H2IOSC Training: CIRCE Project Online Seminar Series on Language and Accent Discrimination

Textbooks play a pivotal role in language education, even in the era of internet and AI. For both learners and teachers, textbooks are something they use daily in the processes of learning and teaching, in the classroom or at home. According to Curdt-Christiansen and Weninger (2015) textbooks are sociocultural materials, they have the power to represent and position ideas, values and beliefs, namely they can legitimate an ideology, reflect a particular ideology and in this perspective, they can shape identity of learners. To explore textbooks as sociocultural products, we will analyze a sample of textbooks from different countries and focus on the following aspects: plurilingualism, theoretical approach, language activities, metalinguistic analysis and variation.  Examples from textbooks will be presented and discussed. 

Francesca Gallina is Associate Professor of Educational Linguistics at the University of Pisa.  

She completed her PhD in Linguistics and didactic of Italian as L2 in 2009 with a dissertation on the development of the lexical competence of learners of Italian as a second language at the University for Foreigners of Siena. Her main research interest areas are: educational linguistics, L2 vocabulary acquisition, language contact and multilingualism, impact of language policies on the development of L2 teaching and learning processes. Her last publications are “Italiano di contatto e didattica plurilingue” (Cesati, 2021),  “Osservare e valutare la competenza lessicale in italiano L2” (2022). 

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I spend a lot of my time trying to persuade people to have a more accepting attitude towards language variation and language change. In fact, we should be doing a lot more than accepting it – we should be enjoying it and celebrating the fact that we all use language in different ways. We should take time to appreciate the fundamental connection between the way we speak, and who we are. In this talk, I will present my top ten reflections and insights that aim to improve everyone’s relationship with their own, and other people’s, use of English. 

Rob Drummond is Professor of Sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he researches, teaches and writes about the relationship between spoken language and identity. He recently led the community-focused Manchester Voices project, exploring the accents, dialects and identities of people in Greater Manchester, and he co-leads The Accentism Project, which strives to challenge and raise awareness of language-based prejudice. Rob does a lot of public-facing academic work and is the author of You’re All Talk: Why we are what we speak (Scribe Publications, 2023), a book for a general audience that shed light on the fascinating relationship between ourselves and our language. 

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