Talks at the conferences NOFA and Linguapeda
In May 2023, Line Krogager Andersen participated in two different conferences: NOFA in Vaasa and Linguapeda i Jyväskylä. She gave the two following talks there:
Awareness of linguistic diversity, linguaculture and the role of language in society (NOFA 2023)
In a world of increasing globalisation, multiculturalism and multilingualism, essential components of education for global citizenship must include intercultural competence and language awareness (Boye & Byram, 2018; James & Garrett, 1992), especially in the form of awareness of and reflection upon linguistic diversity, linguaculture (Risager, 2006) and the role of language in society. This presentation explores these questions through qualitative analyses of classroom and interview data collected in a plurilingual setting in a Danish 9th grade classroom in the context of the research project Plurilingual Education (funded by the Danish Research Council grant no. 0132-00208B; PI: Petra Daryai-Hansen), which has an overall focus on manifestations of metalinguistic, practical and critical language awareness across educational levels (Daryai-Hansen, in progress). As one subproject of this larger research project, plurilingual cross-disciplinary project weeks for 9th grade were developed in collaboration with subject teachers of Danish, English, German and French. These project weeks were documented through field notes, audio recordings, student interviews and collection of student work, contributing to an extensive set of qualitative data (Krogager Andersen & Daugaard, submitted). In this study, I focus specifically on data from teaching activities relating to linguistic diversity, linguaculture and the role of language in society, analyzing how students’ engagement with these topics influences the ways in which language awareness is manifested. Departing from the notions of metalinguistic, practical and critical language awareness as defined in Daryia-Hansen et al. (in progress), I will present examples of students’ language-aware forms of engagement with the topics in question and discuss how such forms of engagement may contribute to intercultural competence, the formation of a sense of global citizenship and multilingual identity. Finally, I will point out perspectives for the integration of intercultural competence and language awareness aspects in the promotion of global citizenship across school subjects.
Performing critical resistance through language play (Linguapeda)
This presentation is based on the research project Plurilingual Education (funded by the Danish Research Council grant no. 0132-00208B), which investigated student language awareness in the context of plurilingual teaching at different educational levels. In the presentation, I focus on the playful multilingual practices of three specific students in plurilingual settings, considering the performative functionality of these practices as expressed by the ways in which they and their fellow students orient to them in interaction. How do these playful episodes involving French, German, English, Vietnamese and Arabic count as linguistic performances (Rampton, 1999) to the students involved? Why do some of them have such a rebellious feel to them? Is there a relationship between playful performance and critical language awareness to be found in these examples? The study is based on empirical classroom data from grade 9 and 11 in the form of audio recordings and transcripts which have been analysed deductively on the basis of a theory-based operationalisation of language awareness drawing primarily on van Lier (1998, 2004), giving rise to an inductive category formation of multilingual language play. A closer look at the examples of language play in these secondary classrooms suggests that language play may also contribute to the performance of critical resistance (Nuñez, 2022) to dominant discourses or positionings in the language classroom. On the basis of this analysis, I discuss what these examples may tell us about the relationship between practical and critical dimensions of language awareness and what this implies for future theory building.