Engaging students through narratives (by Emmanouela Tisizi)

This semester has been particularly hectic for me. I’ve been juggling two jobs while also being a full-time PhD student. I teach an undergraduate course on second language learning at McGill University, where I work with a group of 76 students, most of whom are perfectly bilingual (or multilingual!) and come from diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds. At the same time, every Saturday I teach Greek language and culture to a small group of 16-year-old students of Greek heritage. Most of these students go to French immersion schools on the weekdays, so their opportunities to use the Greek language are limited to their interactions with their family and these Saturday classes, which are organized by the Hellenic Community of Greater Montreal.

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Translanguaging pedagogy: ¿Qué significa? (by Dr. Alison Crump)

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 space for ongoing ‘sociolinguistic noticing.’ This is the practice of reflecting on connections between our own (and others’) language teaching and learning experiences and sociolinguistic issues (e.g., identity, social status, place, race, gender, language variation, language ideologies, multilingualism, language policy, etc.). Continue reading