Multilingual CALL: Multilingual Language Learning with Digital Media in Primary and Secondary Classrooms
Frankfurt, February 17-18, 2016

Learners of a second or foreign language are not homogeneous with regard to their linguistic backgrounds and their degree of fluency in different languages. Students often have skills in more than one language, including languages previously studied at school, as well as heritage and minority languages. These skills can range from basic conversational skills to fully developed cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP). Teachers are expected to diagnose the different needs of all pupils and cater for them in the mainstream classroom. CALL – computer assisted language learning – can potentially contribute to this.

Online interactions that bring together speakers of different languages, for example telecollaboration and virtual tandems, can add depth and complexity to a language learning setting. Who speaks which language to whom and when? Why? Is code-switching permissible? Many decisions regarding language choice are made by teachers and learners alike, but which “language choice designs”, which “language choice strategies” are most beneficial for learners?

Despite these relevant questions, very little research has been conducted on multilingual CALL. Usually, issues of multilingual language practices in CALL are mentioned only in passing, often based on the assumption that they constitute a problem that needs to be addressed. Sometimes, unspoken assumptions about a monolingual ideal in language instruction (cf Gogolin 1994, Butzkamm 1973) permeate CALL designs – but these assumptions are rarely empirically tested or theoretically challenged

This conference aims to increase the awareness of the existence and functions of multilingual materials and multilingual language use in CALL contexts. Furthermore, it will contribute to a critical assessment on widespread assumptions regarding monolingual/multilingual practices in CALL.

Further information and registration: Multilingual-CALL-2015

Please, find attached the call for contributions.

CfP_MultilingualCALL_EN CfP_MultilingualCALL_DE

There is an open call for papers out for contributions to a special-topic edition of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. We forward this to you in case you are interested.

CALL FOR PAPERS

International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism: Special Issue 2017

As guest editors of a Special Issue of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, we invite you to submit proposals on the following topic:

Instructional practices and teacher development in content and language integrated learning (CLIL)

The aim of this Journal is to be thoroughly international in nature. It disseminates high-quality research, theoretical advances, and international developments related to initiatives in bilingualism and bilingual education. Each year the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism devotes two of its issues to Special Issues. Previous Special Issues have tended to receive remarkable praise, particularly as they focus on one issue and often provide a major step forward in the study of a particular topic,

This Special Issue on CLIL seeks:

• To promote theoretical and applied research conducted in the context of CLIL and other content-based programs such as immersion.
• To disseminate information about best practices in content-based instruction.
• To provide a truly international exchange on how CLIL pedagogy is applied in a wide range of educational settings.

Authors are invited to submit proposals focusing on instructional practices and teacher development in CLIL at any educational level and in any educational setting. Both state-of-the-art articles and empirical studies are welcomed. Manuscripts submitted should be original, not under review by any other publication and not published elsewhere.

Important dates:

– Deadline for 200-250 word abstracts: 15th September 2015. Proposals should be submitted by email attachment to the co-editors at yolanda.ruizdezarobe@ehu.es and roy.lyster@mcgill.ca.

They should contain the author’s name, affiliation and e-mail address.

– Notification of acceptance/rejection: 1st November 2015. Please note that selection of the proposal does not always guarantee publication.

– Deadline for full papers (no longer than 7,000 words including notes and references): 15th February 2016.  Each article will receive two independent and anonymous reviews.

For further information on the journal’s submission guidelines please visit.

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rbeb.

With best wishes,

Yolanda Ruiz de Zarobe and Roy Lyster

Dear (spontaneous) LANGSCAPE members and friends,

on behalf of Itesh Sachdev, member of the LANGSCAPE Board of Directors (Research Projects), I would like to forward the call for participation in an one-day seminar on

“Re-visiting the pedagogy of the languages of minority communities“

organised by the Institute of World Languages at SOAS (University of London) and Mercator (Fryske Academy). The event takes place on Friday, 26th June, registration deadline is on 22nd June!

For detailed information on the programme and registration formalities, please refer to the announcement attached here.

Kindest regards,

Claudia Schmidt

Dear LANGSCAPE members and friends,

This is a call for collaboration and ideas coming from Stephan Breidbach, Katrin Schultze, and Bettina Kaiser (Humboldt University Berlin).

We will need you and your ideas for the upcoming conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Fremdspracenforschung (DGFF) on “Teaching Languages”.

We plan to initiate a discussion and research group to work on the topic of

“Teacher educators as professionals: Identities and professionalization in academic teacher training programmes”.

We will deal with the questions of

• what constitutes the professional identity of academic language teacher educators (i.e. those who teach future teachers of foreign languages) and
• how it affects the development of teacher identities in their students.

Our guiding questions presuppose that the professional identity of teacher educators has a major influence on how prospective teachers at the university level understand their future profession.

The group we hope to be able to initiate will work together for a research period of two years. It is our aim to present our findings at the next DGFF conference in 2017.

The purpose of this call is to collect ideas on this question in order to be able to organise an interesting, multi-layered discussion with some potential for further research. And – of course – we hope for your participation in the event itself.

All those interested, please send a mini-abstract (approx. 250 words) to kaiserbx@cms.hu-berlin.de (Bettina Kaiser) before 18 May 2015 briefly outlining your particular research interest in the question of professionalization of foreign language teacher educators.

Best regards from Berlin

Katrin, Bettina & Stephan

Dear LANGSCAPE members,

we hope you’re all fine and we send you our best wishes for the New Year.

In the last LANGSCAPE meeting in Brussels it was decided to pursue the project of a printed book series. Moreover, it was considered important to have 3 titles ready to be able to contact a publisher who might be interested. The BoD suggested that the first volume for the series could be based on selected papers from the Brussels Conference “SOCIOCULTURAL COMPETENCE & LANGUAGE LEARNING IN MULTILINGUAL SETTINGS” (2014). Katja, could you please give us further information about that? We also know that Jean-Paul and Marie-Françoise Narcy-Combes are offering to publish a monography in this series about their current research.

As we would like to proceed with this project, we’re contacting you today in order to find out whether you’re also planning to publish a volume in this series. If so, could you please contact us with details about a potential publication project?

Thanks for your help and all the best,
Christiane Fäcke (christiane.faecke@phil.uni-augsburg.de)
Marie-Françoise Narcy-Combes (marie-francoise.narcy-combes@univ-nantes.fr)