Today is the last day of the conference and many of the participants are already rushing to the airport to fly back home. I decided to stay and leave on Saturday. I had the chance to listen to the last keynote speaker, Rita Franceschini, from the Free University of Bozen, in Italy. She talked about future research opportunities on multilingualism.
According to Rita, areas that need further research include:
1. Historical aspects of multilingualism;
2. Multilingualism in business and the use of linguae francae;
3. Sociolinguistics dimensions, such as majority language speakers use (parts of) languages of minorities;
4. Multilingualism in the individual, especially how 4 to 14 year olds acquire two, three or more languages as well as learners in a more advanced age; continued studies on the acquisition of a third language (or fourth language) and the effects on those languages already mastered;
5. Computer mediated communication, investigating, for example, which methods non-native speakers of English, who dominate the internet, use to be understood worldwide, how problems in expressing oneself are overcome and which approach(es) is (are) taken towards cultural assumptions.
Well, I have to say that it was a very intense and tiring week but it was worth giving up my last week of holidays. Besides keeping up-to-date with the new findings in my area and making new contacts, it also motivated me to keep on reading and writing. It is quite easy to leave it for second plan once you’ve finished (part of) your postgraduate studies and have the hectic life of a primary school teacher (which, by the way, restarts next week.)
David Barton’s presentation on multilingual literacy practices on Flickr was very interesting and the crowded room was not disappointed. He showed how multimodal elements are an essential part of new literacy practices, especially by multilingual users of Web 2.0 and Flickr, an online photo (and now video) management and sharing application. David showed the case of a Spanish-speaker user of Flickr who uses both her first language and English to write the title and caption of the photos she publishes.He also analyzed her profile presentation, other users’ comments on her photos and how she responded to them. He pointed out that Flickr offers new opportunities for those interested in studying semantics in this digital context. Just search for family on the Flickr site, for example, and will you find unimaginable and diverse associations between photos and the concept of family. If you want to find out more about Web 2.0, I strongly recommend that you check out this video.
The symposium I attended in the afternoon was also related with language learning and technology. Teletandem Brazil is government-funded project from Sao Paulo State University (Unesp) which promotes collaborative language learning between students from Unesp interested in learning languages such as English, Italian, Spanish and German and native speakers of these languages who are interested in learning Portuguese. The difference between traditional tandem and this new concept of teletandem is the presence of a teacher mediator and obviously the digital context. It was very interesting to note how new language learning strategies are being used in this new digital context as well as the computer mediated communication that takes place in this conversation.
