Rate My Professor Ruth Fielding

Ruth Fielding serves as Associate Professor of Languages and TESOL education within the School of Education Culture & Society at Monash University’s Faculty of Education. She specializes in multilingualism, language education, and identity, with particular emphasis on bilingual and multilingual identity, language teacher education, pedagogy and assessment in language learning and teaching, and intercultural approaches in languages education. Her research program aims to transform teaching and learning practices by integrating identity and intercultural understanding into languages education. She contributes to an interdisciplinary Australian Research Council Discovery project on Teacher Capabilities in Conditions of Superdiversity (2021-2025) and a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council project led by A/Prof Angelica Galante at McGill University on Linguistic Discrimination in Higher Education. In 2023, she founded the Monash branch of Bilingualism Matters within the Faculty of Education, and in 2022 she established the Bilingualism, Multilingualism and Plurilingualism Research Group, which she will co-lead from 2026 with Dr Gary Bonar and A/Prof Kim Anh Dang.

Fielding obtained her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2010, focusing on multilingualism and identity negotiation—a dissertation that received the Michael Clyne Prize for the best research thesis in the area of bilingualism and language contact—and a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education from the same institution in 2011. Beginning her career as a secondary school teacher of French and German, she advanced through academic roles including Lecturer in Languages Curriculum at the University of Sydney Faculty of Education and Social Work (2006-2014), Assistant Professor of TESOL and Foreign Language Teaching at the University of Canberra (2014-2017) as Program Coordinator for the TESOL and Foreign Language Teaching program, and Senior Lecturer in the French program at the University of Technology Sydney (2017-2018). Her accolades include the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia Travel Scholarship (2007), Faculty of Education and Social Work Excellence in Teaching Award (2011), Trevor Miller Memorial Fund Scholarship (2008), and University Postgraduate Award (2008).

Key publications encompass her books Multilingualism in the Australian Suburbs (Springer), Multilingualism, Identity and Interculturality in Education (Springer, 2022), and the co-edited Teacher Development for Content-Based Language Education (Multilingual Matters, 2024). Her scholarship has been published in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Foreign Language Annals, Language Learning Journal, Language and Education, Babel, and various edited volumes.