The Program of Multilingual Education and The Division of Foreign Languages
We are honored to announce the lecture of
Prof. Suresh Canagarajah
Pennsylvania State University
Prolific researcher, previous president of TESOL International Association &
Editor of TESOL Quarterly
Thursday, February 18, 2016, 15-17; Webb Hall 001
Theorizing a Language Competence for Negotiating Superdiversity
Mary Louise Pratt (1987) initiated an important line of inquiry when she called
for a shift from âa linguistics of communityâ to a âlinguistics of
contact.â We are finding this reorientation gaining urgency as we grapple
with communication in conditions of late modern globalization, featuring
migration, diaspora relationships, superdiverse urban settlements, digital
media scapes, and transnational economic and production relationships. We
realize now that Prattâs (1991) notion of the âcontact zoneâ is not a
secondary space between the more primary âcommunity.â All communities are
contact zones that involve interactions between diverse languages and cultures.
From this perspective, attempts to territorialize and circumscribe communities
and languages in dominant theories of language competence appear misleading. As
we break away from the notion of bounded communities and attend to
communication in the liminal spaces of contact, we face new questions
confronting language competence.
In this talk, I consider how we can retheorize competence for negotiating
superdiversity. I base my theorization on the narratives of 65 migrant
professionals in English-dominant countries (i.e., USA, UK, Australia, and
South Africa) interviewed in ongoing migration research. Our subjects treat
competence in terms of practices to be adopted to negotiate difference, and
donât treat grammar as primary. They treat successful communication as
deriving from the ability to collaborate with interlocutors by drawing from
diverse ecological resources in layered sociotemporal contexts for the situated
co-construction of indexicality. They state that they have developed this
competence from their socialization in their native multilingual communities
and the ongoing development of suitable dispositions in global context zones. I
demonstrate how their orientation to competence differs from the traditional
cognitive-lingual paradigm and the emergent social approaches.
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