I am very pleased to announce the following event on the future of the Portuguese language.
Symposium: “Futuro Português – The future of the Portuguese language in Europe”
Lancaster, April 8, 2017, website: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/futuro-portugues/
This symposium will bring to Lancaster policy makers, researchers, school teachers/directors as well as representatives of the Portuguese government to assess the current situation of Portuguese in schools and universities in the United Kingdom and France. The idea is to understand the situation of one particular language in detail, which will then allow us to expand to other languages in subsequent years.
Why Portuguese? Portuguese is spoken by 203 million people as a native language in Europe, South America, Africa and Asia, so it is not surprising that a significant proportion of immigrants in the Northwest of England speaks Portuguese at home. Surveys by the Office for National Statistics and the Department for Education indicate that, in some regions of the UK, Portuguese is the second-most frequent European language (after Polish).
Invited speakers:
- João Costa (Secretary of State for Education)
- Tatiana Correia (Co-founder and director of the Native Scientist initiative)
- Adelaide Cristóvão (Coordenator of Portuguese language instruction in France, Instituto Camões, Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
- Regina Duarte (Coordenator of Portuguese language instruction in the United Kingdom, Instituto Camões, Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Attaché for Educational Affairs at the Portuguese Embassy in London)
- Sara Belo Luis (Jornalist, executive editor of VISÃO magazine)
- Sofia Martinho (Teaching Fellow in Portuguese, Director of the Camões Centre for Portuguese Language, Leeds University)
- Márcia Fortuna (Coordenator of Portuguese language instruction in the United Kingdom, Instituto Camões, Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
The symposium will provide a snapshot of the current situation of Portuguese language instruction at the schools and universities. We will focus on both Portuguese as a Heritage Language and Portuguese as a Foreign Language. What are the current trends, what challenges are we facing? What impact will Brexit have? In addition, we will have presentations on particularly successful outreach and impact initiatives, namely the award-winning Native Scientist project and the new Anglo-Portuguese School, a bilingual school that will open in London in 2018. The symposium will conclude with a round table discussion, moderated by Sara Belo Luis, a well-known Portuguese journalist.
Participation in the event is free (and includes lunch and coffee breaks), thanks to the financial support of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) Impact Fund, which we gratefully acknowledge. The event is a joint initiative of PARSUK (Portuguese Association of Researchers and Students in the UK) and FASS.
For questions, please emailp.rebuschat@lancaster.ac.uk.
