Call for Papers: AILA 2020 symposium

CALL FOR PAPERS to be given in an AILA 2020 symposium

AILA 2020 conference is organized in Groningen (The Netherlands) in August 9–14, 2020. This time papers are given in a set of symposia approved by the organizers of the conference.

This is an invitation to submit papers to one specific symposium with the title “Visualising multilingualism as lived” and numbered as S191 on the AILA website.

Description of the symposium

The symposium focuses on multilingualism as lived or as subjectively experienced – and accessed by visual means. More specifically, it addresses aspects of becoming or being multilingual subjects in different contexts, be they learners, teachers or users of more than one language: what sense do they themselves make of aspects of their lives or worlds where they find themselves in, including identities, emotions and future aspirations. These issues are studied by collecting visual data, e.g., by asking participants in studies to produce drawings (or self-portraits) or to take photos. The pools of visual data of various kinds may be complemented by other types data and are analysed for their form and/or content.

The symposium is a response to the recently launched turn in Applied Language Studies (i.e., the multilingual turn) and to the criticism against “lingualism” in addressing multilingualism as lived – and  is different in its focus from an objective approach to multilingualism, e.g., figuring out the internal mechanisms in a multilingual’s mind or tracing the development in his/her language skills, or from describing linguistic landscapes or schoolscapes.

Papers are welcomed on three sub-themes (or in various combinations):

• Multilingualism (as lived) at home
• Multilingualism (as lived) in school
• Multilingualism (as lived) in teacher education

Featured speakers:

Featured speaker 1: Professor Brigitta Busch, University of Vienna, Austria, with a tentative paper title “Some considerations on theoretical and methodological issues when employing visual approaches in multilingualism research”

Featured speaker 2: Professor Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer, University of Hamburg, Germany, with a tentative paper title “’Draw your linguistic biography’: Visual linguistic biographies in foreign language teacher education”

The deadline for submissions is September 16, 2019, for details/instructions, see https://www.aila2020.nl/call-for-papers.

Best,

Paula Kalaja paula.kalaja@jyu.fi

and

Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer (organizers of the symposium)