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), 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 (Professor of Sociolinguistics). 
• The School of Media and Communication: Bethany Hillan (Postgraduate Researcher).

Our current projects and outputs include: 

• An Accent Equality Statement to raise awareness of accent bias in Higher Education, co-produced with the Leeds Students' Union (LUU) and students. The statement has so far been included in LUU induction materials and the University of Leeds Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures Students Handbook and welcome materials. 
• A survey of university students' experiences of accent bias.
• 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. 

We also organise research talks, workshops and symposia on the theme of linguistic diversity (see Events for a full list):

• 'Politics of Language, Politics of Death' (2023). Research talk by Dr Gerald Roche.
• Symposium: "Questioning Language Teaching Orthodoxy in Higher Education" (2023). Delivered by Kashmir Kaur and Prof Rasha Soliman.
• Workshop "The place of linguistic and cultural diversity in teaching and learning: What do we mean and how might we go about it?" (2023). Delivered by Dr Milena Marinkova and Niamh Mullen.
• 'Accented Racism at Work' (2022). Research talk by Dr Vijay Ramjattan .
• 'Accent Bias in Britain: Why Accent Matters' (2021). Research talk by Professor Devyani Sharma (Queen Mary University London).
• The first workshop, 'Embracing Linguistic Diversity', was held in April 2021 (programme and recordings available on the website). 

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.