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Bilingualism Matters is excited to be involved in this final event in a series of academic conferences and workshops funded by the ESRC.
The Importance of the Native Language – Practitioner Day is on November 10th 2017 from 9:00-5:00 pm at Birkbeck, University of London. This event is part of the 2017 ESRC Festival of Social Science and will be hosted by Birkbeck’s Centre for Multilingual and Multicultural Research and organised in collaboration between the Centre for Research in Language Development throughout the Lifespan at the University of Essex (LaDeLi), the Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication at Birkbeck College, Mothertongue and Bilingualism Matters. The event is part of an ESRC-funded seminar series on language attrition, awarded to Prof. Monika Schmid (University of Essex, grant ES/M001776/1)
Participation is free, but for catering and planning purposes, please register here.
Please email languageattrition@essex.ac.uk in case of any questions.
What are the challenges, benefits and opportunities in being able to use several languages?
The economic and personal benefits of acquiring a second language are well known but the fact that learning new languages has ramifications for the existing ones – first language attrition – is usually ignored. This Practitioner Day will bring together experts on the importance of the native language and will explore problems and opportunities which a multilingual society and a multilingual life entails, in both a professional and a personal context. It is intended to provide useful information for practitioners, teachers, parents, caregivers and policy makers for the importance of the native or home language in professional and personal settings.
During the day, we will address topics including:
- Multilingual children and language brokering
- Multilingual children in foster care
- Language, emotion and therapy
- Citizenship, language and identity
- Language attrition and problems of intergenerational transmission of the minority language
(a full programme is available here)
We look forward to seeing you in London!
