Rethinking languages in present-day Europe

In today’s world largely marked by globalization, internationalization, and diversity, being able to successfully communicate in English and/or other languages is very important. This success depends not so much on the speaker’s linguistic proficiency but on his/her ability to display effective intercultural communicative skills. In view of these, the EU, recognizing and respecting linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe, has promoted a policy that fosters language learning as the cornerstone of European identity, mutual respect for other cultures, intercultural dialogue, protection of minority languages and so on. Besides, the exchange of information, the means of communication, the advance of technology, the organization of our daily routine have become so multifaceted that they call for a revisiting of the ways we cope with such a complexity of communicative and cultural realities. The impact of diverse linguistic, social, cultural, political and technological landscapes owing to factors such as European and worldwide policies and politics, globalization, migration, technological advances, or the more recent pandemic-related contexts, along with the various real and virtual realities these have created need to be (re)examined in order to revisit the role and status of languages today. In this conference, we invite scholars to challenge their perceptions of language studies and language teaching in the present-day European context.

Some of the proposed topics for this conference include:

• Reevaluating language policies

• Normative language policy approach

• Regional and minority languages

• Minority language communities in the age of globalisation

• Europe for languages or languages for Europe

• Cross-cultural, intercultural, transcultural, multicultural, pluricultural, what else?

• Foreign Language proficiency, CEFR and ELP

• Rethinking language certification

• Intercultural communication as interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary

• The multimodality of language studies and language teaching today

• Language in culture, culture in language

Papers are welcomed from but are not limited to:

• Language Teaching

• Cultural Studies

• Intercultural Communication

• Intercultural Education

• Communication Studies

• Media Studies

• Discourse Analysis

• Pragmatics

• Linguistics

• Semiotics

• Applied Linguistics

The conference languages are English and Italian. Please send your abstracts (about 250 words) for papers (20 min) as an MS word attachment to the following email address by 31 October 2021:

jmm_folate@univlora.edu.al.

Please follow the template to be found here for abstract submission.

A selection of papers will be published after the conference.