Organized by the Department Of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of French and Italian

Co-Sponsored by the Humanities Council

Although for a long time the study of language was secluded inside of an intellectual tradition marked by structural and cognitive approaches, interdisciplinary fields such as sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and linguistic anthropology have been progressively shifting the focus from language form to language practice, from theory to fieldwork, from communication to identity and expression, and from discrete national languages to hybrid multilingual repertoires, thus producing more socially oriented ways of conceiving language.

The proposed event aims at introducing two such notions, “translanguaging” and “metrolingualism,” by engaging their most visible proponents (Ofelia García and Alastair Pennycook, respectively) in a dialogue with each other and with an audience of language educators, graduate students and undergraduates interested in language and linguistics.

OFELIA GARCÍA is Professor in the Ph.D. programs of Urban Education and of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures (LAILAC) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has been Professor of Bilingual Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Dean of the School of Education at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University, and Professor of Education at The City College of New York.

She is the General Editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language and the co-editor of Language Policy (with H. Kelly-Holmes).

Among her best-known books are Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective; Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education (with Li Wei, 2015 British Association of Applied Linguistics Book Award recipient). Her recent books (2016-2017) include The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society (with N. Flores & M. Spotti); Encyclopedia of Bilingual and Multilingual Education (with A. Lin & S. May), The Translanguaging Classroom (with S. I. Johnson & K. Seltzer); Translanguaging with Multilingual Students (with T. Kleyn).

A complete list of publications can be found at her professional website: https://ofeliagarcia.org/

García’s research on bilingual education has been grounded in her life experience living in New York City after leaving Cuba at the age of 11, teaching language minority students bilingually, educating bilingual and ESL teachers, and working with doctoral students researching these topics. In 2016 García received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Bank Street Graduate School of Education, and in 2017 she received the Charles Ferguson Award in Applied Linguistics from the Center of Applied Linguistics, and the Lifetime Career Award from the Bilingual Education SIG of the American Education Research Association. In 2018 she was appointed to the National Academy of Education and received The Graduate Center Excellence in Mentoring Award.

ALASTAIR PENNYCOOK is Distinguished Professor of Language, Society and Education at UTS. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan at the University of Oslo, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Alastair has been involved in language education for over 30 years in France, Germany, Japan, China, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia. He is well known for his work on the global spread of English, particularly in his classic text The cultural politics of English as an international language, (Longman, 1994; BAAL Book Prize), which has just been reissued as a Routledge Linguistics Classic in 2017. Also well-known is his work on critical approaches to language education and applied linguistics, outlined in Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001), and collected in a new selection of his writing from Shanghai Foreign Language Press.

His most recent books are: Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (Routledge, 2007; BAAL Book Prize); Global Linguistic Flows: Hip hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language (co-edited with Samy Alim and Awad Ibrahim; Routledge, 2009); Metrolingualism: Language in the City (with Emi Otsuji; Routledge, 2015); Posthumanist Applied Linguistics (Routledge, 2017); and Popular culture, voice and linguistic diversity: Young adults on- and offline (with Sender Dovchin and Shaila Sultana; Palgrave, 2018).

More information and publications at https://www.uts.edu.au/staff/alastair.pennycook