Our next London TESOL Research Forum event will be happening on Thursday the 20th of October from 6-7:30PM. We’ll probably head over to the IoE Bar afterwords for further discussion. The event is free to attend. The details of the event are below:

Language, education & linguistic citizenship: A conversation at LTRF

6-7:30PM 20/10/22. Room W3.05 – UCL IoE, 20 Bedford Way

According to our 4 National Science Academies, “almost everyone encounter[s] other cultures and communities on a daily basis in the UK, where hundreds of languages are spoken, [and recognition of these] untapped reservoirs of linguistic capacity [could make the UK] more prosperous, productive, influential, innovative, knowledgeable, culturally richer, more socially cohesive, and, quite literally, healthier” (British Academy 2019:2).As many academics know, there’s been very little interest in these resources in (successive) central governments. But are the categories and frameworks with which we routinely organise and think about language education themselves also an obstacle? Since 2019, in a collaboration between King’s College London and English for Action , we have been exploring these issues with teachers, bringing our efforts together under the banner of ‘linguistic citizenship’, a concept developed in post-apartheid South Africa by Christopher Stroud and colleagues (Stroud 2004) that treats language as a political and economic site of struggle, respects language difference, and deconstructs essentialist understandings of language and identity. In this seminar, we will provide a sketch of this work, and hope to open a conversation about its relevance to other areas of language education like EFL, both in the UK and elsewhere.

Please let us know if you have any questions. We hope to see you there,