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Quinto simposio sobre política del lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
"Alfonso Vélez Pliego"
Puebla de los Angeles, México

Keynote speakers





Javier López Sánchez. Biodata

He belongs to the maya-tzeltal people and is both Chiapanec and Mexican. He graduated with distinction from the BA in Elementary Education for Indigenous Environments at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional (UPN). Nowadays, he holds a Master's degree in Linguistics by the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) from which he graduated with honors. His special qualifications include a series of diplomas in Public Management, Law, Indigenous Culture and International Education.

He has worked as an indigenous elementary school teacher in the maya-tseltal communities and has also given some university and postgraduate courses. At the same time, he has participated in diverse international organizations regarding teachers' training with an intercultural approach as well as in various congresses –national and international- about diversity and the intercultural approach applied on education, teachers' training and the development of pedagogical competences for assisting diversity, policies and linguistic rights. He has founded and coordinated several projects, some of them for designing and elaborating grammars and dictionaries in indigenous languages, some others for the BA in Intercultural Bilingual Education and others regarding preschool children literature in Chiapas.

He has also been author, co-author and coordinator of different publications about diversity and intercultural education, teachers' training and linguistics and linguistic rights. Some of them are mentioned below: "The intercultural approach in education. Guidelines for elementary school teachers", (2006), CGEIB-SEP, Mexico; "Self-assessing and monitoring in and from school. Guidelines to systematize and document educational practice with the intercultural bilingual approach", (2006), CGEIB-SEP, Mexico; "Policies and foundations for intercultural bilingual education in Mexico", (2008), CGEIB-SEP, Mexico; "Sk ́op Bats ́ilWiniketik. Basic Grammar of the Tseltal Language", 2003), CONACULTA-UNEMAZ, A: C. He is besides a current member and advisor of diverse indigenous social organizations–national and international-.

Additionally, he is member of the scientific committee of on line intercultural education in Madrid, Spain. Because of his contributions to both education and development of national indigenous languages, he has also been considered a distinguished visitor and has received recognition from governments and educational authorities at different levels (international, national, state and municipal). He has been in charge of the Pedagogical Department of Indigenous Education in Chiapas, and has also worked as Director of Education and Training for Educational Agents at the General Coordination of Intercultural Bilingual Education (SEP-Mexico). Furthermore, he was Research Director at the Indigenous Languages National Institute (INALI-Mexico) and currently, he directs the INALI.

Presentation title:
Pendiente . Abstract

Pendiente
Por este medio queremos hacer de su conocimiento que por causas de salud el Dr. Bernard Spolsky ha decidido cancelar su participación en el V Simposio. Agradecemos su comprensión en esta situación que queda fuera de nuestro alcance.

Atentamente
Comité Organizador

Bernard Spolsky. Biodata

Bernard Spolsky was born in New Zealand in 1932 and educated at Wellington College, Victoria University College of the University of New Zealand, and the University of Montreal. He taught at high schools in New Zealand, Australia and England. He taught English for two years at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and completed military service in the Israel Defense Forces. He was assistant professor of Education at McGill University (1962-4), and assistant professor of Linguistics at Indiana University (1964-8). At the University of New Mexico from 1968-1980, he was Professor of Linguistics, Elementary Education and Anthropology and for six years Dean of the Graduate School.

He was appointed Professor of English at Bar-Ilan University in 1980, serving as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1992-4 and Chair of the Department of English from 1995-6. On retirement in 2000, he was appointed Professor Emeritus.

At Indiana University, he was director of the English as a Foreign Language Program and associate chair of the Research Center for the Language Sciences. At the University of New Mexico, he directed the Navajo Reading Study. At Bar-Ilan University, he founded and directed the Language Policy Research Center.

He has been a Senior Associate at the National Foreign Language Center and Senior Research Scientist at the Center for the Advanced Study of Language, both at the University of Maryland. He was Editor-in-Chief of the international academic journal Language Policy, published now by Springer Science from 2002 until 2007, and is Publications Director of Asian TEFL and editor-in-chief of its journal.

He is currently writing a book on religion and language management.

Presentation title:
Managing language diversity. Abstract

Many of the earlier studies of language conflict concentrated their attention on theoretically bilingual countries, like Belgium, Switzerland, Paraguay and the Afrikaans-English conflict in South Africa, ignoring the greater complexity of considering the minority languages and the multilingualism of India or South Africa and Mexico. In 1973, when I was starting on a project concerned with the survival of the Navajo language and charged to replicate the Modiano study in Chiapas, I attended a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Mexico City, where local linguists defined language maintenance as placing dictionaries and grammars of threatened languages in libraries rather than encouraging continued use of the language. But now, South of the Border, there has been recognition of the rights of the speakers of these varieties.

The difficulty is to come up with a model of language management that will fit these diverse (or even super-diverse) situations. Recognizing this, the late South African linguist Neville Alexander even suggested encouraging only one African language rather than the nine added to the South African constitution or the many others reasonably expecting inclusion.

National language policies faced with this kind of challenge sometimes provide minimal assistance to groups attempting language maintenance, but usually their emphasis will be on the practical goal of teaching the standard variety in schools, most commonly ignoring the evidence that children learn best if their instruction starts in their home language (the lesson of the Chiapas and Navajo studies among others). Or sometimes they will provide support in the form of interpretation for those seeking access to government, legal or health services.

Can we rely on the minimal language learning of contact situations, producing code-switching and the development of mixed languages like Media Lengua in Ecuador or Michif in Canada or the receptive multilingualism described in many diverse communities like Scandinavia and the Balkans?

As the most elementary human right for speakers of minority language varieties, one might propose the dignity of recognition of diversity, including tolerant approaches to commonly stigmatized minority and mixed languages.

Albert Bastardas-Boada. Biodata

Professor of "Sociolinguistics" and "Language ecology and language policy", and ICREA Academia researcher.

Coordinator of the research group of "Complexity, Communication and Socio/Linguistics", and director of the project "Globalization, Intercommunication, and Medium-Sized Language Communities".

Right now my main research interests are (socio)complexity theory, and language ecology and policy for the medium-sized languages in the global era.

Director of the CUSC - University Center of Sociolinguistics and Communication,UB, from its foundation in 1998 to 2010.

Presentation title:
(SOCIO) Complexity and Language Sustainability. Abstract

Phenomena in an intermediate reality level present specific characteristics, namely: systemic selforganization, multi leveled interrelation, recursivity, evolutionary dynamicity and that related to the rising of new “objects” with properties far different to the ones of their constituting elements. The presence of such features might indicate the necessity to formulate new theoretical conceptions and different paradigmatic principles. An attempt to fulfill this demand entailed in the “complexity” of reality is represented by what has been called “complexity” perspectives or sciences; in other words, the so called “complex” thinking. If we approach “languages” as if they were simple and decontextualized objects, we could then advance in the comprehension of some of their more mechanical aspects; however, such approximation might let us  completely ignore their existence conditions, functionality, maintenance, variation, change or extinction.
Language sustainability, as a proactive evolution of ecological thinking, is considered an attempt to build human linguistic coexistence based on: (1) egalitarian and balanced agreement on maintenance and development of the specific codes belonging to each human group, and (2) knowledge and use of other languages for more general intercommunication. Finally, the (socio) complexity perspective allows apprehending more properly the determiners and dynamics implied in language maintenance and language replacement whilst it makes also possible to develop general and practical principles to guide language policies in a “glocal” world.

Gunther Dietz. Biodata

Studied Social Anthropology, American Anthropology, Hispanic Philology and Philosophy at the Universities of Gotinga and Hamburg (Germany); in addition, his M.A. and Ph. D. in Anthropology were studied at the University of Hamburg. He has worked as a teacher at the Universities of Hamburg, Granada, Aarlborg (Denmark) and Gent (Belgium). He is currently a full professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Granada. He has performed ethnographic work on handcrafts and "indigenism" as well as on indigenous communities and ethnical movements in Michoacán (Mexico); also, about immigrant collectives, non-governmental organizations, social movements and multiculturalism in Hamburg (Germany) and in Andalucia (Spain).

His main interests comprise: indigenist policies and development projects in indigenous regions, ethnicity, interculturality, intercultural education and ethnic and/or regionalistsmovements, indigenous peoples and non-governmental organizations as new agents of development, participative methods for evaluating development projects as well as the contribution of ethnic movements –and other social movements- to democratization processes and those of self-managing development. He has carried on research stays at the Centro de Estudios Antropológicos, Colegio de Michoacán (Zamora, México),in the Anthropology Department; University of Hamburg (Germany); at the School for Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Research on Interculturalism and Transnationality; University of Aalborg (Denmark); at the Steunpunt Intercultureel Onderwijs, University of Gante (Belgium) and at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California in San Diego (USA).

He leads the project "Diálogo de saberes, haceres y poderes entre actores educativos y comunitarios: una etnografía reflexiva de la educación superior intercultural en Veracruz" (InterSaberes), in colaboration with the Instituto de Investigaciones en Educación y la Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural granted by the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT).

Presentation title:
Language and cultural diversity in education: contemporary challenges for language planning . Abstract

Language and cultural diversity has reached educational contexts a little late in time. Therefore, its discourse has recently been inserted in the contemporary development of educational systems. Public education even at the very beginning of the XXI century, as a power core strictly controlled and successfully defended by the Nation-State, is still hierarchically and institutionally rooted to certain ideological anchorage from the nineteenth century which comes from the classic precedent "nationalism nationalizing" (Brubaker). As a result, in a wide range of European origin Nation-States including the postcolonial Latin-American ones, different relationships between majorities and minorities as well as diverse configurations between native and migrant populations (autochthonous and allochtoon) are either still being made invisible as educationally inexistent or simply problematized as an obstacle for educational integration. Thus, diversification and heterogenization in education will not yet be perceived as an institutional challenge for the continuity of educational systems as such, but at the most, it will be considered as a mere institutional appendix, suitable for compensatory measurements and extraordinary situations.

After a brief conceptual introduction about this emergent paradigm for language and cultural diversity, in this lecture we will track its origins in relation to multiculturalism and its institutionalization process. Likewise, we will discuss the concurrent "academization" of both theoretical discourses and educational programs which recognize the intrinsic value of cultural diversity in education, in whose course certain approaches about language diversity have reached the pedagogical field. Afterwards, different conceptual "solutions" developed to face the language and ethno-cultural diversity challenge will be debated both in relation to the necessary redefinition of what diverse is in terms of hybridization and intersectionality, and from the perspective of concrete "anti-discrimination" and "diversity management" programs. Finally, the consequences of current applications of the diversity paradigm will be discussed in terms of their potential contributions to educational research as well as to educational policies and practices.
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades "Alfonso Vélez Pliego" Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Coordinación de HUmanidades Centro de Enseñanza de Lenguas Extranjeras Departamento de Lingüística Aplicada

Hecho en México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), todos los derechos reservados 2013. Esta página puede ser reproducida con fines no lucrativos, siempre y cuando no se mutile, se cite la fuente completa y su dirección electrónica. De otra forma, requiere permiso previo por escrito de la institución. Créditos