LLEN Activities
Tuesday 6th February 2024
Pluriversal Applied Linguistics: Onward to Pquyquy
Dr. Yecid Ortega (Queen's University Belfast)
This presentation argues for Pluriversal Applied Linguistics in which language is used and studied in relation to humans, non-humans and beyond humans promoting research and education for a better society and planetary survival for all. Drawing on research conducted in a marginalized community in Bogotá, Colombia, this presentation will offer a fresh perspective toward pluriversalizing applied linguistics research and language teaching with a focus on critical ethnography and decolonial praxis. I urge humanity to rethink binary views on language and encourage researchers and practitioners to indulge in insights from the Global South, unlocking the possibilities for the future of language learning, teaching and research. As a collective, we can demonstrate that language and languaging can be used as a counter-narrative to defy social hierarchies and that teaching is an invaluable humanizing praxis. We all can collaboratively invent new communicative forms, negotiate learning, and strengthen cultural practices. In the end, I propose that an alternative approach to language teaching and learning should focus on understanding a pluriversality of beings in connection with communities, their identities, cultures, and languages while purposely and vigorously attempting to challenge all forms of oppression and inequity for a world worth living.
Zoom Recording (Video, automatic transcript, chat)
Tuesday 6th February 2024
The multilingual children's library as "belonging"
Dr Sabine Little (Senior Lecturer in Languages Education at the University of Sheffield)
Who owns and has a "right" to public spaces is a long-standing social justice issue. This talk will highlight the case of Sheffield's multilingual children's library, and the effect its creation has had on the community in terms of normalising multilingualism and supporting a sense of belonging among multilingual families. We will discuss pragmatic concerns related to the library's creation, as well as exploring research data from a series of events (multilingual storytelling, readathons, reading schemes, etc.). The session will touch on both theory and practice, to support researchers and practitioners alike.
Zoom Recording (Video, automatic transcript, chat)
Thursday 1st February 2024
The role of identity and hope in language learning and integration
Dr Jill Court (Honorary Research Associate at the University of Bristol, and Policy and Research Officer at ACH)
This talk explores the interconnection between language learning, identity and integration in the trajectories of adult migrants and refugees in Britain. Policy and public discourse on integration maintains that migrants and refugees have a duty to learn and speak English. This rhetoric sits within an increasingly hostile environment for migrants and assimilationist attitudes towards migrants’ linguistic and cultural practices. Despite being the objects of policy and rhetoric on immigration and integration, multilingual migrants and refugees are rarely consulted on their needs. My doctoral research investigated the experiences and priorities of adult learners of ESOL (English for speakers of other languages). It combined a large-scale national survey of 409 learners with in-depth, longitudinal exploration of the language learning and integration trajectories of 14 learners. The research contributes to new insights into the ways in which language learning and integration are in fact processes which influence one another in a “Catch-22” scenario which is shaped by their identity positions, that is, how learners see themselves and the ways in which they are seen by others.
The research revealed that many factors shape ESOL learners’ ability to make headway in their language learning and integration trajectories, many of which are neglected by policy. Of particular importance are feelings of safety, stability, confidence, and hope of achieving positive futures; and these are shaped by precarity and disadvantage, the devaluing of migrants’ and refugees’ linguistic and other skills, and negative societal attitudes. These factors can permeate the ESOL classroom, impacting on learners’ engagement and investment in their learning. This talk also describes work I have been doing to create impact from this research by working with stakeholders to coproduce strategies for ESOL and integration policy and practice, with the aim of improving language learning and integration outcomes for multilingual migrants and refugees.
Zoom Recording (Video, automatic transcript, chat)
Wednesday 18th October 2023
Pride, Prejudice and Pragmatism: Family Language Policies in the UK
Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen (Professor in Applied Linguistics at the Department of Education, University of Bath; Director of Centre for Research in Education in Asia)
In this study, I examine how mobility and on-going changes in sociocultural contexts impact family language policy (FLP) in the UK. Using a questionnaire and involving 470 transnational families across the UK, this study provides a descriptive analysis of different family language practices in England and establishes how attitudes influence the different types of FLP in these families. Complementing the descriptive analysis, I use interview data to understand the driving forces behind the different types of language practices and language management activities, and explore how ideological constructs of ‘pride’, ‘prejudice’ and ‘pragmatism’ are directly related to negative or positive attitudes towards the development of children’s heritage language. The findings indicate that migration trajectories, social values, raciolinguistic policing in schools, and linguistic loyalty have shaped family decisions about what languages to keep and what languages to let go. The study responds to the linguistic and demographic changes in British society, and makes an important contribution to our knowledge about multilingual development of children in transnational families. Critically, this study shows that FLPs alone cannot save the minority languages; institutionally sanctioned language practices and ideologies have to make a move from limiting the use of these languages in educational contexts to legitimising them as what they are: linguistic resources and languages of pride.
Zoom Recording (Video, automatic transcript, chat)
Friday 14th July 2023
Creative Methodologies: Opportunities, challenges and new ways of knowing through participatory and arts-based research
More information on Eventbrite
Presentations:
Workshop:
Living Wall:
Wednesday 14th June 2023
Part of the Bristol Conversations in Education series
14 June - Practitioner enquiry in early childhood: ensuring it is pragmatic and playful
Professor Kate Wall (University of Strathclyde)
Zoom Recording (Video, automatic transcript, chat)
Wednesday 31st May 2023
Part of the Bristol Conversations in Education series
The long shadow of coloniality: understanding inequality and language policy implementation in post-colonial schooling
Carolyn McKinney (University of Cape Town)
More information on Eventbrite
International Preschools: Patterns of Social Recruitment and Parental Investments
Jennifer Waddling (Phd candidate)
A growing number of parents around the globe are choosing international schools for their children. This phenomenon is posed to be the result of the changing face of internationally orientated education, which is said to no longer cater solely for internationally mobile elites. Instead, both an increase in the cross-border mobility of the middle classes, as well as a search for international skills amongst ‘locals’ have spurred the growth of international schools. Even for the youngest children, there are now international preschools, which is the focus of this presentation.
In the Swedish context, publicly funded international preschools are becoming increasingly popular in the country’s capital city, Stockholm. Although still relatively few in number, they tend to have extensive waiting lists. This presentation addresses the question of whom these preschools cater for and why parents choose them. As to do this, a Bourdieusian approach is taken in which the social recruitment to these preschools is mapped in relation to the full population of families with children enrolled in preschool in the city. Further to this, as these preschools have their own specific offers of foreign languages, the analysis highlights social differences between families opting for specific languages. Alongside this quantitative approach, the results of an interview study with parents of children enrolled at this type of preschool are presented. In focus is parents’ dispositions towards nurturing their children’s ‘international’ and ‘national’ linguistic and cultural assets.
Wed 23 Nov 2022
Part of the Bristol Conversations in Education series
Affective Literacies: Reconceptualizing the Text through Duoethnography
- Anwar Ahmed (University of British Columbia)
- Brian Morgan (Glendon College/York University)
More information on Eventbrite
Zoom Recording (Video, automatic transcript, chat)
Tuesday 11 October 2022
Recasting Teachers' CPD as co-operative development: An evaluation of a collaboration between creative artists and teachers of English as an Additional Language
Prof. Jane Andrews
Teachers’ continuing professional development has been conceptualised in different ways, ranging from a humanistic process of co-operative development (Edge, 1992, 2002) to a transmission of knowledge or practice (Muijs et al, 2014). In this presentation, I present findings from an AHRC funded project exploring how practices from creative arts (based around music, film making, crafting and the spoken word) might be integrated into learning and teaching practices for children and young people developing English as an Additional Language in schools in England. The project was structured around a series of creative arts workshops in which teachers collaborated with creative artists to explore creative practices and the potential for developing new practices to enhance learning in schools. The findings specifically focus on data from evaluative interviews with teachers from primary, secondary and special schools who participated in the project.
Tuesday 12th Jul 2022
Creative Collective
This event brings together researchers, particularly PGRs, who are using creative, arts-based methods in their research. You will have the opportunity to share how you are currently using or have used creative, arts-based methods to interrogate educational challenges, and how we can use various creative ways to listen to stories, particularly ‘untold and hidden’ stories from the pandemic. In particular, we will think about the following questions:
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How do we narrate our experiences of the pandemic using creative, arts-based methods?
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Whose stories do we narrate and whose stories are hidden?
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How can we open up spaces for stories to emerge and what are the creative ways that we can do this?
More information on Eventbrite
Wednesday 1st Jun 2022
Part of the Bristol Conversations in Education series
Unsettling Student Identities: Affect, Memory, and Student Narratives During the Pandemic
Bronwyn T. Williams (Professor of English, University of Louisville)
More information on Eventbrite
Zoom recording (Video, automatic transcript, chat)
Tuesday 17th May 2022
Part of the Bristol Conversations in Education series
Researching in/through and around the pandemic: Challenges, Opportunities and New Understandings of Being a Researcher
- Bronwyn T. Williams, Professor of English, University of Louisville. United States
- Aubrie Cox Warner, University of Louisville
- Olalekan Adepoju, Rhetoric and Composition, University of Louisville
- Artemio Cortez Ochoa, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge
- Carolina Valladares Celis, School of Education, University of Bristol
- Gonzalo Hidalgo Bazan, School of Education, University of Bristol
- Victoria Bowen, School of Education, University of Bristol
- Harriet Hand, School of Education, University of Bristol
- Jennifer Rowsell, School of Education, University of Bristol
More information on Eventbrite
Monday 25th April 2022
Associate Professor James Simpson
The presentation is about current policy in the coordination of opportunities for adult migrants in England to learn English. People who move to a different country experience a need to learn the dominant language of their new environment, for employment, to access services, and generally to support their settlement. A willingness to learn English is a marker of social inclusion from a political perspective too, and an insistence that migrants have an obligation to learn and use the language is a recurrent trope in political and media discourse. In the UK, language education for adult migrants in practice and in policy focuses on the field known as ESOL, English for Speakers of Other Languages. Beyond the rhetoric, policy support for migrants’ learning of English across the UK is inconsistent: there is neither a UK-wide strategy in policy to support the provision of, and access to, ESOL, nor an England-specific one. In my talk I consider how this important area of adult education appears to have no place in national education policy, and the implications of this, for practice. First, I trace the recent trajectory of ESOL policy in England. Through an examination of key policy documents, I show that despite sustained attempts to address its coordination there remains a lacuna. Second, I ask what the implications are of this policy gap for ESOL coordination in practice. Analysis of a set of interviews with key ESOL stakeholders suggests an enduring condition of fragmentation and lack of coordination to the detriment of students. Ultimately, I challenge established accounts of policy formation at macro/meso/micro scale as being inadequate for ESOL. I propose instead an understanding of policy as grassroots or rhizomatic, with an example from Yorkshire & the Humber.
Tuesday 15th March 2022
‘Strategic ambiguity’ in the language policy of small states: Insights from migrant communities in Andorra and Luxembourg
Dr. James Hawkey
This presentation examines de jure language officialization policies in Andorra and Luxembourg, and addresses how these are discursively reproduced, sustained or challenged by members of resident migrant communities in the two countries. Although Andorra and Luxembourg bear similarities in their small size, extensive multilingualism and the pride of place accorded to the ‘small’ languages of Catalan and Luxembourgish respectively, they have adopted different strategies as regards according official status to the languages spoken there. In this talk, I will provide insights into the complex ideological fields in which small languages are situated and demonstrate the ways in which language policy is intertwined with issues of power and dominance.
Language of Instruction Attitudes in Rural Tanzania: Parental Discourses and Valued Linguistic Capabilities
Dr. Danny Foster
Abstract: In Tanzania, rural, indigenous language communities attain the lowest outcomes in education. Language of instruction is a factor, but indigenous languages are proscribed from classrooms. Research shows that mother tongue-based multilingual education can improve the situation; however, there is little interest from government to pursue it. And with a lack of information, support, and voice, indigenous language communities are poorly positioned to drive change. A study conducted among parents from a rural, minoritised language community---the Malila---elicited perspectives on language-in-education to examine their support and rejection of specific languages of instruction (Foster 2021). Using critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003) and the capability approach (Sen 1999), it was possible to expose deeply held ideologies and consider them against parents' valued linguistic capabilities. The study reveals a troubling strategy whereby parents look to schools to provide their children with alternate linguistic identities that better position them to achieve well-being. The question of whether or not children retain their identity (including their language) in this process has been triaged by parents against the prospect of not achieving well-being resulting in a perspective that views indigenous language loss as collateral damage. I argue that this is an egregious form of linguistic hegemony that sustains inequality and social exclusion for the Malila community. The findings affirm and elaborate a proposal by Rubagumya et. al. (2011) which suggests well-being in Tanzania is linked to language repertoires. Three distinct capability sets can be connected to indigenous, national, and global languages.
Tuesday 19th October 2021
Mathematics lessons in a government secondary school in rural Rwanda and pedagogical translanguaging
Rachel Bowden
This presentation draws on my PhD, a socio-cultural case study of mathematics teaching and learning in a government secondary school in rural Rwanda. The study was guided by three main research questions: How does the teacher construct lessons? How do students participate in lessons? and How are EMI and the competence-based curriculum (CBC) constructed as part of these lessons? Data included 13 hours of mathematics lessons, recorded over a five-month period, post-lesson interviews with the teacher and students, an in-depth interview with the teacher and focus groups with students, and a period of participant observation at school. Data were analysed using discourse analysis (Gee, 2010), to identify classroom-mathematical discourses and to trace connections between classroom discourse and Discourses around EMI and the CBC at school and in the wider education system. In this presentation, I explore mathematics classroom communication in relation to the concept of pedagogical translanguaging, where the aim is bi-literacy (Probyn, 2015; Heugh et al, 2019). I demonstrate how this teacher uses English, Kinyarwanda, non-verbal language and mathematical modes systematically and flexibly, to enable students to access English and mathematics. I suggest the need to broaden the concept of pedagogical translanguaging to allow for integrated linguistic repertoires, where the focus is the acquisition of subject-specific literacy and not verbal standard language/s.
Tuesday 4th May 2021
Exploring Bilingualism and Bilingual Education in Spain from a Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography
Dr. Alicia Fernández Barrera
This presentation investigates the concept of ‘bilingualism’ and the implementation of different CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning)-type bilingual programmes (BPs) in secondary educationin the region of Castilla-La Mancha (CLM), central Spain, from a critical sociolinguistic ethnographic perspective.
CLM has experienced a dramatic social transformation due to the rapid proliferation of BPs in most public (i.e. state-run) and charter schools for over two decades. Since the first BPs were implemented in the region back in 1996, the evolution and subsequent ‘explosion’ of BPs have become a major controversial issue in the political, social and educational arenas due to the social inequalities currently emerging in the school communities attempting to ‘become bilingual’. This Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography (CSE) was carried out in three bi/plurilingual (Spanish/English/French) secondary schools in one of the provinces comprising the region of CLM. The methodological design combines traditional ethnographic techniques, such as participant-observation and field notes, with interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1982; Rymes, 2009; Goffman, 1981,1992), to identify interactional patterns or recurrent sequences of action and activities in the CLIL classrooms. Building on Heller’s “critical social perspective on the concept of bilingualism, combining practice, ideology and political economy” (2007: 2), this presentation aims at examining language ideologies circulating among stakeholders (teachers, families, students) and social categorisation processes in situated classroom practices. Departing from this premise, this study explores discourse in daily meaning-making practices in relation to wider social, political, economic and ideological changes tied to the new economy. In particular, it looks into identity construction related to moral (“good”, “appropriate”) and linguistic (“native”/“non-native”;“bilingual”/“non-bilingual”) configurations out of which tensions, dilemmas and contradictions emerge in the process of appropriating and legitimising BPs in my three focal schools.
The analysis shows that the bilingualism movement in CLM has given rise to social categorisation, social inequalities and identity construction processes related to the reconfiguration of bilingualism, bilingual selves and the BPs. Likewise, these processes are linked to the restructuration of material and symbolic resources underpinning the institutional legitimisation of bilingualism under the conditions of the 21st century.
Tuesday 20th April 2021
Part of the Bristol Conversations in Education series
Screen time, surveillance and stuck places in digital literacies.
Screen time signals a global public health concern that promotes limiting children’s digital viewing practices. In the last decade, warnings against screen time increasingly constrained children’s access to and use of digital media, at school and at home (Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2016; Ernest et al., 2014; Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2019; Laurciella, Wartella, & Rideout, 2015). Periodic warnings from pediatricians and educators cautioned caregivers about the threat of overexposure to screens and urged time limits on the use of digital devices (e.g.Pediatrics, 2016, 2018). Screen time applied the medical models of “addiction” to screen technologies, pathologizing digital literacies practices. And then COVID-19 happened. Suddenly, Zoom classrooms moved into young children’s homes. mandating that young children spend hours each day gazing at screens.
In this presentation, screen time is examined through the lens of a nexus of practice (Scollon, 2001) - a set of tacit expectations and practices that members of a culture expect of one another. What is the impact of screen prohibitions and children’s disparate early access to technologies in cultures that expect people to not just use but to think with screens? How do screen time warnings (and now screen time mandates) intersect with family literacy practices?
Wednesday 24th March 2021
Part of the Bristol Conversations in Education series
Supporting Spoken Language in the Classroom: The importance of universal school-based interventions in the time of Covid-19 pandemic
Dr. Ioanna Bakopoulou
Dr. Bakopoulou will present her research that focuses on the inequalities in children's language learning demonstrating how disparities in language learning can affect children's access to the curriculum and their achievement in schools. Inequalities can occur due to different opportunities in the language learning environment and children's language learning needs. To address this issue, Dr Bakopoulou will defend a more supportive language learning environment in education, and present findings from the Supporting Spoken Language in the Classroom programme implemented in schools in Bristol.
Tuesday 16th February 2021
Autism, Reading and Eye tracking
Dr. Philippa Howard
Tuesday 29th June
Symbolic word learning in Autism from digital devices
Prof. Melissa Allen
Understanding that pictures and words are symbolic is a substantial developmental achievement, but one that may be delayed or deviant for children with Autism who have characteristic difficulties with language acquisition. In this talk, I will discuss how levels of engagement and word learning may differ using digital devices compared to 2-D pictures, and whether the processes of learning differs between children with and without Autism.