Last week's language and super-diversity conference in Jyväskylä felt a lot like swimming in
toothpaste: strenuous, but ultimately refreshing. As a sociolinguist with a decent grasp of the
history behind the idea, and the reasons for its sudden popularity, I think I pretty much get it,
and it is kinda useful, if a little hard to operationalise. BUT... how on earth do I teach it to
students? Thankfully my intro to sociolinguistics course this autumn is at postgraduate level, so I
can throw them into a certain depth of toothpaste, but I'm not sure how to make it sufficiently shallow.
Secondly, students these days tend to be young digital natives, and in my particular case
(University of Turku, southwest Finland) they'll also be trilingual (at least). For them, a lot of
the stuff that characterises super-diversity as a relatively recent phenomenon will be intensely
ordinary -- even if it's all rather new and empirically challenging for us creaky academics. There
will be plenty to confuse them with in terms of theory, but the inherent sense of amazement in the
term *super*-diversity may be met with glazed indifference. Like, yeah, duh...?
With all this in mind, please, esteemed colleagues and peers, share your pedagogical cogitations on
how to teach this exciting new sociolinguistic frontier, which was variously described last week as
a paradigm, a perspective, a theory, a tool, and an awareness-raising exercise -- I particularly
liked the last one! There are no textbook chapters on the subject yet, but we always get extra
points for exposing students to new research in the field, so it's worth the effort.
To kick us off, my clearest sense last week of how to teach it was to explain code-switching as a
starting point, then show how certain contemporary multi-/trans-/poly-lingual practices, especially
those conducted in mixed online-offline settings, render code-switching somewhat obsolete, at least
in its traditional empirical territory of conversation recordings. That's an extremely sketchy
initial idea though, which I'll be developing more substantially in the coming months -- at some
point between research, conferences, admin, meetings, supervisee calming, and of course discounting
the weeks of free time us academics enjoy each summer..... ಠ_ಠ
Isn't Jyväskylä lovely btw? Looking forward to next year's Sociolinguistic Symposium already! Last
one in the lake is a rotten egg.
Dave
--
Dr. Dave Sayers
Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University, UK
Visiting Lecturer (2013-14), Dept English, University of Turku, Finland
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http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers
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