Course outline
Jim Cummins: Multilingualism in Education: Research, Theory and Policies
The course will examine a broad range of issues relating to bi/multilingual development among school-aged students, focusing on achievement in the school language(s), maintenance of home languages in cases where there is a home-school language switch, and instructional policies and practices that promote awareness of language, strong literacy development, and healthy personal and social identities. The specific topics that will be addressed are outlined below.
Session 1. Basic Principles and Controversial Constructs
This session will review research on (a) the nature of language proficiency, in particular distinctions between social and academic language, (b) the cognitive consequences of bilingualism, (c) outcomes of bilingual education programs for both majority-language and minority-language students, (d) cross-linguistic transfer, and (e) translanguaging. The focus of the analysis will be on how these issues and constructs influence the academic achievement of emergent bilingual students.
Session 2. The Achievement of Immigrant-Background Students: PISA and Beyond
This session will examine how first- and second-generation immigrant-background students perform academically in different countries as revealed by the OECD’s PISA studies. In particular, we will critically examine the claim by some PISA authors that the low levels of achievement experienced by immigrant-background students are cause by speaking a minority language in the home.
Session 3. Societal Power Relations and Academic Achievement in Multilingual Contexts
The ways in which societal power relations influence students’ academic achievement will be examined using examples from both European and North American contexts. In particular, the role of teacher-student identity negotiation in determining patterns of student engagement/disengagement will be analyzed as a function of societal power relations.
Session 4. “Identity Texts” as a Pedagogical Tool in Multilingual Educational Contexts
This session will focus on how teachers can create contexts of “empowerment” for multilingual and marginalized group students through instructional strategies that affirm student identities and challenge societal patterns of coercive relations of power. The theoretical basis of the construct of “identity texts” will be outlined together with concrete examples from classroom practice.
Session 5. Multilingualism and Educational Achievement: A Synthesis of Evidence-Based Strategies for School Improvement
This session will draw together the themes discussed in previous sessions by presenting a framework that identifies causes of underachievement among marginalized group students and articulates evidence-based instructional strategies that respond to these causal factors. The framework highlights the importance of instructional scaffolding, reinforcement of language awareness across the curriculum, active literacy engagement, and connecting instruction to students’ lives in ways that affirm student identities.
Lynda Yates: Adult L2 learning and use in the workplace
The central aim of this course is to explore the communicative challenges for transnationals working in a later-learned language and how they can develop the sophisticated skills they often need to flourish there.
It will begin with a brief overview of what constitutes workplace language, language use in different kinds of workplaces and the various research approaches that have been used to investigate it. Attention will then turn to the pressures and challenges facing transnationals, immigrants and other L2/L3 language users as they seek and take up employment in a later-learned language. Focussing in particular on the pragmatic aspects of interpersonal spoken competence and drawing on several recent empirical studies, the lectures will explore what they need to learn for the workplace and what they can learn in the workplace in relation to:
- The influence of sociopragmatic values on the pragmalinguistic realisation of different functions at work;
- The role of social language at work and the challenges this presents;
- Approaches to instruction in both courses preparing learners for and those supporting them in the workplace
- The autonomous language learning skills that adult learners need for on-the-job language learning in the wild