Rate My Professor Loy Lising

Dr. Loy Lising is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University and serves as a Graduate Research Supervision Fellow. She earned her PhD with High Distinction in June 2004. Prior to her appointment at Macquarie University, she was the Program Director for the Master of Crosscultural Communication program at the Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney. Loy Lising brings over 20 years of higher education teaching experience, with a focus on supporting students from diverse heritage and language backgrounds. She has conducted seminar workshops for postgraduate international students and colleagues to address sociocultural differences in learning and teaching norms.

Loy Lising is a sociolinguist specializing in multilingualism and social participation. Her research employs ethnographic and corpus approaches to investigate language features and use among multilingual speakers in diasporic and homeland contexts, across domains such as family, education, health, and law. Central themes include heritage language maintenance in monolingual societies, language barriers for migrants from languages other than English backgrounds, pathways to full social participation, and the linguistic influence of migrant languages on English varieties in Australia. She is a member of the Language on the Move research team and an International Advisory Panel member for the Migration Linguistics Initiative at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Key publications include the co-authored book Life in a New Language (Oxford University Press, 2024), the chapter Global English in Multilingual Philippines: Language Practices in Government Communications (John Benjamins, 2025), articles such as The (Un)imagined Work of Determining Patients’ English Language Proficiency (Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2025), "I Want Her to Be Able to Think in English": Challenges to Heritage Language Maintenance in a Monolingual Society (International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 2022), Language in Skilled Migration (2017), and Language, Employment, and Settlement: Temporary Meat Workers in Australia (2016). Her contributions have advanced understanding of migrant language experiences and intercultural communication. Notable awards and honors encompass Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (2024), Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (2018), the Brother Andrew Gonzalez Chair in Linguistics and Language Education from the Linguistic Society of the Philippines (2015), and High Distinction for her PhD (2004).