As promised, updates from Bangor. It was quite a day – I haven’t spent this much time in lectures in many, many years. All were interesting, but some were more challenging than others.

Thoughts of the day:

1. Issues in Bilingualism – Statistic: 56% of EU citizens speak a second language. 38% master two foreign languages. Question: What would these stats look like in the English-speaking world?

2. Bilingual/multilingual education – Interesting talk about code-switching in the classroom – is it lazy, or is it useful? Question: If you code-switch, why do you think you do it (and I won’t believe you if you tell me you don’t…)?

3. Dynamic Bilingualism in the 21st Century. – Wow. I know a lot about bilingualism, and I hadn’t really heard very much new so far today. But this class will challenge me – Garcia takes all the old notions about L1, L2, code-switching etc. and drops them in a bucket called translanguaging… I’d heard of it before, and was skeptical (I don’t do change easily) but I’m already getting the point and am interested to learn/hear more.

4. Code-switching – Who knew there was a Welsh-Spanish bilingual community in Patagonia? Not me!

And now I’m off for some article reading, to prepare for the onslaught tomorrow…