Dear colleagues and friends,

Please, find attached the announcement of the LANGSCAPE Symposium on “Vitality of Urban Multilingualism & Language Pedagogy” taking place at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on the 8^th and 9^th of July 2016.

Itesh Sachdev and Katja Lochtman – in their capacity as leaders of the directorate Research Projects – are currently initiating the research project “Vitality of Urban Multilingualism”.

Together with the LANGSCAPE coordinators, Katja and Itesh wish to encourage all members of the network to join the project and circulate the announcement of the Berlin symposium within their research groups. They will be happy to respond to all questions regarding the project. Questions, however, should be sent through langscape@hu-berlin.de

Thank you for your support of and contribution to this Langscape project.

Kind regards from of the project coordination team:

Itesh & Katja,

Lutz, Stephan & Bettina

20160322_Langscape Symposium Berlin_Announcement

ANNOUNCEMENT

LANGSCAPE Symposium: Vitality of Urban Multilingualism & Language Pedagogy

8 July 2016: 10.00 am – 5.00 pm

9 July 2016: 10.00 am – 3.00 pm

Room 2249a

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Unter den Linden 6

10099 Berlin

Registration by 30^th May 2016

Multilingual living has received a considerable boost in recent times due to increased migration to urban contexts within and across national and regional boundaries. Super or hyperdiverse, globalised urban contexts, under a variety of different national and local policies and contexts, provides interesting challenges and opportunities for multilingual and intercultural communication, social cohesion and education. Focussing on language learning and language teacher education, this LANGSCAPE Symposium aims to explore how the Vitality of Urban Multilingualism (VUM) relates to intercultural competence, sensitivity and awareness and its role in language teaching and learning. VUM is about how societal multilingualism and individual plurilingualism thrive and flourish in urban conglomerations in terms of an array of demographic, status, and institutional support (& control) factors. We invite experts in the field of multi-/plurilingualism working on language learning and/or language teacher education to join us to discuss these issues in the symposium.

In addition to keynote speakers, the symposium in Berlin will provide a forum for presentation and discussion of preliminary data comprising interviews with language teachers across various LANGSCAPE cities/sites. We call for LANGSCAPE members to express their interest in the project on VUM & Language Pedagogy, and for a confirmation to conduct a small-scale interview study in their area/city by June 2016. This semi-structured interview study would consist of 6 main questions to be posed to language teachers. Ideally, we would like between 15-20 short interviews to be conducted by each partner. Of course, partners will determine the number of interviews according to time and capacity available. Please, send your expression of interest to conduct the interview study to langscape@hu-berlin.de by 27 March 2016. Interview questions and other materials will then be sent to you. Discussion at the symposium in Berlin of preliminary data and findings is envisaged.

For further information and registration for the symposium, please, go to: https://sites.google.com/site/langvumberlin2016/. Registration ends by 30th May 2016. A contribution for refreshments (€ 15) will be collected at the registration desk.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

• Lesley Harbon, University of Technology Sydney

“Superdiversity in language teacher education: compelling issues from the Australian context“

• Lid King, The Language Company, UK and Lorna Carson, Trinity College Dublin

“Diversity and the city – the LUCIDE experience”

• Cor van der Meer, Fryske Akademy, Mercator Institute

“Minority languages and urban multilingualism”

• Anne Pauwels, SOAS, University of London

Details will be confirmed.