Liberating Language Education

This book explores how language education practices are shaped by local, institutional, and social forces, highlighting the importance of a translingual and transcultural approach. It presents empirical studies from diverse contexts, illustrating the potential of a translingual and transcultural orientation to reimagine language education in diverse settings.

Format: Hardback
Length: 360 pages
Publication date: 04 February 2022
Publisher: Multilingual Matters

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.

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.

Weight: 682g
Dimension: 234 x 156 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781788927949