Past Seminars

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.

Increasingly around the world, children are required to learn foreign or second languages through primary school education. In this talk I begin by discussing some of the consequences of these policy decisions, and focus on the specific issue of crosslinguistic influence. Historically, researchers have examined the issue of crosslinguistic influence from the direction of the first language to the second (L1 –> L2). However, one of the consequences of lowering the age at which children are taught foreign/second languages is that it is likely their L1s are not fully developed at the time the L2 is introduced. This timing creates an opportunity for the L2 to influence aspects of the L1 (L2 –> L1). I discuss some of the research on crosslinguistic influence generally, and then present the findings of studies which show that L2 learning can influence key aspects of developing L1 skills, notably literacy. Learning a foreign/second language at primary school can, therefore, have much wider reaching consequences when introduced at younger ages in primary education contexts.

There are well-established relations from overall levels of phonological and spatial abilities to Chinese reading and mathematical competencies: people who are stronger in the former perform better on tests of the latter. However, do the rates of growth in phonological and spatial abilities also matter? This longitudinal study of Hong Kong Chinese children (aged three to six) demonstrated that growth rate in phonological awareness during the preschool years significantly predicted both Chinese reading and mathematical competencies at the end of preschool, and that growth rate in spatial perception also significantly predicted mathematical competence. These effects were over and above the overall levels of phonological awareness, spatial perception, and spatial reasoning. The findings highlight the need to provide phonological and spatial learning opportunities for preschoolers whose rates of growth in these skills are slower than those of their peers.

In this talk, we will present the Hong Kong Archive of Language Learning (HALL), the first digital archive in Hong Kong that collects, archives and disseminates stories of English learners in the city. At present, the HALL has more than 3,000 language learning narratives collected through face-to-face interviews and paper-based surveys across university campuses in Hong Kong since October 2014. The digital archive is a public-access resource that provides a holistic record of the diverse language learning and reading practices of Hong Kong learners in academic, leisure and professional settings. We will then draw on preliminary analysis of the narratives and discuss its potential as a pedagogical resource for language learners, teachers and researchers to develop English learning and teaching strategies both within and beyond the curriculum.