Authors

Jelena Calic¹; Eszter Tarsoly¹; Riitta Valijarvi¹;  ¹ UCL (SSEES), UK

Discussion

This paper addresses the ways unorthodox approaches to language studies in the context of societies in Central and South-Eastern Europe, and in the Nordic region have been challenging educational norms adopted on traditional language-and-culture degrees. Despite an increasing research focus on multilingualism, language endangerment, and social and cultural minoritisation, these advances have made little impact on foreign-language education, which is still largely based on the centrality of named languages and their official or standardised varieties. Critical trends in language education which do engage with these issues, however, tend to still focus on the teaching and learning of so-called "major languages", which have a large and/or economically powerful speaker population.

We address the idea of disruption in the above context, through three discretely selected case studies. The first looks at methodologies of ethnographic multilingual learning and the way it can be implemented in the contexts of summer schools, general academic modules, and language courses, which promote a multilingual view of language instead of the singularity of established standards. The second addresses decolonial and de-centering approaches that shift the focus from languages as flags for nation states to ways of speaking in present-day and historic contact zones, highlighting the impact of socio-economic power imbalances. The third one is reflective of the changing attitude and experience of young people and brings examples from queering dominant pedagogical practices and textbook content in language education.

In our paper we argue that the disjointed institutional practices characterising language studies and research on language in society put both areas of enquiry in a disadvantageous position. The less-widely spoken language contexts in which we examine the issues outlined above are uniquely well positioned to illustrate the problems arising from exclusion and minoritisation because they draw attention to these processes themselves. In our conclusions we will assess our findings against the goals of the Platform for Linguistic and Epistemic Justice (PLEJ), SSEES’s new research centre.