New times, new voices and new literacies : Multilingual Resources for the ‘Design’ of Pedagogy.

Nouvelles ères, nouvelles voix et nouvelles littératies : Ressources multilingues pour la conception pédagogique

Conférence avec Marilyn Martin-Jones, Université de Birmingham

Mercredi 22 février à l'IUFM d'Alsace

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Biography

Marilyn Martin-Jones is an Emeritus Professor and former Director of the MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism, at the University of Birmingham. Over the last 30 years, she has been involved in research in bilingual and multilingual contexts in England and in Wales. She has a particular interest in the ways in which language and literacy practices contribute to the construction of identities, in local life worlds and institutional contexts, and with  the ways in which such practices are bound up with local and global relations of power. These themes are reflected in her publications: e.g. Multilingual literacy practices: reading and writing different worlds (with Kathryn Jones, John Benjamins, 2000); Voices of authority: education and linguistic difference (with Monica Heller, Ablex, 2001); Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism (with Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese, Routledge 2012) and Multilingualism, discourse and ethnography (with Sheena Gardner, Routledge 2012). Marilyn Martin-Jones is also editing a book series for Routledge, entitled: ‘Critical Studies in Multilingualism’.

Abstract

The starting point for this talk will be the large-scale social, demographic and technological changes, linked to globalization, that have taken place over the last few decades. In these ‘new times’, we have seen the intensification of transnational population flows (e.g. labour migration and the movement of refugees). There has been a diversification of diversity and new voices are being heard in local urban neighbourhoods that have long been places of urban settlement for newcomers. They are also heard in some rural areas where local agricultural industries or tourist sites are attracting migrant workers.

In these ‘new times’ we have also seen massive changes in information and communication technology and the development of new ‘technoscapes’ (Appadurai, 1996) through the introduction of computers and mobile phones. These new technologies have made it possible to build and sustain relationships over distance and engage in regular translocal communication and, at the same time, new ways of reading, writing (new literacies) and new ways of producing or using texts are being created. Contemporary social life is increasingly textually-mediated and, in multilingual contexts, people draw on multiple language and literacy resources in producing texts on screen and on paper, as they engage with others and as they give expression to different facets of their identity.

The second part of my talk will be devoted to the challenges posed by these twenty-first century realities for pedagogy and for research on language in contemporary social life. In discussing the challenges for the ‘design’ of pedagogy, I will consider language pedagogy and language across the curriculum. I will argue that both research and pedagogy needs to be grounded in an ethnographic understanding of the lived experiences of multilingual students with language and literacy and in an appreciation of the multilingual resources that they bring to different teaching/learning encounters at school.


Reference

Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.