Abstract

Teachers of ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) in the UK work with students who use many languages, dialects and registers in their lives outside the classroom – but their experience of multilingual communities and their knowledge about languages and language use is not often made full use of in ESOL teaching. In 2017, researchers and teachers at King’s College, London and the popular education charity, English for Action, collaborated on an 8 week project, Our Languages, which was directly concerned with students’ multilingual lives and experiences. The project took place in two ESOL classes and explored various highly generative sociolinguistic themes: linguistic repertoires; bi/multilingualism in families; linguistic discrimination and language ideologies. At the same time, in classes where people spoke more than 20 different languages and dialects, we explored ways of employing students’ other languages in our discussions as well as ways of using their full range of linguistic resources to help develop their English language competence. The eight sessions were highly engaging and thought-provoking; both students and teacher-researchers were able to think deeply about language issues in our daily lives, to learn from each other and to challenge some of our long-held beliefs. We noted at the end of our 8 week project that students had gained more confidence in their own linguistic identities, had considered ways of resisting language-based prejudice and discrimination and had made considerable improvements in their English language learning. At a time when some of our students are facing increasing levels of prejudice and discrimination because they are speakers of languages other than English, we would argue that working with sociolinguistic ideas in ESOL is a way of addressing serious questions of social justice with migrant communities.

Since Our Languages ended we have been working on a set of materials based on the themes, activities and findings from the project. These are in the form of a web site which can be used in various ways, either as a complete course or as several stand-alone lessons or activities. The materials are organised in four sections: ‘Ourselves’, ‘Our Homes’, ‘Our Classroom’ and ‘Our Communities’. This session will briefly introduce the web site, explain the original project and will discuss some of the sociolinguistic theory behind the project. We will also carry out some of the activities. The workshop will be hands on and participatory and will be suitable for teachers with varying levels of experience, as well as those interested in language education more generally.

Dr Melanie Cooke