This colloquium brings together scholars working on language diversity, minorities, language and power, and education. The participants share methodological orientation towards linguistic ethnography and action research in plurilingual settings.
During recent years, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and anthropological linguistics have gained an ever more solid understanding of the ways in which people employ their diverse linguistic repertoires in environments where the participants possess asymmetric resources. Research has clarified the reflexive processes through which ideologies and attitudes contribute to social relations and to the semiotic force of linguistic conduct.
The colloquium will discuss the ways in which academic sociolinguistic knowledge can be shared with ‘the field’, with non-academics whose lives happen in linguistically and culturally diverse encounters. Questions to be addressed are:
- What is linguistic awareness and how does it contribute to everyday lives of people?
- What can linguists do to raise linguistic awareness in the communities they are working with? How to co-construct linguistic awareness that contributes to the sense of belonging?
- How can plurilingualism and translanguaging be reinforced and employed as assets in linguistically and ethnically diverse settings?
- How are the plurilingual identities and practices of the immigrant minorities (dis)similar to the traditional or primordial minorities?
A shared keyword for the authors is participation: researchers participate in the everyday life of the community, and the people in the field participate in constructing understanding of the plurilingual practices they participate in. Activities promote shifts in conventional roles, i.e. the roles of researcher, teacher, and student are less confined than in traditional research contexts.
LITERATURE
Busch, Brigitta 2015: The linguistic repertoire revisited. – Applied Linguistics 33/5.
Edwards, Emily - Burns, Anne 2015: Language teacher action research: achieving sustainability. – ELT Journal 70/1.
Hélot, Christine - Ó Laoire, Muiris 2015 (eds.): Language Policy for the Multilingual Classroom. Pedagogy of the Possible. Multilingual Matters.
Madsen, Lian Malai - Karrebæk, Martha Sif - Møller, Janus Spindler 2015: Everyday Languaging. Collaborative Research on the Language Use of Children and Youth. Mouton.
Pérez-Milans, Miguel 2016 (ed.): Reflexivity in Late Modernity. Accounts from linguistic ethnographies of youth. - AILA Review 29.
Rymes, Betsy 2014: Communicating Beyond Language. Routledge.
