The 1st International Conference on Multilingualism and Multilingual Education

Call for papers

The laboratory of Values, Society and Development (LVSD) (research groups: Language and Culture; Language Contact and Language Policy) organizes its First International Conference on Multilingualism and Multilingual Education on May, 9-10, 2018, at the Center of Letters and Human Sciences, Ait Melloul University Campus (Ibn Zohr University, Agadir, Morocco).

Over the past decades, research has focused on both individual and societal multilingualism. A great number of people are multilingual and use more than two languages in their everyday life. These languages differ in statuses as majority/minority languages both in their community and internationally; some of the languages are used primarily in the private domain while others are used primarily in public domains, such as work or school. Hence, multilingualism is not exceptional but more frequent than might be commonly thought. Individual and societal multilingualism are strongly interrelated and characterized by the occurrence of certain issues such as how sociocultural parameters determine the choice of language, persistent language conflicts, concepts of identity, and symbolic struggles over religious, ethnic, cultural or national identity. These issues occur strongly in the educational systems and institutions of the multilingual communities.

Multilingual education refers to educational programs that use languages other than the first languages as media of instruction or teach additional languages as school subjects aiming at developing communicative proficiency in more than two languages. In order to attain this aim, these programs have to utilize complex educational planning to accommodate multiple language aims, curricular materials and teaching strategies. This aim can be challenging given that multilingual education is linked to the sociolinguistic context in which it takes place and has to take into consideration the status and use of the languages involved.