Special Issue Call for Papers
Diversity in second language instruction: new challenges and perspectives
CALL FOR PAPERS
Editors: Daniele Artoni and Marco Magnani
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States almost ten years ago, provides a plan of action in the form of 17 goals to fight against today’s social, economic, and ecological turmoil. Fostering language diversity is not explicitly one of such goals. Nevertheless, encouraging the coexistence of different languages within a community as well as promoting their learning would bring a significant contribution to the building of a more inclusive and respectful society. Furthermore, the role of language diversity cannot be ignored in the attempt to achieve the fourth sustainable development goal in the UN Agenda, which is to ensure equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
In an ever more multilingual and interconnected society, where the monolingual speaker has by far become the exception rather than the norm (Sorace 2011, De Houwer 2022), it may seem redundant to emphasize the importance of multilingual education. Yet, from the vantage point of language learning, the need to overcome barriers in cross-linguistic communication has all too often led to the hegemony of one lingua franca (Phillipson 2022), to the detriment of instruction in second languages other than English. Giving up on a more balanced plurilingual education would pose a huge representational problem for less studied languages, questioning their usefulness in our globalized society – let alone for local minority languages, which are constantly fighting for their survival. Moreover, by expanding their linguistic repertoire beyond English as a foreign language, learners would enhance their understanding of key grammatical categories encountered in morphologically more complex languages, such as case or gender inflection, a wider range of verb paradigms, as well as a higher number of syntactic permutations available as a resource for expressing discourse and pragmatic intentions.
In light of these challenges, this special issue aims to explore the role of external manipulation (e.g., instruction, learner self-directed learning, input adaptation) on second language development in various contexts of linguistic diversity.
In particular, we invite authors to submit contributions that address the following topics:
- Methodological issues and approaches to instruction in multilingual classrooms
- Challenges in teaching morphologically complex languages
- Intercomprehension and positive transfer in foreign language instruction
- Instructed acquisition of minority languages
- The role of heritage languages in instruction
Authors are invited to send an abstract (up to 400 words) to Marco Magnani ([email protected]) and Daniele Artoni ([email protected]).
IMPORTANT DATES:
Deadline for abstracts: 31st May 2024
Notification of acceptance: 31st July 2024
Submission of papers: 31st December 2024
Publication: November 2025
