International students studying at Australian universities are largely represented in the media as problematic speakers of English, in part due to the dominance of the monolingual mindset as an approach to language. This paper focuses instead on international students’ multilingualism and examines the multimodal media representation of them as multilingual speakers. This study presents a thematic language ideological analysis of an episode of an Australian current affairs television program, Four Corners, and social media discussion of the episode and explores the way language ideologies work in the context (Irvine and Gal, Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities, 35–84. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2000). It shows that multilingual practices and speakers are stigmatized through the textual and multimodal representation of languages other than English (LOTE). Findings show that the multilingualism of international students and competencies available through LOTE are largely rendered invisible and students are constructed through a ‘double deficit’ view. They are thus not seen as multilingual speakers but deficient English speakers and this deficiency indexes other deficits. Where LOTE becomes visible, it is represented as a problem. The results also show that the social media discussions further amplify the language ideologies of the episode. The implications are considered for media representation and for universities to shift the focus to English language as a medium of instruction only and end ‘language blindness’ for improved social inclusion.

International education constitutes a key industry in Australia and international students represent a third of university students at Australian universities. This paper examines the media representation of international students in terms of their English language proficiency. The study applies Critical Discourse Analysis to the multimodal data of an episode of a current affairs TV program, Four Corners, and social media comments made to the episode. Using Social Actor Analysis, the study finds that the responsibility for declining standards at universities is assigned to international students through representations of their language use as problematic. This is supported by the visual representation of international students as different. By systematically mapping out the English-as-a-problem discourse, the paper finds that the media representation of language proficiency and language learning is simplistic and naïve and the social media discussion reinforces this. This further contributes to the discursive exclusion of international students.

This article examines the language ideologies undergirding university English language admission requirements. Universities are today caught between the order of the nation state and that of corporate globalization as they seek to attract both national and international students. This tension produces conflicting processes of (converse) racialization and linguistic (un)marking within which universities construct language proficiencies and ethnonational identities. Our study finds two categorically different constructs of English language proficiency (ELP): inherent ELP based on citizenship, linguistic heritage, and prior education, and tested ELP. These two constructs of ELP map onto two dichotomous student groups. One side of this binary—the white native-speaker citizen construct—is subject to converse racialization and unmarking. While it becomes blurred, it casts its Other into clear relief: the Asian non-native speaker non-citizen. The research has implications for critical language testing and language policies in higher education. (Citizenship, English as a global academic language, internationalization of higher education, international students, language ideologies, language testing, native speakerism, racialization, World Englishes)

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Gender Matters: Feminist Linguistic Analysis is a collection of articles and essays that Sara Mills has published since 1992, all belonging to the domain of feminist linguistic analysis and forming a comprehensive overview of what feminist analysis can do. On the one hand, the book provides an analysis of literary and non-literary texts from a feminist perspective by covering such genres as novels, poems, lyrics and movies through the themes of gendered reading/writing and sexism. On the other hand, Mills examines conversation via everyday interaction and public speeches to highlight the relationship between gender and politeness and gender and public speaking. The individual chapters, therefore, can be read separately. The major strength of this book lies in its potential to cover a wide range of topics, genres and methods, thus opening it up to a broader audience than merely students of Literature, Popular Culture or Linguistics. Mills has an engaging style and the examples and the variety of text genres she draws on are impressive. Each essay is introduced with a paragraph that explains its focus and relationship to the other essays in that section. This paragraph, often a version of the original abstract, is especially useful as it often comments on the context of the creation of the individual essay (as some of them were written in the 1990s) and makes particularly useful recommendations for further use of the method of analysis in question. Perhaps more details regarding the location of the specific essay in the present context would be even more useful for those not so familiar with the specific area of study. The book consists of an introduction and four parts. The introduction focuses on why feminism is needed and what feminist linguistic approaches have achieved and can achieve. The explanation of terminologies such as gender, feminism and feminist theory makes this section very reader-friendly and accessible to a non-specialist audience too, as well as providing relevance to the main themes the essays discuss. Part 1 consists of two chapters and has a literary theme. The first chapter examines the so-called 'female sentence' (the deficient) as opposed to the 'male sentence' ('the norm',