Multilingual Lives: Stories of Language and Culture Learning

Catalog description

This course will explore how research into language acquisition intersects with the lived experiences of multilingual speakers. Drawing upon both social sciences and the humanities, the course will give students the opportunity to understand and appreciate multilingualism, and the complex relationships that language has with culture, education, family life, and the structures of power, gender, and class. In addition to reading formal studies of scholarly research into language acquisition, language education, motivation and identity, students will read excerpts from literary works that illuminate these topics through the lens of narrative, memoir, and fiction. The stories we read will help us find answers to questions such as these: How can we understand the processes of language learning and language loss? What are the documented cognitive benefits of bilingualism? What are the factors that influence language learning, including motivation, age, and social context? In addition to reading, analyzing, and discussing texts, students will conduct a community outreach project in which they collect and analyze stories from multilingual individuals in the local community, including members of their own family, recent immigrants, long-term residents, international students or scholars, retirees, heritage language learners or parents in a multilingual household.