American notes: what another academic tradition can teach us about language, classrooms and migration

Rob Sharples, University of Leeds

Returning from a semester spent as a visiting scholar in the US, ideas that had become familiar needed rethinking to integrate them with the disciplinary traditions from back home. New fields – from linguistic anthropology to the mysterious 'Rhetoric and Composition' – needed to find a place in a mental landscape dominated by British scholarship. Lessons drawn from Bilingual Education needed to be adapted for the complex linguistic landscapes of the UK. Ways of talking about classrooms and migration needed rethinking for an audience already deeply steeped in the UK context. The semester abroad – supported by the ESRC and taking in visits to research centres in New York, Toronto and rural Pennyslvania – brought that central ethnographic challenge into focus: it made the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. 

This talk is about those shifts in perspective. It comes from the viewpoint of a late-stage PhD student, trying to put together a coherent position on complex questions and to locate it in the scholarly dialogue of the field. The visit destabilised many of my assumptions, and this talk shares the new thinking about language, classrooms, and migration that emerged.