This book responds to a growing body of work in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics that places an emphasis on situated descriptions of language education practices and illuminates how these descriptions are enmeshed with local, institutional and wider social forces. It engages with new ways of understanding language that expand its meaning by including other semiotic resources and meaning-making practices and bring to the fore its messiness and unpredictability. The chapters illustrate how a translingual and transcultural orientation to language and language pedagogy can provide a point of entry to reimagining what language education might look like under conditions of heightened linguistic and cultural diversity and increased linguistic and social inequalities. The book unites an international group of contributors, presenting state-of-the-art empirical studies drawing on a wide range of local contexts and spaces, from linguistically and culturally heterogeneous mainstream and HE classrooms to complementary (community) school and informal language learning contexts.

Takes a radical approach to language education that is both situated and decentred

About the Author

Vally Lytra is Reader in Languages in Education and Head of the MPhil/PhD Programme in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her research interests include multilingualism, community and minority languages education and inclusive language pedagogies.

Cristina Ros i Sole is Lecturer in Language, Culture and Learning at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her current research focus is situated at the interface between language, identity and material culture where she investigates the relationship between multilingual speakers' ordinary collections and their identities.

Jim Anderson is Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. His work focuses on theories and methods of second language learning and bilingualism, multilingualism and new literacies, and language policy.

Vicky Macleroy is Reader in Education and Head of the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her research interests focus on language development and multilingualism, multiliteracies and digital storytelling, and transformative pedagogy.

Reviews
The editors and contributors to this book liberate language and language education by placing them in a 'caravan' of unpredictable actions that are locally situated. This book masterfully centers the aesthetic ways in which people and learners liberate language by bringing art, digital storytelling, drama improvisation, poetry, song, and music into the center of meaning-making. * Ofelia Garcia, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA *
This is a truly path-breaking volume. It provides a highly original, transdisciplinary vision of how language and language education can be reimagined in research and practice. Drawing on recent advances in theory-building relating to language in contemporary social life, the contributors present rich and engaging accounts of fluid, situated language learning practices and demonstrate, in clear and compelling ways, how language education can be liberated locally from long-dominant ideologies about fixity in language and prescriptive models of pedagogy. * Marilyn Martin-Jones, University of Birmingham, UK *

The stimulating title of this remarkable book reflects the original theoretical questionings of the conceptualisation of language education across multiple new facets of language learning experiences. Readers will discover an exiting alternative vision of language education through a wide range of new research dimensions explored to transform language learning and teaching. This volume is a seminal text that will stimulate researchers, teachers and learners alike to understand that our responsibilities regarding language education have changed and that we must all become engaged policy activists.

-- Christine Helot, University Strasbourg, France

At the core of "Liberating Language Education" is an invitation to readers to problematize how they perceive language education. The diverse contributions that make up this volume engage with this question from multiple perspectives, and effectively challenge views of communication that are narrowly linguistic and views of learning that are narrowly formal. The effectiveness of the volume lies in the suggestive power of the various contributions, and in the opportunities these diverse chapters create for imagining alternative to normative practice in language education.

-- Achilleas Kostoulas, University of Thessaly, Greece * LINGUIST List 33.2271 *

This book certainly reaches its 'liberating' goals by presenting multiple ways of challenging static notions and thoroughly illustrates Tudor's statement that "...language teaching is far more complex than producing cars".

-- Tazin Abdullah, Macquarie University, Australia * Multilingua, 2022 *



Book Information
ISBN 9781788927932
Author Vally Lytra
Format Paperback
Page Count 360
Imprint Multilingual Matters
Publisher Multilingual Matters
Weight(grams) 540g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm * 19mm