“Neither Bilingual nor Education”: critiques of bilingual education in state school education and responses to them
Dr. Tom Morton
Abstract
In this talk I will address some recent public controversy about bilingual education in one European country: Spain. I will examine outspoken critiques by prominent intellectuals and members of the public about the educational practice of teaching school academic subjects through English as a medium of instruction. I will also briefly discuss some research which casts doubt on the outcomes of bilingual education programs, and some critiques of other research and evaluation which has highlighted possible bias and methodological shortcomings in studies which reported favourable results. I will argue that proponents of bilingual education, whether at the levels of policy, pedagogical practice or research, need to have more visibility in public debates about the goals and realistic outcomes of bilingual programs, in order to counter deep-seated myths about the effects of bilingual education on individual plurilingualism and societal multilingualism.
Speaker
Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication, Birkbeck, University of London
About the Speaker
Dr Tom Morton is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London, and visiting academic at the universities of Southampton and Vienna. He is currently working on research projects in CLIL with the team of researchers led by Dr Ana Llinares at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. He has published widely on CLIL, including the Cambridge University Press volume “The Roles of Language in CLIL” (co-authored by Ana Llinares and Rachel Whittaker). He is co-founder and associate editor of the journal “Classroom Discourse”.
Date
17 March 2016 (Thursday), 12:45 - 02:00pm
Location
Room 203, 2nd Floor, Runme Shaw Building , HKU
Chair
Professor Angel Lin
Presentation Slide
Presentation Slide 1 :
Gallery
