Bi-/Multi-lingualism and the History of Language Learning and Teaching (Special Issue of 'Language & History') (original) (raw)
The history of language learning and teaching
Paedagogica Historica, 2020
the History of Language Learning and teaching as a Field of Study In this introduction, we set ourselves two tasks. First, as this three-volume collection marks the culmination of our AHRC-funded project 'Towards a History of Modern Foreign Language Teaching and Learning' (AH/J012475/1), we ref lect on the emergence of an international community of scholarship focused on what has come to be called-following McLelland and Smith (2014a)-the History of Language Learning and Teaching (HoLLT), and we describe how this is becoming established as a newly emerging interdisciplinary, intercultural and plurilinguistic field of enquiry. Second, we outline what the present collection contributes to this developing field, and how it helps indicate future directions of research. These three volumes, following on from McLelland and Smith (2014a) and Smith and McLelland (2018a), represent the first time that a substantial collection of research studies in the field of history of language learning and teaching has been published in an English-dominant country. Relevant studies have appeared in several countries over the years, most consistently in the area of French as a second/ foreign language, but there has not, until recently, been a recognizable discourse community of historians of language learning and teaching communicating together across both language and geographical borders. As we explain more fully below, there are biases of focus over the three volumes which ref lect their origins in a UK-based research network project, albeit one with strong connections to Continental Europe. Almost all the chapters started life as papers at a conference we organized in July 2014 at the University of Nottingham. 2 The conference was the last of a series of three events which were designed to bring together potentially interested UK-based academics and teacher educators in the field of modern foreign language teaching with some of those we knew in Continental Europe who were already doing relevant historical research. The conference followed on from two smaller workshops in the previous two years (at the Universities of Nottingham and Warwick, respectively), which themselves
Multilingual Practices in Language History: English and Beyond
2017
Multilingualism and multiculturalism are burning topics in today's societies. Peoples, languages and cultures coming into contact with each other can provoke confusion and concern. However, although the current situation in Europe, for example, tends to be viewed as alarmingly sudden, cultural and language contact and multilingualism are nothing new. Multilingualism in the past was not limited in place and time: we find evidence of it throughout medieval Europe, and in other periods and regions as well. Multilingual societies were composed of multilingual individuals who used more than one language in their daily lives, even within a single utterance. This is manifest in their writing. The surviving written evidence offers us access to code-switching and other multilingual practices of the past, the topic to which this volumeand a growing number of othersis dedicated. A key term in discussing multilinguals and their communicative practices is code-switching, which has been defined in a number of different ways. We quote Winford (2003: 14): "the alternate use of two languages (or dialects) within the same stretch of speech, often within the same sentence"and Poplack (1980: 583): "the alternation of two languages within a single discourse, sentence or constituent". Both define code-switching as involving two linguistic codes, although there can be more. Moreover, Winford mentions speech, as codeswitching was originally studied as a feature of spoken interaction, whilst Poplack highlights the linguistic, structural context within which the switch takes place. Since historical linguists only work with written records of language use, we have a slightly different emphasis: "the co-occurrence of two or more languages in a single communicative event" (Pahta and Nurmi 2006: 203). Broader definitions have also been made by othersconsider Heller (1988: 1): "the use of more than one language in the course of a single communicative episode". The similarities between these definitions, though, hide the variation and variability of
Language in Society, 2011
We all know our schools; we grew up in their classrooms and, to a large extent, are a product of them. Nevertheless, once that stage of our education is over, we are not allowed to relive it, slipping through the doorway to sit down at a desk and watch what happens. The appeal of all educational ethnographies, including the one presented by Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese in Multilingualism, resides to a large extent in this potential to allow us, from the standpoint of our past experience, to discover current schools and classrooms, and to do so in the (sometimes cacophonous) voices of their protagonists. In the present case, these voices, moreover, mobilise resources in languages other than that of English, the predominant tongue with which they become enmeshed. Multilingualism presents a sociolinguistic study of four interlocking case studies in four English cities, and eight complementary schools, opening up a scenario that for many readers might be a novel one, that of complementary schools created for "Teaching of the Language and Culture of Origin".
The continua of biliteracy and the bilingual educator: Educational linguistics in practice
Bilingualism and language pedagogy, 2004
The continua model of biliteracy offers a framework in which to situate research, teaching, and language planning in linguistically diverse settings; bilingual teacher education represents a conjunction of all three of these and hence, a good candidate for applying the continua model. This paper uses selected experiences in language teacher education as practised at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education to illustrate the potential of the continua model as heuristic in continually (re)writing the bilingual or language educator's knowledge base in response to the demands of educational policy and practice. A series of vignettes serves as a means for exploring dilemmas confronting bilingual (and language) educators and ways in which the continua model might shape a response: the global/local dilemma -global social, cultural, and political trends as contexts for biliteracy; the standard/nonstandard dilemma -media of biliteracy as reflected in evolving views of language and literacy in the world; the language/content dilemma -enquirybased teacher education as an approach to the development of biliteracy; and the language/culture/identity dilemmateachers' and learners' identities and cultures as they relate to biliteracy content. The paper concludes with a few comments on bilingual educators as researchers, teachers, and language planners and on the need, now more than ever, for bilingual educators to be advocates.
A Brief History of Language Teaching
The purpose of this article is to give some context to the current discussions abounding in language teaching classrooms around the world. I think it is essential to judge the most recently marketed approaches in the light of what has gone before. And following Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, my suggestion is that we integrate and account for, rather than sweep away, past approaches.
Methods and masters: Multilingual teaching in 16th-century Louvain
CAUCE. Revista internacional de Filología, Comunicación y sus Didácticas, 2017
Resumen: En el siglo XVI se practicaban varias lenguas en Flandes, especialmente en la ciudad universitaria de Lovaina y en Am-beres, centro económico de los Países Bajos españoles. El multilingüismo que se practicaba era por un lado un multilingüismo 'verti-cal', implicando el estudio de las tres lenguas 'sagradas' (hebreo, griego, latín); este tipo de estudio se concretizó con la fundación del Collegium Trilingue de Lovaina (1517). Por otro lado, estaba muy difundido un multilingüismo 'horizontal', que implicaba las lenguas vernáculas, como el español, el francés y el italiano; este tipo de multilingüismo se explica por el ascenso de la clase comerciante. La presente contribución analiza la documentación disponible (sobre los maestros de lengua y los instrumentos didácticos) y rastrea los fac-tores contextuales que influían en la enseñanza y el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras en Flandes, con particular atención a Lovaina. Palabras clave: Historia de la enseñanza de lenguas: Instrumentos didácticos; Multilingüismo (español, francés, italiano); Flandes; Collegi-um Trilingue de Lovaina; siglo XVI Abstract: In 16th-century Flanders, various languages were practiced, especially in the university town of Louvain and the city of Antwerp, the economic heart of the Southern Low Countries. On the one hand, the multilingualism to be observed there was a 'vertical' one: it concerned the study of the three 'sacred' languages (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin), and is typically exemplified by the creation of the Collegium Trilingue in Louvain (1517). On the other hand, there was a widespread 'horizontal' multilingualism, involving the vernaculars (e.g., French, Italian, Span-ish) and serving the needs of the ascending merchant class. The present paper surveys the extant documentation (language masters, didactic tools), and investigates the contextual factors underlying the teaching and learning of foreign languages in Flanders, with a focus on Louvain.
A Multilingual Paradigm in Language Education: What It Means for Language Teachers
Towards Post-Native-Speakerism, 2017
Language teachers have been categorised along the divide of the “native/non-native speaker” since the beginning of language teaching and in particular since the advent of foreign language teaching. Even though the term “native speaker” is relatively recent, as it emerged in the western world in the middle of the nineteenth century, the notion of being a native speaker of a language, of “owning” the language based on the territory from which one has been socialised, and speaking it in a natural, authentic manner has a very long history. What the monolingual paradigm tells us is that for centuries, the dichotomy between us and them, those who speak the language and those who don’t—or in other words, those who were civilised as opposed to the barbarians—was strongly perceived by people as an intangible truth and reality. Generations of learners and teachers have lived with the paradox that the model of the native speaker was the objective of foreign language learning, whereas it was an unattainable goal and became a somehow obsessive fantasy. The notion of language as a complete and closed set of rules is now crumbling. This is especially true for English, the hyperlanguage of the world, which has to face a growing recognition of World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), implying that any validity for the “native speaker” model is swept aside.
More than 50% of the world's inhabitants are bilingual, and this percentage is expected to be increasing due to the increasing global mobility. Some people are bilingual because of the characteristics of their families, others because of migration, or because they live in a border area or a country that has several languages. Bilingualism is extremely widespread in Russia and in France. An important role in this is played by specific historical and geographic and economic factors of the development of the nation. Here you can talk about the bilingual willy-nilly or the bilingual by birth. In any case, these factors should be taken into account when planning the educational process, recruitment of teachers and a contingent of students. This phenomenon is multifaceted and therefore thoroughly studied in various aspects by a multitude of sciences, among which, besides linguistics, are psychology, pedagogy, sociology and others. Hundreds of works have been written about it, but at t...
Challenges Texts are never culturally neutral, but rather are embedded in, and shaped by, histories and contexts, language, speech communities, modes, and text types. How does such a multi-literacies approach enable learners to explore not only new words, but new worlds, and to view reading and writing as complementary linguistic processes? Abstract In recent years, literacy has emerged as a key critical term in foreign language (FL) teaching and learning. This essay reflects on the history of literacy and on current developments , in particular those related to the development of multiliteracies paradigms. The article concludes with a discussion of emergent topics related to literacy and language teaching and suggests ways in which research in these domains is posing new questions for the field of FL education.
Studies in Multilingualism, Lingua Franca and Lingua Sacra
2018
The perspective of time At this point, we may ask how old multilingualism and linguistic diversity really are. It is not just the world of today which is multilingual; the past has had its fair share too. Many languages have vanished, and from Anglosaxon and Etruscan via Ostrogothic, Punic and Sumerian to Tocharian, Vandal and Wiradhuri we can draw up a long list of extinct languages 16-some of which we may still know today, if they have been preserved in writing and deciphered; while others we may still know of, if at some point somebody has cared to leave a mention or a name. When we travel back in time, what we find is that, at each and every stage of the written record for the past 5,000 years, there have always been many languages in the world. Three millennia BCE, Uruk in Sumer, the city of Gilgamesh and cuneiform writing, was a large multilingual metropolis 17-and so were many other city states in the Ancient Orient, such as Babylon, Ebla, Hattusa, Mari, Niniveh, Nippur or Palmyra. Ever since those ancient times, monolingualism may have been a most powerful dream, ideal or norm, 18 but the fact is that there has always been linguistic diversity in the world. Going back in time from today's multilingual New York 19 and London 20 to the time of Uruk, we can track its existence at all intermediate stages of known history-in eighteenth-century Europe, 21 the Renaissance. 22 and the Middle Ages 23 no less than in the Roman Empire, 24 the Celtic and the Germanic world, 25 the Hellenistic World, 26 Persia, 27 the Phoenician Mediterranean, 28 as well as the pre-classical Orient, 29 and beyond this along the Silk Road and farther. 30 As Rankin put it: "It is not easy to assume the monolingual uniformity of any inhabited area in ancient time." 31 And before Uruk? Here, as Steven Fischer has observed, 32 there is "an absolute boundary of linguistic reconstruction" in "the teeming linguascape of 10,000 years ago." Beyond that boundary, we move into evolutionary time-when it may well have taken very long indeed, from the earliest beginnings of language (perhaps about 100,000, or possibly 200,000 years ago) 33 until the final assemblage of the disparate components-such as vocal imitation and language play, signaling behavior and communicative interaction, speech sound
2003
Chapter 10, 'Women's writing as evidence for linguistic continuity and change in Early Modern English', by Terttu Nevalainen, explores the differences observed in personal correspondence by male and female writers, and the relationship existing between women's language and the development of alternative styles of English. Andreas H. Jucker deals with the development of 'Discourse markers in Early Modern English' (chapter 11), focussing on the written forms representing spoken language in plays; in particular, he highlights uses marking communicative interaction between speakers. The epilogue written by David Crystal, 'Broadcasting the non-standard message', offers a critical analysis not only of all the papers, but also of the linguistic stereotypes and realities forming the socio-political background of writers dealing with the history of the English language. His stated hope is that this book can be the first step towards raising awareness of the existence of many 'Englishes' -the only possibility to overcome and erase those stereotypes. The bibliography is very rich and includes texts dating from 1695 to 2000, thus offering a really helpful database for anyone interested in the overall history of English. Although perhaps the tones in the introduction are somewhat too sharp in criticizing the traditional view by means of which English has been diachronically analysed for decades -tones which, incidentally, are mitigated by James Milroy's prologue -the book (with just one typo in page 154) is well worth reading for its full and rich picture of the complexity of the history of the English language.
The Impact of Multilingualism on Education and Language Learning
It is not new; the world has always been multilingual, and the ways in which we develop language learning and teaching success must take into account the multilingual realities of the world. We accept that English alone is insufficient. Multilingualism has always been the default discourse on human beings. Children in most parts of the world grow up with two or more languages available to them and increasingly young people in their studies and work move to places where languages other than their mother tongue are used, and they must learn to be bilingual or multilingual. Business, employment, and scholarship are increasingly global and multilingual, and 21st century citizens need a new range of skills and strategies, such as code-switching and www.rjoe.org.in