You are warmly invited to Our Languages: Sociolinguistics in multilingual participatory ESOL classes with Melanie Cooke (King's College, London and English for Action) Becky Winstanley (Tower Hamlets College, EFA and KCL) and Dermot Bryers (EFA and KCL)

Date: Monday 21st May 2018

Time: 17.45

Place: Room 1.13, Franklin Wilkins Building, Stamford Street, King's College, London.

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/campus/waterloo.aspx (the entrance is marked 'A' on the map)

The seminar is free and all are welcome to attend but it is essential to book your place in advance. Please contact [log in to unmask] for a place.

Abstract

Speakers of languages other than English in the UK frequently face barriers to their integration and wellbeing, not because they do not speak the language or are reluctant to learn it (a commonly repeated trope in political and public discourse) but because of hostility to their other languages and because of strongly held – but often erroneous – beliefs about bi/multilingualism both on an individual and a societal level. Yet ESOL programmes rarely explicitly address the language issues which are salient in the lives of linguistic minorities, and their voices are rarely heard on such matters. Drawing on findings from the Diasporic Adult Language Socialisation Project (DALS), an ongoing sociolinguistic investigation into the development of multilingual communicative repertoires in the homes and communities of Sri Lankan Tamils in London, Our Languages set out to explore the potential for incorporating sociolinguistic topics into ESOL and to establish a pedagogical approach which was more in tune with students’ linguistic realities and those of their local communities. The project took place last year in Tower Hamlets College and in a class run by English for Action in Streatham in south London. In this seminar we will discuss how we used sociolinguistic data to design the course, we will describe some of the activities we used to explore sociolinguistic themes and we will present our thoughts on some of our findings.

You can read a full report on the report here:

 https://www.academia.edu/35839204/WP234_Cooke_Bryers_and_Winstanley_2018._Our_Languages_Sociolinguistics_in_multilingual_participatory_ESOL_classes

And more info about English for Action here: http://www.efalondon.org/