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.
The full program of the symposium can be downloaded here.
Presentations
Aniko Hatoss
How do online games help language maintenance? Children’s imaginative world and transnational language maintenance in Hungarian-English bilingual families in Australia
Mohammd Nofal and Corinne Seals
Linguistic reflection drawings as an imaginative space for expressing belonging
Kelly Shoecraft
Plurilingual dinosaurs at play: Children negotiating meaning using French, English and gestures
Mona Hosseini
Multilingual children’s imaginative worlds and their language use: Chronotopical analysis of children’s play
Carola Kleemann
Translanguaging roleplay in North Sámi and Norwegian
Eman El Sherbiny Ismail
Negotiating Control in Imaginative Play: Parent-Child Multilingual Interactions
Kay Tisdall
Childhood Studies’ Perspectives: debates about agency, rights and research
Seyda Tarim
Turkish immigrant Children’s Multilingual practices during Pretend Play at a U.S. Turkish Saturday School
Arantzazu Martinez Etxarri
Multilingualism and creativity
Jungmin Lee
Multilingual children’s pretend play: An ethnographic case study in an English-dominant kindergarten classroom
Roberto Alvira, Ana María Cely, Manuela Silva, and Natalia Hernández
Gaming strategies in EFL classes
Melissa Schuring and Eline Zenner
English lexical resources in Belgian Dutch preadolescents’ role play
Min-Seok Choi
Translanguaging space in imaginative play: The role of embodied actions in the use of heritage language
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