Invisible Children's Bilingualism in Greece Le bilinguisme invisible des enfants en Grèce

Le bilinguisme invisible des enfants en Grèce

Conférence en anglais avec Roula Tsokalidou de l' Université Aristote de Thessalonique, Grèce

Mardi 18 décembre à 17h

• Abstract :

Mass immigration in Greece, which started in the early 1990s, has dramatically changed the student population of mainstream schools, making it a necessity for the official educational system to address issues of multicultural and intercultural education. To this day, children from immigrant backgrounds within the Greek educational system are usually referred to as ‘alloglossa’, that is children who speak ‘other’ languages.  However, research has shown that the majority of non-Greek background students use both their home language and Greek, the latter being their dominant language.  Therefore the actual bilingualism of immigrant background children in Greek schools remains highly “invisible”, not only because of the exclusion of immigrant languages from the school curriculum and the use of inappropriate terms for the children (i.e ‘alloglossa’) and but also due to the dominant school language practices and attitudes, which are largely driven by a pervasive monolingual ideology. On the other hand, we propose that as educators and researchers, a closer look at the linguistic and sociolinguistic behaviour of immigrant background children is necessary. Through extracts from bilingual children’s interviews we will highlight the way children themselves talk about and describe their bilingual realities. We strongly believe that hearing children’s voices carefully, giving thus children the opportunity to define their realities themselves, will only be a great asset for the educational system as a whole.

• Biography :

Roula Tsokalidou is a graduate of the Department of English Language and Literature of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and holds a PhD in Linguistics from Monash University, Australia.  She specialized in language contact phenomena and code-switching among second generation Greek-Australians.  She has taught at Khon Kean University (Thailand), Monash and Deakin Universities (Australia) and has been a research associate of the Centre of Greek Language in Thessaloniki, Greece.  From 2000 to 2006 she taught at the University of Thessaly, Greece and since 2006 she has been teaching (as an assistant and since 2012 as an associate professor) in the School of Early Childhood Education at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.  Since 2009 she has been founder and editor in chief of the group and periodical ‘Polydromo’ which researches and carries out activities on bilingualism and multiculturalism in education and society.  Her publications and research interests lie in bilingualism, language contact, code-switching, gender and educational practices for a culturally sensitive education.