Early Language Learning & Multilingual Education Network

ABSTRACT

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Being a language teacher for children or adults with linguistically diverse backgrounds puts teachers in a position of constantly evaluating the output of their teaching, i.e. their students’ performance in the target language.

The evaluation criteria that the teachers apply are not just technical means. They reflect the evaluator’s epistemologies, i.e. their standpoint and gaze towards language(s) and bilingualism, what they consider as ‘proper’ or ‘correct’ language use, and eventually how they conceive speakers’ translanguaging practices and how they deal with them.

The question we ask here is how far we, as educators, act as “white listening subjects” of students’ language performance and what consequences this might have for our students.

We will build upon a series of major shifts in language diversity / bilingualism theories that resulted in a relocation of focus from language to the speaker and eventually to the listener. We will discuss the notion of ‘white listening subject’ in the context of the new epistemologies and in that of the raciolinguistics theory.

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BIO

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Eleni Skourtou is a Professor Emerita for “Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in Education” at the Department of Primary Education of the University of the Aegean. Her research and teaching focus on language diversity and education of minorized students and on orality, literacy and meaning making. Specifically, Eleni Skourtou’s research focuses on language diversity in Greece, on bilingualism and learning, translanguaging, learning through a second language, education of Roma, immigrant and refugee children in Greece.

As for literacy, Eleni Skourtou focuses on orality / literacy / multiliteracies / e-literacies, text and meaning making and multiple (re)making of meaning of culturally canonistic texts (e.g. Odysseia).