Keynote speakers

Anna GHIMENTON, PhD

Professor

Laboratoire LiDiLEM

Université Grenoble Alpes

Keynote Title

Doing being a pluricultural family in France: From language practices to plurilingual socialization

Bio

Anna Ghimenton is a Professor at Université Grenoble Alpes and is affiliated with the Lidilem Research Lab. She teaches General Linguistics, Language Acquisition, and Socialization to undergraduate and graduate students in Grenoble. Her research focuses on various facets of language socialization. She has published in numerous handbooks (e.g., Handbook of Bilingualism, Handbook of Language and Mobility, Handbook of Romance Sociolinguistics) and journals (e.g., Journal of Child Language, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Journal of Language, Identity & Education). Using ethnographically informed approaches to language acquisition and socialization, she combines both quantitative and qualitative methods. These complementary approaches enable her to investigate how children and adolescents acquire socially meaningful language practices.

Abstract

Successful plurilingual transmission is often explained by quantitative and qualitative measures of exposure to the languages spoken in the family. In this presentation, I suggest taking a different vantage point. I explore plurilingual transmission by looking at the lived and situated underpinnings of how languages circulate and are lived in ordinary practices.More particularly, through the lens of the concept of small stories (Bamberg 1997; Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008), I examine how families actively perform and accomplish pluricultural and plurilingual identities. Small stories are interactionally embedded narrative fragments produced in ordinary occurring conversations. Adopting an interactional approach, I focus on identities as social achievements continuouslyproduced and negotiated in interaction through the mobilization of different language and semiotic resources.Drawing from a corpus of mealtime interactions recorded in plurilingual families living in France, I use small stories as an analytical tool in order to probe how identities are far from being pre-existing and stable entities. Rather, because they are negotiated and interactional accomplishments, I focus on how they reveal various speakers’ (narrators’) positionings (e.g. how the narrator positions the protagonists based on their relations; how the narrator views his/her role in the narration; how the narration reflects the narrator’s position with regard to forms of normativity).The discussion addresses the epistemological value of approaching plurilingual transmission through the lens of socialization, and argues in favor of praxeological approaches in order to support more holistic views of how language practices circulate within and beyond the family.

Disclaimer

Site Map