LLORENÇ COMAJOAN: MULTILINGUALISM IN SCHOOLS IN CATALONIA: VOICES FROM THE TEACHERS
Monday, September 17th
Boylston Hall, 403
6 pm
Poster Comajoan
This lecture provides an overview of the Catalan education system at the secondary level focusing on how teachers manage language teaching and language-related issues in the classroom. After reviewing some data on the linguistic demography of the Catalan population and some results regarding language proficiency of Catalan students, I present data on a recent project (Bretxa, Comajoan & Vila, 2017) where high-school teachers gave their views on the sociolinguistic landscape of their schools, students’ achievement, as well as teachers’ challenges in handling the sociolinguistic coexistance of several languages in the school community.
Llorenç Comajoan-Colomé (Ph.D., Indiana University, Bloomington) is Associate Professor at Universitat de Vic-Universitat Central de Catalunya (www.uvic.cat), where he teaches at the School of Education, Translation and Humanities. He coordinates the Research Group on Education, Language, and Literature (http://mon.uvic.cat/grell/) and the M.A. Program on Teaching Catalan as a First and Second Language. He is a member of the the Research Centre for Sociolinguistics and Communication at the Universitat de Barcelona (https://cuscub.wordpress.com/). His research interests are educational sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and language teaching.