Title: Empowering pupils, families and teachers in multilingual/cultural contexts through a whole school language awareness approach
Date: 15 January 2020
Time: 17:00 - 19:00
Venue: Faculty of Arts Library, Old Humanities Bldg. (2nd Floor, next to rm.301)
Speaker: Prof. Andrea Young, University of Strasbourg
Chair: Prof. Carmel Borg, Editor, Malta Review of Educational Research (MRER)
Description
The multilingual, multicultural classroom, now commonplace in many schools throughout the world, presents a series of challenges to teachers:
The multilingual, multicultural classroom, now commonplace in many schools throughout the world, presents a series of challenges to teachers:
- How can we welcome these children and their families of diverse cultural heritages into our schools and our communities?
- How can we support them to access the school curriculum through a second language?
- How can we acknowledge and capitalise on their infinitely diverse sets of cultural and linguistic knowledge and skills?
- How can we help them to feel comfortable, recognising and accepting their individual differences, whilst at the same time inviting them to become a constituent part of the class and the school?
Learning about languages and cultures, within the framework of a plurilingual, intercultural education extending across the curriculum in a concerted and coherent manner, has the potential to empower pupils, their families and their teachers, no matter how many nor which varieties of language(s) they speak. All pupils, can benefit from heightened language awareness which support language learning and literacy development, a strong predictor of academic success. All teachers, in all subject areas, working through first, foreign, heritage, national, regional or second languages, have a pivotal role to play in raising linguistic and cultural awareness in school and in so doing, helping pupils to negotiate a place for themselves in this increasingly complex web of human interactions where cultures may meet, exchange, cohabit, merge or clash.
During this talk, filmed examples of inspiring linguistic and cultural awareness activities in the primary school will be viewed, to show how it is possible to meet some of the challenges of twenty-first century education through valuing linguistic and cultural diversity as a resource.
Bionote
Andrea Young is Professor of English at the Faculty of Education and Lifelong Learning (INSP脡) at the University of Strasbourg and a member of the European plurilingualism research group (GEPE, EA1339 LILPA). Her research interests include teacher knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about language(s), home-school educational partnerships and plurilingual/intercultural education in the school context.
Andrea Young is Professor of English at the Faculty of Education and Lifelong Learning (INSP脡) at the University of Strasbourg and a member of the European plurilingualism research group (GEPE, EA1339 LILPA). Her research interests include teacher knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about language(s), home-school educational partnerships and plurilingual/intercultural education in the school context.
