As we approach our 30th Conference, NALDIC Blog editors Carmen Silvestri and Christina Richardson bring you highlights from past conferences
NALDIC Vice-Chair, Christina Richardson, remembers first hearing about translanguaging at the NALDIC conference in 2009 “for me, a great moment from one of the NALDIC conferences was hearing Ofelia Garcia explaining models of bilingualism using the analogy of the bicycles/all-terrain vehicles and then introducing the topic of translanguaging. That was the first time I had really encountered translanguaging and led me to start rethinking some of my ideas about language and pedagogy – and I found the analogies very helpful for explaining bilingualism to my students.”
From García et al. (2011). Pedagogies and Practices in Multilingual Classrooms: Singularities in Pluralities. The Modern Language Journal, 95(3), 385–400.
Fazana Farook, NALDIC’s Conference Editor, tells us that her highlight was from the Conference in 2021 when Dr Ian Cushing joined the conference to discuss his research on the policing of spoken language in classrooms. She recalls that “it highlighted some of the reductive perspectives around spoken language that have become entrenched within the English education system across a range of age phases and subjects. And this links really well to our upcoming conference that aims to continue supporting all teachers in understanding that they are also teachers of language!”
Learn more about Ian Cushing at the 29th NALDIC Conference in the EAL Journal (Issue 17, pp. 32-33)
Carmen Silvestri, NALDIC member and blog editor, remembers when Bonny Norton joined the conference during the lockdown and reflects on the power of technology to connect the NALDIC community. It was sunrise time in Canada and sunset in the UK when Bonny Norton shared with the EAL community her Global Storybooks digital project.
The 30th Anniversary Conference
On Saturday 19th November we are celebrating three decades of working collaboratively with practitioners, academics and policy makers to support multilingualism and raise the achievement of EAL learners. At this 30th-anniversary conference, we will be exploring how language is at the centre of every classroom interaction, and that supporting multilingualism is not just for EAL specialists: every teacher is a language teacher.
In the keynote panel session, Constant Leung, Frank Monaghan and Manny Vasquez, chaired by Yvonne Foley, will reflect upon how NALDIC’s work in EAL has evolved over the last 30 years as well as look to the future of the EAL field and what challenges the next three decades might bring.
The keynote speakers for this year are Carolyn McKinney, Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Cape Town, and Khawla Badwan, Senior Lecturer in TESOL and Applied Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. Carolyn will explore what it means to be a teacher of language in a context of deep inequality in education by exploring some of the dominant language ideologies and myths that underpin what it means to teach and learn English as an additional language as well as what constitutes ‘good’ language teaching. Khawla will respond to the conference theme ‘every teacher is a language teacher’ while extending this statement by adding ‘and every language teacher is more than just a language teacher’.
Click here to watch the full interview with Cate Hamilton (conference organiser)