Embracing Linguistic Diversity

This satellite brings together researchers and scholars from: 

• The Language Centre (LC): Milena Marinkova (Senior Lecturer in English for Academic Purposes), Helen Sadig  (Associate Professor), Niamh Mullen (Senior Teaching Fellow/Lecturer in English for Academic Purposes), Kashmir Kaur (Lecturer of English for Academic Purposes), Carolyn Edwards (Teaching Fellow), Deak Kirkham (Lecturer in EAP).

• Various other units within the School of Languages, Cultures & Societies (LCS): Rasha Soliman (Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Linguistics), Hanem El-Farahaty (Associate Professor in Arabic Language, Translation and Interpreting), Cecile De Cat (Professor of Linguistics), Gise Tomé Lourido (Lecturer in Sociophonetics), Chiara La Sala (Associate Professor of Italian), Ya-chun Liu (Lecturer in Chinese), Diane Nelson (Senior Lecturer in Linguistics), Terry Bradford (Senior Lecturer in French/Translation), Elizaveta Vasserman (Postgraduate Researcher), James Wilson (Lecturer in Russian and Language Studies), Bettina Hermoso Gómez (Lecturer in Spanish), Sascha Stollhans (Associate Professor of Language Pedagogies), Clare Wright (Associate Professor in Linguistics & Language).
• The School of English: Julia Snell (Associate Professor of English Language). 
• The School of Media and Communication: Bethany Hillan (Postgraduate Researcher).

We’re essentially a working group developing a series of initiatives to celebrate linguistic diversity and minimise language-based prejudices and disadvantages, starting from our University context. We’re particularly interested in how linguistic diversity can be incorporated into the language classroom to raise awareness of linguistic and cultural differences and help students improve their comprehension of different varieties of the target language.

Our current projects include: 

• A University-wide survey of students’ experience of accent bias at the University of Leeds.  
• A resource bank of activities, workshops, case studies and principles for embedding linguistic diversity in Language Teaching, partly drawing from examples of existing practice in the Language Centre and LCS. 
• A series of events on the theme of Linguistic Diversity. The first workshop, 'Embracing Linguistic Diversity', was held in April 2021 (programme and recordings available on the website). Other events included a talk by Professor Devyani Sharma (Queen Mary University London) entitled 'Accent Bias in Britain: Why Accent Matters' in June 2021 and a talk by Dr Vijay Ramjattan entitled 'Accented Racism at Work' in January 2022.

The satellite is led by Gise Tomé Lourido and Milena Marinkova.  Please email them if you would like to join or collaborate with the satellite.