Gillian (Jill) Wigglesworth

Biography

Gillian (Jill) Wigglesworth completed her PhD at La Trobe University in 1993 on children’s cognitive and linguistics acquisition of narrative skills and joined the Language Testing Research Centre (University of Melbourne) in 1992 before moving to Macquarie University in 1995. She returned to the University of Melbourne in 2001 and was Head of the School of Languages and Linguistics from 2005-2011 subsequently becoming Associate Dean, Research and then Deputy Dean. She was a Chief Investigator and leader of the Melbourne node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (2013-2022) and Inaugural Director of the Research Unit for Indigenous Language at the University of Melbourne (2013-2015).

With an extensive background in first and second language acquisition and bilingualism, as well as language assessment, her major research focus is on the multilingual communities in which Indigenous children in remote areas of Australia grow up, the languages they acquired as their first languages, and how these interact with English once they attend school.