You're kindly invited to our next virtual Plurilingual Lab Speaker Series event with Dr. Lourdes Ortega of Georgetown University:
What’s the “Multi/Plural Turn” in SLA Got to Do with Social Justice?
It is not every day that I get invited to speak to an audience that leads the field of applied linguistics in the area of research into plurilingualism. In this talk, therefore, I will present for about 35 minutes (if I try hard I will be able to be succinct!) and then I am interested in having reactions and an open dialogue with the Pluriligual Lab community. I will present on my own motivations that led me, starting in 2010, to support the multilingual / plurilingual turn from an SLA standpoint. My main view will be that at the heart of injustice is the fact that being competent with language means being able to claim the right to speak (as Norton Peirce 1995 called it) and to exercise the power to impose meanings (as Bourdieu 1972 called it), and yet English-knowing bi/multilinguals are all too often construed as deficient and their multilingual prowess is erased instead of supported. I see translanguaging/translingualism as a way to open up our pedagogies to the psycholinguistic realities of multilinguals (GarcĂa & Li Wei, 2014). But we also must cultivate an awareness of both world Englishes and unequal Englishes (Tupas, 2015) —or unequal world Spanishes, world Arabics, world Chineses... In the end, language educators may be nimble enough to engage in these professional transformations. But how do we create disciplinary support in SLA to commit to an understanding of learning “success” and “linguistic competence” that prioritizes the capacity to use language for social transformation and self-empowerment? How do we make this non-normative understanding “contagious” among language educators and SLA fellow researchers? Can SLA researchers reinvent themselves and generate empirical research about language learning that contributes to social justice? I hope my self-reflections (I hope) will be a springboard for the dialogue with the Plurilingual Lab community. Together I hope we explore the opportunities and limits of various versions of the multi/plural turn to commit to contribute to social justice for multilinguals.
Lourdes Ortega is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is best known for an award-winning meta-analysis of language instruction published in 2000, a best-seller graduate-level textbook Understanding Second Language Acquisition (Routledge 2009, translated to Mandarin in 2016), and since 2010 for championing a bilingual and social justice turn in her field of second language acquisition. She is originally from Southern Spain and she negotiates and embraces Spanish, English, and Greek in her life.
When: October 28, 2021 (Thursday)
Time: 12pm-1:30pm (EDT, Montreal)
Mode of delivery: synchronous via Zoom
Due to unforeseen events, this talk had to be cancelled.
This is a public event and all are welcome. This Speaker Series is co-organized by the BILD Research Group and McGill's Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE) Research Talks. A recording will be made available on our .
