Language teaching and learning exchange in the superdiverse city: a social gift for getting along?
Professor Angela Creese (a.creese@bham.ac.uk), MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism
This paper argues for a refocusing of second language teaching scholarship from one of ‘acquisition’ to one of ‘comprehension’. An interdisciplinary orientation to language learning is adopted to explore how people in superdiverse city contexts such as markets and libraries respond to social and linguistic difference strategically through teaching and learning bits and pieces of ‘foreign languages’. Returning to early work on ‘foreigner talk’ (Long, 1981) from the field of SLA but now revisited through a sociolinguistic and superdiversity lens, concepts such as repetition, parallelism, pausing, slowing, rhythm, tempo and waiting, are reassessed to understand their value in creating opportunities for convivial social exchange in linguistically and socially diverse city institutions. I consider how small acts of language teaching and learning become ‘free goods’ (Goffman 1971) for positive engagement with social difference. Viewing language learning in this way shifts the focus from that of acquisition, improved proficiency and standardised ‘native speaker’ targets to one of comprehension, communication and getting along.
Friday, 1 July, 15.30-16.30
Bio
Angela Creese is professor of educational linguistics at the School of Education, University of Birmingham, and is the principal investigator of AHRC large grant, Translation and Translanguaging: Investigating Linguistic and Cultural Transformations in Superdiverse Wards in Four UK Cities. Her research interests are in linguistic ethnography, language ecologies, multilingualism in society and multilingual classroom pedagogy.