Keynote Speakers
Jasone Cenoz
is Professor of Research Methods in Education at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU and President of the Education Science Committee of the Spanish Research Council (AEI). Her research focuses on multilingual education, bilingualism and multilingualism. She has published extensively and has presented her work at conferences and seminars in the US, Canada, Australia, China, India, Brunei, New Zealand Singapore and most European countries. Her publications include Minority Languages and Multilingual Education (2014) and Multilingual Education: Between language learning and translanguaging (2015). She has been President of the International Association of Multilingualism and Distinguished Visiting Professor in Graduate Center CUNY, Nueva York. She has also served as AILA publications coordinator and she has been a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Child Language. She is on the editorial board of a large number of scientific journals, most of them international.
PEDAGOGICAL TRANSLANGUAGING AND CLIL: MULTILINGUAL ACQUISITION
Nowadays translanguaging is used as an umbrella term that embraces a wide variety of theoretical and practical proposals. The origin of translanguaging can be found in Welsh bilingual education where it has been used since the 1980’s (Lewis, Jones & Baker, 2012) and it refers to a pedagogical practice designed by the teacher which alternates the languages of the input and the output in the same lesson. In this presentation the concept of pedagogical translanguaging goes beyond language alternation in the input and the output to refer to the use of different languages in strategies that have been specifically planned for learning purposes. Pedagogical translanguaging aims at reinforcing the learning processes by using the whole linguistic repertoire. It encourages using the knowledge multilinguals have because of their own linguistic and educational background. Pedagogical translanguaging can be used both in language and in content classes. The aim of this presentation is to discuss the challenge of using pedagogical translanguaging in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) when students learn content subjects at school through the medium of a second or additional language. CLIL programs are more demanding than regular programs because students have to make more effort when content is taught through the medium of a second or additional language. Pedagogical translanguaging can certainly provide scaffolding strategies to face the difficulties faced by students in CLIL programs when working with new concepts and academic uses of the language.
Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer,
a former teacher of Portuguese and French, is Associate Professor for Foreign Language Teacher Education (French and Spanish) at the University of Hamburg. Her research interests include pluralistic approaches to language learning and teaching, particularly intercomprehension across languages of the same linguistic family, foreign language teacher education, and heritage language education. Together with Paula Kalaja, she co-edited the volume Visualising Multilingual Lives: More than Words, published by Multilingual Matters in 2019. She has published widely in the fields of intercomprehension and visual methodologies.
Reconstructing foreign language teachers' path to plurilingualism through visual linguistic autobiographies
How does someone become plurilingual? How does one make sense of the complex, magical, never-ending process of becoming multilingual? How do foreign language teachers (re)construct their linguistic biographies? In this talk, I will address these issues through a non-logocentric perspective, which does not make exclusive use of verbal data, but uses instead visual methods to study the linguistic biographies of the subjects in question. Grounded in a presentation of the epistemological and theoretical aspects underlying the use of visual arts-based approaches to research on plurilingualism, I will focus on a particular method called “visual linguistic autobiographies” and its heuristic potential. The analysis of a corpus of visual linguistic autobiographies collected in Hamburg will put forward the ideologies attached to linguistic diversity, to language learning and teaching and to teachers’ professional development.