Event: Language in Context Seminar
Organisers: Language in Context
Contact: linc@ed.ac.uk
Date: Friday 5th February 2021
Time: 15.10-16:30
Venue: Zoom (please contact us for the joining information)
Speaker: Drs. Stuart Dunmore (University of Edinburgh), Tom F. Wright (University of Sussex) and Arlene Holmes-Henderson (University of Sussex, University of Oxford)
Speaker bio: Stuart Dunmore is a Research Fellow in Sociolinguistics at the University of Sussex and also teaches at the University of Edinburgh. Stuart’s research focuses on the sociolinguistics of minority language use, ideologies and cultural identities, with particular reference to Celtic language communities in the UK and North America. Stuart’s British Academy postdoctoral fellowship assessed the role of 'new' speakers in language learning initiatives and policy interventions in Scotland and Nova Scotia, and his first book Language Revitalisation in Gaelic Scotland was published in 2019. Stuart’s contribution to the Speaking Citizens project will build on this work to examine obstacles to the development of bilingual oracy within the Gaelic-medium sector, and in the Cornish context.
Tom Wright is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. He is a cultural historian of nineteenth century Britain and America. His research focuses on rhetoric and spoken communication and their role in politics, education and the history of ideas. He is the author of Lecturing the Atlantic (2017) and editor of Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes (2020) and The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe (2013) For the Speaking Citizens project he is finding out what we can learn from the role of ideas about speech in Victorian-era progressive education, labour movements, 'elocution' and women's suffrage.
Arlene Holmes-Henderson is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, and a Research Fellow in Classics at the University of Oxford. Educated at Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge, she is a language education specialist who conducts research, and provides training for schools and universities, in the UK and worldwide. Arlene is the author of Forward with Classics (2018), and many other articles that have sought to understand the value of Classics for critical literacy. For the Speaking Citizens project she is researching the history of 'oracy' in recent UK pedagogy, developing teaching resources, and leading the project's outreach activities across UK schools.
Title of talk: Speaking Citizens: Historical and sociolinguistic perspectives on oracy, multiculturalism and bilingual development in UK schools
Abstract: Based at the University of Sussex and funded by the AHRC, the Speaking Citizens project launched in early 2020 to provide new evidence for how citizenship education can be taught through a focus on speech. Oral skills are being increasingly sidelined in British state schools, with automation, digital technology and the Covid-19 pandemic all contributing to a decline in face-to-face communication. This also poses a crisis of citizenship, at a moment in which ordinary people's voices need to be heard more than ever before. We are a group of historians, linguists and social scientists working together to discover what a deeper knowledge of the past, present and future of speech education can bring to these problems.
The development of speaking proficiency or oracy in children often becomes a matter of heightened political and emotional significance in minority language settings. Formerly Gaelic-dominant communities in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland have continued to attenuate in recent decades, in spite of official policy to revitalise the language since the 1980s. Conversely, policy initiatives which aim to grow the language, such as Gaelic-medium education (GME) continue to expand in urban settings. Yet numerous obstacles impede the growth of immersion education provision in Scotland, including teacher recruitment and lack of continuity in availability at secondary school. As has additionally been recently emphasised by GME students and parents from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, people of colour in Gaelic communities in urban settings often face distressing challenges arising from systemic racism. This paper will explore the inter-relationship of oracy, citizenship and multiculturalism in UK education, based on ongoing fieldwork and qualitative interviews with former GME students, parents, and teachers.