Liberating Language Education: (101 New Perspectives on Language and Education)

This book responds to a growing body of work in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics that places an emphasis on situated descriptions of language education practices and illuminates how these descriptions are enmeshed with local, institutional and wider social forces. It engages with new ways of understanding language that expand its meaning by including other semiotic resources and meaning-making practices and bring to the fore its messiness and unpredictability. The chapters illustrate how a translingual and transcultural orientation to language and language pedagogy can provide a point of entry to reimagining what language education might look like under conditions of heightened linguistic and cultural diversity and increased linguistic and social inequalities. The book unites an international group of contributors, presenting state-of-the-art empirical studies drawing on a wide range of local contexts and spaces, from linguistically and culturally heterogeneous mainstream and HE classrooms to complementary (community) school and informal language learning contexts.

Table of Contents:
Contributors Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy: Introduction: Why Liberating Language Education?  Part 1: Policies, Discourses and Ideologies Chapter 1.Thomas Quehl: 'I don’t think we encourage the use of their home language…': Exploring ‘Multilingualism Light’ in a London Primary School  Chapter 2. Ambarin Mooznah Auleear Owodally: Recognising the Creole Community: Discursive Constructions of Enslavement and the Enslaved in Kreol Textbooks in Mauritius  Chapter 3. Cátia Verguete: Appropriating Portuguese Language Policies in England Chapter 4. Vally Lytra: Making Sense of the Internal Diversities of Greek Schools Abroad: Exploring the Purposeful Use of Translation as Communicative Resource for Language Learning and Identity Construction Ana Souza: Commentary for Part 1 Part 2: Language-Living: Materialities, Affectivities and Becomings Chapter 5. Nuria Polo-Pérez and Prue Holmes: Languaging in Language Cafés: Emotion Work, Creating Alternative Worlds and Metalanguaging Chapter 6. Eszter Tarsoly and Jelena Ćalić: Language Studies as Transcultural Becoming and Participation: Undoing Language Boundaries across the Danube Region Chapter 7. Cristina Ros i Solé: The Textures of Language: An Autoethnography of a Gloves Collection Simon Coffey: Commentary for Part 2 Part 3: Transcultural Journeying and Aesthetics  Chapter 8. Jim Anderson: Visual Art in Arabic Foreign and Heritage Language-and-Culture Learning: Expanding the Scope for Meaning-Making Chapter 9. Maria Charalambous: Creating Pedagogical Spaces for Translingual and Transcultural Meaning-Making and Student Agency in a London Greek Complementary School    Chapter 10. Koula Charitonos: Opening Spaces of Learning: A Sociomaterial Investigation of Object-Based Approaches with Migrant Youth in and beyond the Heritage Language Classroom Chapter 11. Dobrochna Futro: Translanguaging Art: Exploring the Transformative Potential of Contemporary Art for Language Teaching in the Multilingual Context. Alison Phipps: Commentary for Part 3 Part 4: Voices, Identities and Citizenship Chapter 12. Yu-chiao Chung and Vicky Macleroy: How Weird is Weird? Young People, Activist Citizenship and Multivoiced Digital Stories Chapter 13. Gabriele Budach, Gohar Sharoyan and Daniela Loghin: ‘Animating Objects’: Co-Creation in Digital Story Making between Planning and Play  Chapter 14. Jessica Bradley, Zhu Hua and Louise Atkinson: Visual Representations of Multilingualism: Exploring Aesthetic Approaches to Communication in a Fine Art Context Kate Pahl: Commentary for Part 4 Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy: Conclusion: Language Education Collages Index

About the Author :
Vally Lytra is Reader in Languages in Education and Head of the MPhil/PhD Programme in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her research interests include multilingualism, community and minority languages education and inclusive language pedagogies. Cristina Ros i Solé is Lecturer in Language, Culture and Learning at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her current research focus is situated at the interface between language, identity and material culture where she investigates the relationship between multilingual speakers’ ordinary collections and their identities. Jim Anderson is Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. His work focuses on theories and methods of second language learning and bilingualism, multilingualism and new literacies, and language policy. Vicky Macleroy is Reader in Education and Head of the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her research interests focus on language development and multilingualism, multiliteracies and digital storytelling, and transformative pedagogy.

Review :
The editors and contributors to this book liberate language and language education by placing them in a 'caravan' of unpredictable actions that are locally situated. This book masterfully centers the aesthetic ways in which people and learners liberate language by bringing art, digital storytelling, drama improvisation, poetry, song, and music into the center of meaning-making. This is a truly path-breaking volume. It provides a highly original, transdisciplinary vision of how language and language education can be reimagined in research and practice. Drawing on recent advances in theory-building relating to language in contemporary social life, the contributors present rich and engaging accounts of fluid, situated language learning practices and demonstrate, in clear and compelling ways, how language education can be liberated locally from long-dominant ideologies about fixity in language and prescriptive models of pedagogy. The stimulating title of this remarkable book reflects the original theoretical questionings of the conceptualisation of language education across multiple new facets of language learning experiences. Readers will discover an exiting alternative vision of language education through a wide range of new research dimensions explored to transform language learning and teaching. This volume is a seminal text that will stimulate researchers, teachers and learners alike to understand that our responsibilities regarding language education have changed and that we must all become engaged policy activists. At the core of “Liberating Language Education” is an invitation to readers to problematize how they perceive language education. The diverse contributions that make up this volume engage with this question from multiple perspectives, and effectively challenge views of communication that are narrowly linguistic and views of learning that are narrowly formal. The effectiveness of the volume lies in the suggestive power of the various contributions, and in the opportunities these diverse chapters create for imagining alternative to normative practice in language education. This book certainly reaches its ‘liberating’ goals by presenting multiple ways of challenging static notions and thoroughly illustrates Tudor’s statement that “…language teaching is far more complex than producing cars”.