PAST EVENT - ESRC Researcher Development Initiative (RDI)

Researching Multilingualism in Complementary Schools

Department of Applied Linguistics & Communication

Birkbeck College, University of London

Room B04 Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX.

Thursday 10 March 2011, 10am - 4:30pm

Complementary schools are voluntary organisations run by minority ethnic or linguistic communities, often of immigration backgrounds, to teach languages and cultures to the local-born generations of children and young people. They have been a major global educational movement since the 1950s – variably known as heritage (language) schools, community (language) schools, or supplementary schools. Yet, public awareness of the complementary schools is low. Recently, a number of research projects have emerged in Britain, where some 3,000 complementary schools exist teaching a very wide range of languages and cultures. These research projects have demonstrated the significant impact of the complementary schools on the communities they are serving as well as the wider society and the diverse practices and ideologies amongst them. They also highlight the need for further research into these schools with particular regards to educational and social policy, community cohesion and identity development of young people. This workshop aims to introduce researchers new to complementary schools to the theoretical and methodological issues in researching this particular site of multilingualism.

• In the opening session, Li Wei will outline the historical development of complementary schools.
• Arvind Bhatt will discuss his experience of working in and with the Gujarati schools from a teacher-researcher perspective.
• Chao-Jung Wu will talk about some of the issues in working with the Chinese schools as a linguistic and cultural insider.
• Vally Lytra will discuss her work with Turkish schools and issues of culture, language and gender. She will also discuss her current project with her children's Greek school in Lausanne, Switzerland from a parent/researcher perspective. 
• In the final session, Angela Creese and Jaspreet Takhi will discuss the key principles of doing ethnography in complementary schools.

The sessions will contain video and audio demonstrations of examples of empirical research in a number of different complementary schools. There will be ample time for the participants to share their own experience and discuss practical issues of working in and with complementary schools.

Workshop Slides

Programme