I’ve written many, many posts about bilingualism over the years, and some I think deserve to be resurrected from the archives of my blog… last weekend I gave a seminar at the DRONGO Festival of Multilingualism in Utrecht, talking about bilingual education. People generally agree that bilingual education is a good thing when two “important” languages are involved, but as soon as we start talking about bilingual education involving immigrant minority languages, many people become uncomfortable. Why is that? It’s because of language status issues, described in this post from 2012.

One of the unfortunate realities of bilingualism is that success or failure is often determined by language status. Yes, it’s true, languages have “status”. Some languages are high status, some are low status, some are in the middle. It’s not an unchangeable rating – it depends on where you are and what other languages are involved. Here in the…

by Eowyn Crisfield

To round off the 2015-2016 academic year, five LKALE members hosted a round table at the first Bangor International Conference on Bilingualism in Education. Convened by Urszula Clark, the round table entitled “Teaching with and for diversity: What teachers need to know about language and how researchers can (and should!) support them” addressed key aspects of LKALE’s mission to broaden teacher knowledge about linguistics and how it influences classroom learning.
The round table was opened by Eowyn Crisfield, with a paper that contextualised the common mantra “Every teacher is a language teacher”. Eowyn explored the types of training that “language teachers” receive, and compared to the skills needed by regular classroom teachers in order to function as language teachers alongside their roles as subject teachers. She discussed results of a teacher-training pilot project and findings that indicate that targeted INSET can make a difference in both attitudes…