News
ANU linguist unpacks language testing in award-winning book
By Evana Ho In the acknowledgments for Assessing English for Professional Purposes, ANU linguist Dr Susy Macqueen thanks her children “for prompting me to revise just about everything I know”. Dr Macqueen laughs and tells me that one of her children found that extremely corny. Then she…
School of Music student on composing for TV
In early 2017, Bachelor of Music student Will Kepa was just settling in to his first year at ANU when he got the call to begin work on a new ABC docu-drama. His role: to create, mix and master the soundtrack. “I had worked on other films before,” Will, a mature age student, says. “But this…
There’s another health crisis looming – what happens when the pokies switch back on?
When the COVID-19 restrictions came into force more than two months ago, it meant lights out for the country’s 200,000 poker machines. Now, the pokies are slowly turning on again across the country. This week, NSW became the first state to allow venues to reopen, with certain rules mandating…
Work and wellbeing bounce back during coronavirus crisis
Government measures to arrest the economic impact of COVID-19 have helped stop further job losses and declines in working hours, new analysis from The Australian National University (ANU) shows. The steadier jobs outlook has also boosted Australians’ sense of wellbeing. The analysis builds on a…
2020 Australian National Dictionary appeal: #Familyspeak
The expressions and words unique to families, including new lingo developing during the COVID-19 pandemic, are the subject of an Australia-wide search by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU). The Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC) is collecting 'Familyspeak' for…
Millennial mental health toll spikes during Covid
There has been a spike in severe psychological distress in young Australian adults under 35, according to new analysis from The Australian National University (ANU). The study – which tracked 3,155 Australians – is the first-of-its-kind to …
From the Bush
ANU linguist Dr Carmel O'Shannessy has spent more than 20 years working in, and researching within, remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. In one of these, Lajamanu, Dr O'Shannessy wound up collaborating with a person she had taught in the 1990s, to make a…