Event Date: Thursday, May 21, 2026 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Event Location: Phelps Hall 4332
Please join us for our Applied Linguistics Spring Colloquium next week. We have an additional presentation!
Connecting grammar to youth culture in Chilean EFL high school classrooms
Evelyn Vera Flández (Dept. of Education)
While Spanish is the official language of Chile, as in many countries around the world, Chile has incorporated English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching into its national curriculum, in the hopes of preparing students to be active citizens in plurilingual and pluricultural societies. Yet, according to the English Proficiency Index report, the teaching of EFL in Chilean public high schools has shown poor performance. This paper combines a language socialization theory approach with Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics to analyze semi-structured interviews of Chilean public high school teachers reporting on their teaching practice. The teachers were selected out of a broader set of teachers because they reported using techniques of Communicative Language Teaching. The results indicate that these teachers design activities that give their students a vehicle for expressing their peer cultures, interests, identities, and imagined future possible selves but also attend to tying these youth-based activities to specific grammatical forms. This study contributes by offering design principles for EFL programs that have greater chances of success with young people in Chilean public schools and with youth in schools in non-English speaking nations more globally.
French Inclusive Writing and the French Colonial Project: Anti-Colonial and Queer Linguistic Solidarities
Solaire Denaud (Comparative Literature)
The revival of French anti-Inclusive Writing movements in 2017 led to a sudden rise in scholarly interest in French Inclusive Grammars. As they engage with a conversation strongly framed around the French nation, most critical articles reproduce the same bias as their political opponents, that is, engaging with French institutions such as the French Academy or the Ministry of National Education without questioning the colonial role of these institutions or the affinity between the French language, the French nation, and the French colonial project. Although current Inclusive Writing activism has been successful in raising awareness of transphobia and misogyny in the French language, it has done so in a way that, at best, solidifies the link between the French nation and the French language, and, at worst, dissociates queer issues from other linguistically marginalized communities, thus risking the creation of a ‘National Inclusive Writing’ that could act as a form of homo (queer?) nationalist writing system to be spread throughout current and former French colonies. This presentation proposes solutions to an avoidable schism between anti-colonial reflections on language and rising queer linguistic activism by connecting two conversations that are often analyzed separately: the anti-colonial conversation and the feminist/queer conversation. Indeed, African and Caribbean anti-colonial writers largely challenged the bond between the French language, the French nation, and white supremacy, turning their backs on the French empire’s vortex and leaving ‘la Francophonie’ with no other choice but to disappear.
We're not ABC. We’re ABT”: Identity and language ideologies of Taiwanese American youth
Huay Chen-Wu (Dept. of Education)
Existing investigations of Chinese as a HL view the “Sinophone” as a monolithic entity, often grouping speakers of all Chinese varieties together, including Taiwanese Americans; thus, ignoring differences negates their life experiences. Using a sociocultural framework of identity, twelve Taiwanese American university undergraduates were interviewed about their perceptions of their own ethnic identity, as well as how they negotiated their identity and used their heritage language with others of different backgrounds. In this narrative analysis, findings show that the participants’ beliefs of their cultural identity strongly aligned with a collective Taiwanese American consciousness, and participants also expressed a desire to maintain positive relationships and proximity with native Mandarin speakers from Taiwan, despite receiving deficit perspectives about their HL. On the other hand, accounts of interactions with native Mandarin speakers from China were often less positive: participants hesitated in identifying as “Taiwanese” due to ongoing political conflicts, and negative perspectives of their HL often led to them not wanting future communication with these interlocutors. Participants also engaged in the languaging practice of voicing to express humor or sarcasm with others of Taiwanese background, which showed their sociolinguistic understanding of Mandarin and awareness of Taiwanese culture. These findings reveal the importance of supporting Taiwanese Americans’ HL development, whether formally or informally, as their language is a strong part of how they identify and navigate their relationships. “Chineseness” is not singular or simple, and critical discussions of the conflict overseas need to be shared, especially by the diasporic communities affected by it within the U.S.