Date of Publication: 2008-09-01

Ahmar Mahboob teaches linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia. He earned his PhD at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 2003, with a dissertation on Status of nonnative English speakers as ESL teachers in the United States. Ahmar has worked in the areas of language policy development, pidgin and creole languages, NNEST studies, additional language acquisition, additional language teaching and teacher education, World Englishes, pragmatics, and issues surrounding minority languages in South Asia.. Ahmar is the Past President of Indiana TESOL and the Past Chair of the NNEST Caucus in TESOL International.

Naomi Knight is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics Department at the University of Sydney. She is finishing her PhD thesis on conversational humour in the systemic functional linguistic framework, with a focus on the social bonding and discursive identity functions of this phenomenon. Naomi specializes in conversation and discourse analysis, and is also interested in the areas of phonology, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Additionally,she has worked on research projects in ape language studies involving data of language-competent apes Kanzi and Panbanisha, and completed her honours thesis, entitled 'Semantic Analysis of an Instance of Bonobo-Human Discourse', on the subject. Naomi is the co-creator and co-convener of the International Free Linguistics Conference with Dr. Ahmar Mahboob.