KEYNOTE LECTURE

"Navigating Transitions in Multilingual Contexts in Language Education and Language Research"

Dr. Stefanie Shamila Pillai

Professor, Faculty of Languages & Linguistics, Universiti Malaya

ABSTRACT:

The conference theme resonates deeply with the dynamic landscape of language use and language education. As language researchers and educators, we need to recognise that language is not a static and fixed entity. Thus, in this keynote, I invite you to think about the extent to the languages in your environments have changed, not only within the languages themselves, but in how they are used, including on different communication platforms. Additionally, we also need to take into account the multilingual resources we have and how these are often intermeshed when we communicate. Within all these is the notion of how we use multiple resources all at once, layering them to simultaneously construct and negotiate meaning, and even influence subsequent action or decisions over time, thus extending multimodalities to transmodalities (Murphy, 2012). This keynote then explores the challenges faced by language educators when navigating through the transitions taking place in the face of existing policies and curricula, and the perceptions of stakeholders. The keynote ends with a discussion of strategies for navigating such transitions and dealing with transmodalities in language research and education in the spirit of a more realistic and holistic approach to these areas.

About the Keynote Speaker:

Dr. Stefanie Shamila Pillai is a Professor at the Faculty of Languages & Linguistics, Universiti Malaya. She was formerly Dean of the Faculty and Chair of the university’s Happiness and Social Advancement Research Cluster. Professor Pillai works in the inter-connected research areas of phonetics, varieties of English, language education policy, and language use in education as well as language use in multilingual contexts. Her documentation of Melaka Portuguese is digitally archived at the Endangered Languages Archive (https://www.elararchive.org/dk0123/), while more about the Melaka Portuguese language can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMnbW3v296M. She recently co-edited a book featuring research on indigenous communities in Peninsular Malaysia, Selected research on Orang Asli communities, and she has two co-edited books in press at the moment, Making research count: Bridging community, empowering change and impacting society and Contemporary Malaysian English pronunciation. Her publications can be viewed at https://umexpert.um.edu.my/stefanie.html.