You're kindly invited to our next virtual Plurilingual Lab Speaker Series event with Dr. Ajit Mohanty of Jawaharlal Nehru University:
Growing Up with Languages: Implications for Multilingual Education
Growing up in societies where multilingualism is the norm involves moving between languages naturally and spontaneously across contexts of use. Languages remain distinct entities with fluid boundaries and used as composite sets of tools complementing each other for effective communication.
With exposure to varieties of languages widening progressively, children acquire varying levels of skills in languages ranging from age-appropriate proficiency in mother tongue (MT) to functional proficiency in other languages. Through the processes of multilingual socialisation, children learn to communicate socially appropriately regardless their competence in the languages. Our studies show that, in multilingual socialisation, Indian children go through three broad developmental periods of language differentiation, social awareness of languages, and competent multilingual functioning.
Multilingual socialisation and development of cross-linguistic and metalinguistic skills facilitate positive transfer across languages much earlier than assumed in bilingual education (BE) and call for a holistic view of language proficiency as a total linguistic repertoire (Mohanty, 2019; Mohanty & Skutnabb-Kangas, In Press). Multilingual Education (MLE) must therefore go beyond the assumptions of discrete language-specific proficiencies in BE. Further, prevalence of classroom linguistic heterogeneity limits uncritical extension of single-MT model of BE to MLE. Some pedagogic strategies for effective MLE in multiple-language classrooms will be discussed.
Dr. Ajit Mohanty: A former Professor and ICSSR National Fellow, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Ajit Mohanty was a Killam Scholar, University of Alberta and Fulbright Professor at Columbia University. His publications include The Multilingual Reality: Living with Languages (2019, Multilingual Matters). He is a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science, USA and a Fellow and Past-President of the National Academy of Psychology, India. Mohanty developed Multilingual Education Policy for Nepal and Odisha (India).
When: March 25, 2021
Time: 11:00am-12:30pm (EST, Montreal)
Mode of delivery: synchronous via Zoom
All attendees must register by March 24, 2021. Register here
This is a public event and all are welcome. This Speaker Series is co-organized by the BILD Research Group and McGill's Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE) Research Talks. A recording will be made available on our YouTube channel.
