Introduction

The focus of this book is on the experience of eight girls from Vietnamese and Cambodian backgrounds who attended the same multiethnic high school in Melbourne, Australia. This chapter argues for the need to rethink research on language maintenance and shift to reconcile it with 21st-century experiences of migration and superdiversity and explains the rationale for exploring these issues through a mixed-methods study drawing principally on interviews and ethnographic observation. It also outlines the rationale for foregrounding the importance of the school experience and the process by which the study came to be sited at a particular school, which I refer to as Ferndale Secondary College.