| Presenter | Tiéphaine Thomason University of Cambridge |
| Title of Paper | Searching for Language Attrition in Displaced Children in Eighteenth-Century French Atlantic Ports |
| Abstract | If the study of urban centres in the early modern period has led to greater attention to multilingualism and language-learning, less research has been devoted to examining the loss of language. Language attrition or, more specifically for this paper, first-language attrition, in which an individual loses their mother-tongue, remains an under-examined field by historians. This is despite its enduring traces in the francophone colonial landscape through the decline of indigenous languages and in the rise of creole languages in the Caribbean. The reasons for the historiographical neglect of language loss remain two-fold. First, research by linguists has shown that first-language attrition is most prevalent in pre-pubescent children. These are seldom the focus of the eighteenth-century archive. Second, francophone colonial sources that discuss language use outside of elite European and literate circles seem, at first glance, limited. This paper will contend that contemporaries were nonetheless deeply aware of the risks posed by language attrition in this period. (By way of example, West African children were kidnapped to be used as interpreters by French slaving ships at the start of puberty when attrition was less likely – and not any earlier. Doing so ensured that these children retained proficiency in their mother-tongues to interpret for the French on slaving voyages.) This paper will thus trace understandings of language attrition as they emerge in French colonial records. Since this material is often sparse when looking at one single location, the paper will draw from urban case studies across the francophone Atlantic (looking at enslaved children in Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Nantes, as well as nuns in Québec City raised in Indigenous language communities). It will both discuss strategies used by contemporaries to ensure attrition, supplanting children’s mother-tongues with metropolitan French, and concerns by contemporaries who sought to keep attrition at bay. |
| Biography | Tiéphaine Thomason is a third-year PhD student at the University of Cambridge. Her research centres on speech and orality across the French Atlantic, with a focus on three port cities – Nantes, the city of Québec, and Saint-Pierre in Martinique. She is interested in questions of language acquisition, interpretation, creolisation, and attrition, as well as legal and maritime history more broadly. She completed an MPhil in Early Modern History at Cambridge in 2021, and a BA in History with political thought, also at Cambridge, in 2020. Her research is funded by the Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholars Programme. |
| Presenter | Angeliki Voskou University of Greenwich |
| Title of Paper | Language pedagogy and minority student’s identity development in Greek community schools in the UK |
| Abstract | This presentation draws on a mixed-methods research conducted in Greek community schools in the UK, where Greek language and culture are taught to minority students of Greek and Greek-Cypriot origin. This research was conducted within a period of increased migration waves from Greece and Cyprus to the UK, influencing the community structure and pedagogy in these institutions. It discusses how Greek language pedagogy in Greek community schools can be considered as a powerful means of minority students’ identity construction and preservation, and how personal, social and ethnic identities of these students can be understood through experiences of migration, nostalgia, memories, and language and culture pedagogic practices in these educational institutions. Following a mixed-methods methodology, the paper draws on discourses from interviews with minority students of different generations, teachers, community members, as well as teaching observations and documentary-historical research, to discuss teachers’ role as ‘cultural and identity mediators’ and students’ expositions of their identities in schooling, language teaching/ learning, the space of the Greek community, as well as a pluralistic society. The findings suggest that within a context of constant migration flows and cultural interactions, and wider constant socio-political changes, the negotiation of minority students’ identities becomes more prominent, and necessitates the re-examination of language teaching curricula and pedagogic practices, considering students as social actors, active and reflexive learners and co- constructors of curricula and educational practices. |
| Biography | Angeliki Voskou has a degree in Greek Philology (Classical Studies) from the University of Crete (Greece), Med in International Studies in Education: Management and Policy, and a PhD in Education, from the Department of Education and Social Justice, University of Birmingham. Angeliki has extensive teaching and research experience in various settings in both UK and Cyprus. She is a Senior Lecturer in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education at the University of Greenwich, teaching in the PGCert Programme in HE. She is interested in exploring various approaches to pedagogic research, inclusive education, minorities education and inclusion, HE Teaching and Learning. |