I’ve recently been giving a lot of thought to ‘acquisition’ versus ‘learning’ of a second (or subsequent) language. In brief, the difference is related to communicative competence versus “explicit rule-based grammar teaching” (Lightbown & Spada, 2013, p. 193). (For more on the distinction, click here). In my mind, acquisition is perhaps the longer-lasting state or […]
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 […]
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 […]
This term, I’m teaching a graduate course called Educational Sociolinguistics and we’re blogging (the course blog is here). In the course, we explore social, cultural, and political dimensions of (second) language education, and there’s a lot of resonance with what we write about here in the BILD community. The course blog is our public facing […]
Recently, I’ve been watching the Disney+ show Shōgun, a historical fiction drama about the political entanglements between a daimyo (feudal lord) outmaneuvering political rivals, and an English sea navigator shipwrecked in 1600s Japan. The show is visually stunning, emotionally captivating, and, of importance for this blog post, linguistically inspiring. That is, the show is almost […]
