Multilingual Children and their Imaginative Worlds
Children's imaginative play has long attracted scholars in different fields, from psychologists like Vygotsky in the 1960s to sociolinguists in recent years. This symposium with papers from diverse contexts will address such methodological and theoretical questions as how bi/multilingual children use linguistic varieties and other semiotic resources in their plays, and what implications their language use may have for the languages, families, communities, and societies.
This two-day symposium hosted by Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing), University of Oslo, seeks to shed light on how bi / multilingual children's imaginative worlds and their language use within them could methodologically and analytically help us understand their views on languages, multilingualism, as well as the concomitant implications, outcomes and consequences for languages, communities and societies. During the symposium, we will focus on how children's imagination mediates their language use in such imaginative spaces as naturally occurring plays at home or playground leading to language shift (e.g. Mirvahedi & Cavallaro, 2019; Smith-Christmas, 2020), or intentionally created ones to catalyze using a minority language, eg in language revitalization efforts.
Program
The full program of the symposium can be downloaded here.
Registration
To obtain the Zoom link, please register on Nettskjema.
Keynote speakers
Prof. Amy Kyratzis, University of California, Santa Barbara
Prof Asta Cekaite & Prof Polly Björk-Willén, Linköping University
Prof Kay Tisdall, University of Edinburgh