One year ago I lost my father. He passed away while visiting family and friends… returning home to… South Africa. At that time, I had not been back to Durban in 37 years. Continue reading
Re-union: Re-connect, Re-discover (by Sumanthra Govender)
Author: admin
Hey Good Lookin’!! (by Kathleen Green)
Recently, a friend of mine returned from a five-minute walk down the street and commented, casually, about having been catcalled several times on her way back to the café in which we were studying. She was clearly annoyed by it, said something about it being a sign of the arrival of Spring and that she’d have to start wearing sunglasses and earphones again when she was walking in public. Continue reading
“Fais le give-and-go!”: Reflections on translanguaging in Parc Jarry basketball (by Stephen Davis)
Weaving through a tapestry of pedestrians, pylons, Peugeots, and police officers, I find myself contemplating Montréal’s sisyphèsque construction schedule and wondering whether Camus was properly cited in the city planning documents. Rue Jarry is a zoo at the best of times, but now we’re down to one lane and I’m praying that my rusty bike chain and the crusty driver behind me can make it through the next few minutes without snapping altogether. We approach a red light, so I catch my breath while several young families hustle and bustle into the shops and restaurants that decorate the street. Now it’s green, so on y va, and I swerve into sun-soaked Parc Jarry, the site of some of the best basketball and translanguaging Montréal has to offer. Continue reading
Language confidence (by Melissa J. Enns)
BILD is very happy to welcome Melissa J. Enns as our latest guest blogger. Melissa is a graduate student in McGill’s Master of Arts in Second Language Education program. Prior to entering the program, she taught ESL at an academic prep school in Saskatchewan. Her thesis research will center on bridging the gap between research and practice. She authors a language education blog, Ramblings of a Linguaphile. With an undergraduate degree in linguistics and Spanish, she is fascinated by all aspects of language, language acquisition, and language teaching.
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In her discussion of translanguaging in Kolkata, Dr. Mela Sarkar beautifully said, “If one is prepared to be linguistically adventurous, I don’t see why there would be any limit to the number of places where one can feel local.”
Back to Bangla: Rediscovering translanguaging (by Dr. Mela Sarkar)
Bengali, properly called Bangla, is the language of Bangladesh and of the Indian state of West Bengal. It’s one of the languages I would have grown up speaking if my parents had settled in India in the late 1950s. They planned to. After I was born in Kolkata (Calcutta until 2001), my father looked hard for a faculty post in an Indian university, one that would have made it possible to raise a family of half-and-half children in India with his Ukrainian-Canadian wife (my Manitoba Ukrainian family appeared in this blog a while back).
