PowerPoint presentation: Multilingual turn in sociolinguistics: What use is it to educators?

Dr. Fiona Willans’s research focuses on language policy and multilingual education, with a particular interest in the context of Vanuatu. She combines ethnography and discourse analysis to examine the way language is used and talked about within the domain of education, focusing on the way a number of familiar arguments against multilingual education circulate unchallenged. Her aim is to encourage new ways of looking at policy and planning, in order to move towards a more effective framework for education. She is currently researching ways to implement multilingual pedagogies and policies in schools in Vanuatu, where English, French, Bislama, and more than 100 indigenous languages are spoken.