"Communicating with ESL Communities in WA" Report Findings

Hi everyone,

I hope that you are all enjoying the study break and making full use of the break to reflect on the internship and writing up the internship report.

I have been working on a research report for my internship organisation named "Communicating with English as a Second Language Communities in Western Australia" throughout my internship with the Keep Australia Beautiful Council Western Australia.

Have you all ever wondered how difficult it is for people from English as a Second Language backgrounds to settle down in Australia because of the environment differences of their home country and Australia? Who are these people and what were their backgrounds like before they were forced to leave their own countries due to wars and migration? Have you all also ever given a thought on how government departments in Australia face challenges in communicating important community messages to these communities that come from extremely different backgrounds and speak in languages that we may not even be aware of? What can we do to reach out to these people?

With this in mind, the Keep Australia Beautiful Council WA took me in as an intern to write up a research report aiming to identify the main non-English speaking communities in Western Australia and examine methods to effectively communicate environmental messages with regard to litter and illegal dumping to these groups in order to contribute to a litter-free Western Australia.

For most days of my internship, I carried out desktop research mainly on the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the 2006 Census of Housing and Population, Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC), as well as the Office of Multicultural Interests (OMI) as well as academic research. On other days of my internship, I made appointments with representatives from migrant resources centres, state government agencies, educational institutions and ethnic radio stations to interview them in order to find out who the main ESL groups in Western Australia were.

Based on the information gathered from the consultations, the main ESL groups in Western Australia has been identified as groups from war torn and poor countries from the African region and Asian countries. For privacy reasons, the exact findings of the report will not be shared in this blog post.

Another main part of the research report was also to include recommendations on how the Keep Australia Beautiful Council can reach out to the ESL communities to convey important messages on litter in which I obtained information through desktop research as well as through the consultations and interviews. This was a challenging part due to the limited resources on budget and practicality but my supervisor was happy with most of my recommendations.

I mainly focused on the research report for this internship, but I also had the opportunity to participate in the Kwinana Freeway clean up, being a representative at the Perth 2011 World Sailing Championships as well as other office tasks. I have greatly honed my research skills that I have learnt in the PR Corporate unit, as well as interviewing skills from the PR Media unit. This made me realise just how useful and relevant the PR units that I took in university were to my internship!

The end result of the research report was a 76 pages long report! I received good feedback from my supervisor and my colleagues on the report and it greatly boosted my confidence level in being a future PR professional.

I'll be back with my final blog post soon so stay tuned and enjoy the rest of the study break!

Debra Tan

Curtin Bentley