Lecture by Fiona Willans "The Multilingual Turn: What Use Is It To Educators?"

April 8, 5:00pm - 6:30pm
Mānoa Campus, Wist Hall, CCC (College of Education Collaboration Center)

Sociolinguistic research can be considered to have taken a ‘multilingual turn’ in recent years, challenging and denaturalising the linguistic boundaries that have traditionally been considered to tie languages down into separate, bounded systems. Recent examinations of language have begun to highlight the complex repertoires that language users employ, avoiding the reification of boundaries between the ‘languages’ to which they might traditionally be considered to belong. These changes lead to the following questions, which Fiona Willans will examine further with reference to her own experiences in multilingual Vanuatu and Fiji: To what extent can educators make use of this rethinking? What are materials developers, teachers and teacher trainers meant to do with notions such as ‘flexible multilingualism’ and ‘complex repertoires of resources’? This presentation aims to open up these questions for discussion, by talking through some of the sociolinguistic concepts that might be relevant to educators, and considering the extent to which practical benefit can come of recent engagements with linguistic complexity. Fiona Willans is lecturer in the Linguistics Department of Linguistics at the University of the South Pacific. Her research interests include colonial legacies within language ideologies and language-in-education policies; the potential for bottom-up and ‘sideways’ approaches to medium of instruction issues throughout the Pacific.


Event Sponsor
Charlene J. Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole, and Dialect Studies, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Christina Higgins, (808) 956-8610, cmhiggin@hawaii.edu

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