Michaela

Michaela Salmon only recently completed her Master’s research at McGill University.. However, her interests in second language acquisition and the social contexts of language use extend back many years. Growing up with a language-obsessed mother in an otherwise monolingual family in Australia, she grew up feeling attached to her “mother” tongue, German, but without the heritage to back it up. So began the years of language learning: at home, overseas, at school, and at university. After studying in Austria, Michaela undertook an undergraduate Honour’s thesis, where she questioned the reasons for the reportedly lower rates of German acquisition by Turkish immigrant children in Vienna, compared to children from other backgrounds. So the seed was planted: for becoming a language teacher, and for exploring further the implications for learning languages (or not). Now transplanted to Quebec, Michaela is engaging in locally-based research within a critical sociolinguistics framework. She is investigating mismatches between language policy, practice, and ideology, and how these mismatches impact certain immigrant groups. French language student over morning coffee, ESL teacher and tutor by day, researcher by afternoon, bicycle rider and dog walker by night, Michaela is carving out a niche in her newly adopted home.

Browse Michaela’s past posts for BILD here!