CALL FOR PAPERS
University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL/SSEES)
invites proposals for paper and poster presentations on
The Politics of Teaching and Learning Languages:
a Conference on the Occasion of the Centenary of SSEES’s Establishment
17-18 September 2015
The significance of the title ‘The Politics of Teaching and Learning Languages’ is twofold: first, it
alludes to politics and foreign languages in education, and second, to the politics of teaching and
learning languages. The first of these approaches focuses on political and historical developments
that influence tendencies, and shape policy, in the area of foreign language learning and
education. The second approach centres on the ideologically-governed attitudes that underlie
language professionals’, teachers’, and textbook writers’ decisions when choosing a particular
variety of a language, a particular methodological approach and resources in their teaching,
writing, and syllabus-design practice.
The Conference intends to address the historical perspectives and current key narratives
surrounding the teaching of languages, linguistics, and area studies. Its aim is to explore language
education in the context of an ever changing and dynamic societal, political, and cultural
landscape globally, and in the UK-context.
Papers will be 20 minutes in length with 10 minutes for questions. Posters will be showcased
during the second day of the conference and presented (max. 5 minutes) in one of UCL’s public
areas.
The conference programme includes key-note addresses by Nicholas Ostler, Foundation for
Endangered Languages; Anne Pauwels, School of Oriental and African Studies; Nigel Vincent,
FBA, University of Manchester.
Please send your abstract (max. 300 words for both papers and posters; in a Word file) and your
short professional biography (max. 150 words; in a separate Word file) to langpolconf@ucl.ac.uk.
Deadline for submission: 20 January 2015.
An email confirming your acceptance will be sent by 30 March 2015. The full programme of the
conference will be announced by 30 April 2015 on the SSEES website.
Organising committee:
Jelena Čalić, UCL/SSEES
Eszter Tarsoly, UCL/SSEES
Urszula Chowaniec, UCL/SSEES
Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi, UCL/SSEES, Uppsala University
We are planning to publish selected papers in a Conference Proceedings volume.
Rationale and Suggested Themes:
The first theme of the Conference – politics and language teaching – addresses the political and
institutional factors that underpin the promotion, in education and beyond, of a certain language,
languages, or a particular language variety in a community at various points in time. Papers are
invited to explore these questions in three different contexts: at global (e.g. linguae francae and
world languages), national (e.g. national curricula, planning, and foreign language education
strategies), and local institutional (e.g. schools, universities) levels. The Conference will also
explore how the increased interest in a particular language or language variety affects the teaching
and learning of other languages, primarily, but not exclusively, through the history of teaching
and learning less-widely used languages (e.g. the languages of Central and Eastern Europe,
Scandinavia, minority languages of Russia and South-East Asia, etc.) in the UK context.
The second theme of the Conference – the politics of teaching and learning languages – addresses
the above themes in the context of language professionals’ primary concerns, which centre on
language, method, and teaching technique. We welcome proposals with an approach that taps
into a further dimension of the political: at the level of classroom practices and of the individual.
In this regard, the Conference seeks to explore the role of teachers and students as cultural
mediators between the source and the target language-and-culture. It will investigate the
dilemmas that the individual (teacher, learner, textbook writer, etc.) faces as a result of the
mismatches between political agendas and ideological commitments in the communities
associated with the source and the target languages-and-culture.
Possible questions include, but are not limited to, the following:
THEME 1. Global, National, Institutional Politics and Language Teaching
 Can the history of foreign language teaching be seen as a political debate?
 In what ways is gender discourse relevant to foreign language teaching?
 How does migration (e.g. the recent migration from Central and Eastern Europe to the UK) affect
languages, speakers, and the contact between them? What are the possible responses in language
education to migration in both the source and the target communities?
 Enhancing interest in particular languages as a quick response to crises (e.g. languages of Central and
Eastern Europe in the UK during the cold war, Russian in Eastern Europe, Serbian and Croatian in the
1990s, Arabic in the 2000s, and now perhaps Ukrainian in the UK-context) – does it work?
 If ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’ [a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot; M.
Weinreich] how, and to what extent, is language professionals’ work determined by linguistic constraints
and choices (e.g. the grammatical and lexical apparatus of a language, the existence of a reified ‘standard’
variety, etc.), on the one hand, and, on the other, by national and political agendas?
 How and to what extent is the planned or unplanned spreading of languages – and educational
organisations’ and educators’ interest in them – influenced by language-internal (e.g. typological features
and relatedness to other languages) and language-external (e.g. military, political, administrative, powerrelated, etc.) factors historically and at present?
THEME 2. The Politics of Teaching and Learning Languages
 How do linguistic purism and standardisation shape classroom practices in the foreign language
classroom? Is language teaching and textbook writing an inherently purist and normative undertaking?
 What to do with contact varieties of languages which came about as a result of migration (e.g. Spanglish,
Ponglish, franglais, Hunglish, Somali in Finland, etc.) in language education?
 Can the example of teaching and learning diaspora languages (e.g. Yiddish, Romani), minority languages
(e.g. Sami in Finland, Sweden, and Norway, Udmurt in the Russian Federation, Hungarian in Romania,
German in Belgium), pluricentric languages (e.g. German, Spanish, South-Slavic languages) influence the
teaching of languages with strong normative tendencies?
 How is the notion of foreign language defined in the context of the national states of Eastern Europe?
 What are the main ideologies that underpin policy-making concerning minority languages?
 Language revitalisation and language activism through language education: a pitfall or a possibility?
 Language variety and the individual: how are speakers and learners affected by a lack of overlap between
the linguistic and civic communities that they belong to (e.g. speakers of Romanian in Moldova, of Finnish
in Sweden, of Hungarian in Slovakia, of Polish in the UK)? In what way does foreign language learning
and competence influence the learners’ sense of belonging to one or a number of communities?
 Foreign language textbooks as representations of communities: what do textbooks reveal about the way in
which national or other native-speaking communities would like others to see them? In this respect, what
are the differences between ‘internal’ textbooks, written by native-speaking authors and published in the
country of origin of the language, and ‘external’ ones, published abroad, often by non-native authors (e.g.
Routldge’s Colloquial series)?
 Claims of ownership over language: native-speaking v. non-native teachers of language.