yet there have been relatively few studies of student metalanguage and, to our knowledge, no studies which have considered age-graded differences in adolescence. This paper focuses on comments from Australian students in their initial an…
The meta-pragmatic discourses of Australian high school students on language, migration and belonging
Recent years have seen a backlash against multiculturalism in many Western countries and increasing calls to restrict migration and citizenship rights to those who can pass language tests. This paper explores the sentiment of high school students who were born and raised in Australia towards issues of language and migration, including the need for migrants to speak English and use Australian dialect and accent. Results show that Australian youth …
Meeting the challenges of heritage language education: Lessons from one school community
The heterogeneous backgrounds, languages and proficiencies students bring to the classroom have always been a key challenge facing schools that wish to implement heritage language programmes. In this article I describe the evolution of one high school's approach to heritage language education and some of the roadblocks they encountered in attempting to boost student participation in heritage language classes during the senior-secondary years. Dra…
Language practices in multilingual communities: Insights from a suburban high school
As a result of globalisation and mass migration, suburbs and schools around the world are becoming increasingly multiethnic, multilingual places. Yet there is still relatively little linguistic research on how language is used in everyday interaction in these multilingual communities. In this paper, I explore the strengths and limitations of traditional language maintenance research for understanding language choice in the school setting and high…
Unpacking barriers to quality care for Deaf people in residential aged care facilities
Residential aged care providers often face difficulties in meeting the needs of residents with a lifelong disability. In this article, I explore these issues from the perspective of signing Deaf residents. While previous studies have documented a number of issues around staff training and communication for Deaf residents, there remains a dearth of literature considering the root causes of these problems. Drawing on interviews with a variety of se…
Is the Cultural Cringe Alive and Kicking? Adolescent Mythscapes of Australian English in Queensland and Victoria
Although there is a growing literature on grammatical, lexical and phonological aspects of Australian English, there are comparatively few studies of attitudes towards this variety of English. What literature there is tends to be either anecdotal or based on media language or on findings from experimental, subjective reaction tests where samples of speech are matched against those produced by speakers of other varieties of English. This study aim…
Language maintenance and the deaf child
For all families with deaf children, choosing communication methods is a complex and evolving business. This process is particularly complex for migrant background families, who must not only negotiate the role that speaking or signing will play in their communication practices, but also which spoken language(s) will be used – that of the host society or the heritage language? For many years, it was believed that oral language maintenance was an …
The challenges of multimodality and multi-sensoriality: Methodological issues in analyzing tactile signed interaction
Citizenship, language tests, and political participation
This article critically examines the argument that language testing for citizenship is necessary in order to ensure that naturalized citizens have sufficient language proficiency to participate in democratic life. First, we contend that as they are currently designed, language tests are normally unsuitable to assess the ability of would‐be citizens to participate in the complex linguistic interactions that characterize democratic life. We further…
Meeting the challenges of heritage language education: Lessons from one school community
The heterogeneous backgrounds, languages and proficiencies students bring to the classroom have always been a key challenge facing schools that wish to implement heritage language programmes. In this article I describe the evolution of one high school's approach to heritage language education and some of the roadblocks they encountered in attempting to boost student participation in heritage language classes during the senior-secondary years. Dra…
Is the Cultural Cringe Alive and Kicking? Adolescent Mythscapes of Australian English in Queensland and Victoria
Although there is a growing literature on grammatical, lexical and phonological aspects of Australian English, there are comparatively few studies of attitudes towards this variety of English. What literature there is tends to be either anecdotal or based on media language or on findings from experimental, subjective reaction tests where samples of speech are matched against those produced by speakers of other varieties of English. This study aim…
Intersubjectivity and (non-)shared modes of interaction in Australian tactile signing
Nicknames in Australian Secondary Schools: Insights into Nicknames and Adolescent Views of Self
Although it is widely known that language practices can significantly affect adolescent self-image, research studies on adolescent naming practices are surprisingly scarce. The only study to date on nicknames in Australia was undertaken by Chevalier (2006). Her study provides a comprehensive analysis of morphological and semantic features of names but makes no reference to adolescent language practices and their role in society. Our exploration o…
Language choice in multilingual peer groups: Insights from an Australian high school
Despite Australia's strong tradition of research on language maintenance and shift, little is known about the ways in which migrant background students continue to use their heritage languages in Australian schools. This paper presents an in-depth case study of students’ linguistic practices at a multiethnic Melbourne high school, where over 95% of students speak a language other than English (LOTE) at home. Although virtually all students are bi…
Handling Turn Transitions in Australian Tactile Signed Conversations
This article explores how deafblind Australian Sign Language (Auslan) users, who communicate through an alternative range of modalities including tactile (hands) and kinetic (body movement) inputs, manage turn transitions. Studies of deafblind communication have typically employed a signal-based approach. In contrast, this article applies broader Conversational Analysis (CA) frameworks, which have been developed based on interlocutors who primari…
Are you trying to be funny? Communicating humour in deafblind conversations
Humour is a prevalent feature in any form of human interaction, regardless of language modality. This article explores in detail how humour is negotiated in conversations among deafblind Australians who are fluent users of tactile Australian Sign Language (Auslan). Without access to the visual or auditory cues that are normally associated with humour (e.g. smiles, laughter, eye crinkles and ‘smile voice’), there is a risk that deafblind interacta…
Young people's perspectives on the mobility of Australian English accents
This paper draws on lines of sociolinguistic theory that have arisen in response to globalisation and current thinking about mobilities in the social sciences. Using the constructs of space, scale and centre‐periphery, we set out to analyse 564 Australian high school students’ responses to a questionnaire item which asked: ‘If you moved to another country, how important would it be for you to keep your Australian accent?’ Our exploration of the s…
The meta-pragmatic discourses of Australian high school students on language, migration and belonging
Recent years have seen a backlash against multiculturalism in many Western countries and increasing calls to restrict migration and citizenship rights to those who can pass language tests. This paper explores the sentiment of high school students who were born and raised in Australia towards issues of language and migration, including the need for migrants to speak English and use Australian dialect and accent. Results show that Australian youth …
Language practices in multilingual communities: Insights from a suburban high school
As a result of globalisation and mass migration, suburbs and schools around the world are becoming increasingly multiethnic, multilingual places. Yet there is still relatively little linguistic research on how language is used in everyday interaction in these multilingual communities. In this paper, I explore the strengths and limitations of traditional language maintenance research for understanding language choice in the school setting and high…
Unpacking barriers to quality care for Deaf people in residential aged care facilities
Residential aged care providers often face difficulties in meeting the needs of residents with a lifelong disability. In this article, I explore these issues from the perspective of signing Deaf residents. While previous studies have documented a number of issues around staff training and communication for Deaf residents, there remains a dearth of literature considering the root causes of these problems. Drawing on interviews with a variety of se…
Language maintenance and the deaf child
For all families with deaf children, choosing communication methods is a complex and evolving business. This process is particularly complex for migrant background families, who must not only negotiate the role that speaking or signing will play in their communication practices, but also which spoken language(s) will be used – that of the host society or the heritage language? For many years, it was believed that oral language maintenance was an …
Language choice in multilingual peer groups: Insights from an Australian high school
Despite Australia's strong tradition of research on language maintenance and shift, little is known about the ways in which migrant background students continue to use their heritage languages in Australian schools. This paper presents an in-depth case study of students’ linguistic practices at a multiethnic Melbourne high school, where over 95% of students speak a language other than English (LOTE) at home. Although virtually all students are bi…
Sign Language Users' Education and Employment Levels: Keeping Pace with Changes in the General Australian Population
This article draws on data from the 2006 Australian census to explore the education and employment outcomes of sign languages users living in Victoria, Australia, and to compare them with outcomes reported in the general population. Census data have the advantage of sampling the entire population on the one night, avoiding problems of population comparability and sampling errors that may affect survey-based research. The analysis shows that sign …
Language maintenance and the deaf child
For all families with deaf children, choosing communication methods is a complex and evolving business. This process is particularly complex for migrant background families, who must not only negotiate the role that speaking or signing will play in their communication practices, but also which spoken language(s) will be used – that of the host society or the heritage language? For many years, it was believed that oral language maintenance was an …
Nicknames in Australian Secondary Schools: Insights into Nicknames and Adolescent Views of Self
Although it is widely known that language practices can significantly affect adolescent self-image, research studies on adolescent naming practices are surprisingly scarce. The only study to date on nicknames in Australia was undertaken by Chevalier (2006). Her study provides a comprehensive analysis of morphological and semantic features of names but makes no reference to adolescent language practices and their role in society. Our exploration o…
Language practices in multilingual communities: Insights from a suburban high school
As a result of globalisation and mass migration, suburbs and schools around the world are becoming increasingly multiethnic, multilingual places. Yet there is still relatively little linguistic research on how language is used in everyday interaction in these multilingual communities. In this paper, I explore the strengths and limitations of traditional language maintenance research for understanding language choice in the school setting and high…
Unpacking barriers to quality care for Deaf people in residential aged care facilities
Residential aged care providers often face difficulties in meeting the needs of residents with a lifelong disability. In this article, I explore these issues from the perspective of signing Deaf residents. While previous studies have documented a number of issues around staff training and communication for Deaf residents, there remains a dearth of literature considering the root causes of these problems. Drawing on interviews with a variety of se…
Is the Cultural Cringe Alive and Kicking? Adolescent Mythscapes of Australian English in Queensland and Victoria
Although there is a growing literature on grammatical, lexical and phonological aspects of Australian English, there are comparatively few studies of attitudes towards this variety of English. What literature there is tends to be either anecdotal or based on media language or on findings from experimental, subjective reaction tests where samples of speech are matched against those produced by speakers of other varieties of English. This study aim…
Meeting the challenges of heritage language education: Lessons from one school community
The heterogeneous backgrounds, languages and proficiencies students bring to the classroom have always been a key challenge facing schools that wish to implement heritage language programmes. In this article I describe the evolution of one high school's approach to heritage language education and some of the roadblocks they encountered in attempting to boost student participation in heritage language classes during the senior-secondary years. Dra…
What their friends say about the way they talk: The metalanguage of pre-adolescent and adolescent Australians
Adolescence is a time in young people's lives when identities are being constructed and what their friends say is particularly important. The teenage years are a critical period in terms of attitudes to language, yet there have been relatively few studies of student metalanguage and, to our knowledge, no studies which have considered age-graded differences in adolescence. This paper focuses on comments from Australian students in their initial an…
The meta-pragmatic discourses of Australian high school students on language, migration and belonging
Recent years have seen a backlash against multiculturalism in many Western countries and increasing calls to restrict migration and citizenship rights to those who can pass language tests. This paper explores the sentiment of high school students who were born and raised in Australia towards issues of language and migration, including the need for migrants to speak English and use Australian dialect and accent. Results show that Australian youth …
Young people's perspectives on the mobility of Australian English accents
This paper draws on lines of sociolinguistic theory that have arisen in response to globalisation and current thinking about mobilities in the social sciences. Using the constructs of space, scale and centre‐periphery, we set out to analyse 564 Australian high school students’ responses to a questionnaire item which asked: ‘If you moved to another country, how important would it be for you to keep your Australian accent?’ Our exploration of the s…
Australian English Reimagined: Structure, Features and Developments
Are you trying to be funny? Communicating humour in deafblind conversations
Humour is a prevalent feature in any form of human interaction, regardless of language modality. This article explores in detail how humour is negotiated in conversations among deafblind Australians who are fluent users of tactile Australian Sign Language (Auslan). Without access to the visual or auditory cues that are normally associated with humour (e.g. smiles, laughter, eye crinkles and ‘smile voice’), there is a risk that deafblind interacta…
The challenges of multimodality and multi-sensoriality: Methodological issues in analyzing tactile signed interaction
Building L2 social connections: The case of learners of Auslan (Australian Sign Language)
Social interaction, and the attendant negotiation of meaning, is of prime importance for developing second language (L2) skills. Yet how learners go about building L2 social networks – and why some have more success than others in doing so – remains underexplored. This article explores this phenomenon via a 12-month longitudinal case study of three hearing adult learners of Auslan (Australian Sign Language) who were studying the language in a voc…
Australian public health Covid-19 messaging is missing its mark in some vulnerable communities and people who reject Covid-19 safety advice
Background: There are groups in our community who may be more vulnerable to contracting, transmitting, or experiencing negative health impacts of COVID-19 than the general community. They may also have greater difficulty accessing, accepting, and acting upon COVID-19 public health information. Our aim was to understand if vulnerable communities and those who express "COVID-risk" behavioural intentions seek and respond differently to COVID-19 publ…
Handling Turn Transitions in Australian Tactile Signed Conversations
This article explores how deafblind Australian Sign Language (Auslan) users, who communicate through an alternative range of modalities including tactile (hands) and kinetic (body movement) inputs, manage turn transitions. Studies of deafblind communication have typically employed a signal-based approach. In contrast, this article applies broader Conversational Analysis (CA) frameworks, which have been developed based on interlocutors who primari…
Citizenship, language tests, and political participation
This article critically examines the argument that language testing for citizenship is necessary in order to ensure that naturalized citizens have sufficient language proficiency to participate in democratic life. First, we contend that as they are currently designed, language tests are normally unsuitable to assess the ability of would‐be citizens to participate in the complex linguistic interactions that characterize democratic life. We further…
Intersubjectivity and (non-)shared modes of interaction in Australian tactile signing
Representation of migrant accents in media discourse: A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis
This study looks at how migrants’ accents are portrayed, labelled, and constructed in media discourse, investigating media coverage of migrants’ accents in the Australian press from 2007 to 2017, a period highlighted by changes in Australian citizenship policies and public discourse. While language has been extensively discussed in policy discourse, there has been a notable dearth of research on the coexistence of dialects and accents within offi…
The GeSCA repository: Gesture and Sign Corpus of Australia
The Monash node of the LDaCA project has established the GeSCA repository for researchers to deposit multimodal video-based annotated corpora collected in Australia or the Asia Pacific region–both for sign languages and for spoken languages where multimodal features have been annotated. In this article we discuss three initial datasets augmented and deposited as part of this project which include the newly expanded Auslan Corpus of over 300 h of …
Doing multilingualism through transnational linguistic landscaping: The MultiDiv experience
Linguistic Landscape (LL) is a valuable pedagogical approach and tool. • LL allows students to link political and social processes with language use. • LL can usefully link project-based learning and students’ linguistic repertoires. • Student autonomy and student-led learning needs to be scaffolded properly. • LL can lead to student agency and empowerment. This paper explores Linguistic Landscape (LL) as a pedagogical approach that fosters stude…
One cohort or two: Enjoyment, anxiety and study behaviours among intermediate language learners in tertiary language classes
Foreign language anxiety and enjoyment have been shown to correlate with each other ( Botes et al., 2022 ), but few studies to date have considered whether distinct groups of learners within the one class may experience these variables differently. This article considers whether learners who have arrived in Australian university intermediate language classrooms via two different pipelines, either having studied the language at university the year…
Sign language for all? Profile and retention of students in a beginner sign language program
Around the globe, beginner sign language programs have seen surging enrolments in recent years. Yet relatively few learners progress to higher‐level sign language study. In this article, we explore factors shaping retention and attrition among a cohort of 70 beginner Australian Sign Language (Auslan) students studying in a vocational education context. We explore the influence of both demographic variables and measures of study approach via a que…
Deafblind interpreter practice and training
Deafblind people have complex interpreting needs that often go beyond interlingual transfer. Their communicative profiles vary across various modes — visual, tactile and verbal — yet comparatively little is known about the repertoire of modes used by interpreters who work with deafblind people. Existing research shows that the communicative capacities and preferences of deafblind people encompass close-range signing, visual frame signing, tactile…
Psychology (20 works) · Linguistics (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (13 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (11 works) · Hearing Impairment and Communication (10 works) · Pedagogy (10 works) · Political science (8 works) · Sign language (7 works) · Communication (6 works)