Past Seminars

This talk will argue that in some contexts, policies and ideologies of language revival which claim to be empowering disadvantaged populations may actually be more closely linked to furthering nationalist agendas. Drawing on interviews and policy analysis, this talk examines how nationalists in both Kazakhstan and Mongolia make use of ideologies of linguistic/ethnic threat and revival to justify potentially exclusionary policies. In Kazakhstan, post-independence promotion of the Kazakh language after its suppression during the Soviet Union has come hand in hand with policies which centralize power among the ethnic Kazakh elite. In Mongolia, discourses about encroaching threats, primarily from China, are used to justify a strain of nationalism centered on keeping the nation “pure” and a glorification of selected national symbols, including the Mongolian language and traditional script. This talk will consider in what ways such discourses are different from or similar to language revival movements which have typically been celebrated by linguists and the general public. Overall this research demonstrates that a critical perspective is necessary to show how framing languages as threatened or reviving can participate in potentially exclusionary nationalist agendas.

Translanguaging refers to the strategic and creative use of one’s available semiotic resources to achieve contingent communicative needs, often transgressing established boundaries between languages as well as between modalities of language. This seminar aims to seek out evidence of translanguaging in everyday textual practices, with a view to exploring the pervasiveness of translanguaging as a social semiotic phenomenon. It first traces the trajectory of the concept since its coinage in the 1990s and briefly reviews its applications in language education, sociolinguistics, and visual studies. It then draws on David Crystal’s understanding of the linguistic formations in text messaging to demonstrate how translanguaging is inherent in mundane communications. Using further authentic, including anecdotal, examples from Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, the talk elaborates on how translanguaging constitutes a mode of literacy in its own right. It proposes that by virtue of its aberrance and recalcitrance vis-à-vis the language institution, translanguaging provides an alternative pedagogical resource for understanding the dynamism and flux of language performances.

Paper 1: Building Language Support in an EMI Chemistry Classroom: An Exploratory Study by a Science Teacher

Abstract:

Writing in science plays a crucial part in assessment. However, not many science teachers spend time on cultivating students’ skills in communicating science effectively through English. In this presentation, I share my journey of developing a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and LAC (Language Across the Curriculum) approach to the teaching of senior secondary school Chemistry and address the following research questions:

1. To what extent is students’ content and language awareness raised by increasing language support?
2. To what extent do teachers and students accept the LAC and CLIL approach?

Findings and implications of my exploration study will be discussed.

Paper 2: Thematic Patterns as CLIL Strategies: ‘Concept+Language Mapping’ in Science and Geography Classes

Abstract:

In this presentation, we introduce the ‘Concept+Language Mapping’ method, which we have developed based on Lemke’s theory of thematic patterns to integrate language support into content learning. Preliminary findings from our project schools will be shared showing how students learn both academic content and language and gain confidence in presenting and writing Science and Geography topics using this innovative approach to Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL).

Contemporary art has been a site of intense linguistic production for several decades. Visual artists experiment with language in their efforts to develop new ways of displaying language in the transformative processes of creativity and symbolic manipulation that, at times, contravenes or subverts dominant language ideologies. In this way, artists produce new ‘regimes of language’ (or ‘regimes of discourse’, Pennycook, 2002: 92) that regulate or unsettle ‘moral and political visions that shape attitudes and behavior’ (Tollefson, 2011: 370).  In this paper, four major, text-based pieces by the artist Xu Bing are examined in terms of their apparent, underlying language ideologies. In the course of the discussion, we see language ideologies not as homogeneous cultural templates but as processes ‘involving struggles among multiple conceptualizations [of language] and demanding the recognition of variation and contestation within a community as well as contradictions within individuals’ (Woolard and Schieffelin, 1994: 71). By teasing out these language ideologies, I argue, we can see Xu Bing as an individual ‘language planner’ constructing different sociolinguistic publics and inviting their responses.

Multilingualism has both a de facto existence and an important place in the psychological, political and social debates that define social and ethnic groups, communities and regions. A very widespread phenomenon, it arises for a number of well-understood reasons. In the main, however, it is really an unremarkable state of affairs, fuelled by necessity up to, but rarely beyond, appropriately useful levels of competence. Multilingual capacities at an individual level can obviously broaden possibilities, but a world of many languages is also one in which communicative problems exist. In such a world, lingua francas and translation are required. Multilingualism is particularly interesting where “big” languages confront “smaller” ones, and thus where languages and group identities come to the fore. Even more specifically, we can note the scholarly interest in the maintenance of those smaller varieties – and if, as some have argued, the continuation of linguistic diversity is a matter of social justice and language “rights”, then a strong case could indeed be made for active intervention in the fate of endangered languages and dialects. The notion of such “rights”, however, is nowhere near as straightforward as some seek to imply. In discussing this aspect of multilingualism and language contact, we must necessarily pay attention to the relatively new emergence of an “ecology of language”. This, I will suggest, is of special importance where scholarship meets advocacy.