PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

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Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen is Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education at the Department of Education, University of Bath, UK. Her research interests encompass ideological, sociocultural-cognitive and policy perspectives on language learning with particular focus on children’s multilingual education and biliteracy development. Within these broad perspectives, her research addresses three main issues:

·     What education policy in general and language-in-education policy in particular provide affordances or constraints in supporting minority language learners to narrow the education gap? 

·     How do various linguistic and non-linguistic forces influence and interact with macro, meso and micro-level language policy and classroom policy to facilitate or inhibit literacy and language development? 

·     How do teachers’ and parents’ ideological convictions affect their socialisation and pedagogical practices, and how are these convictions reflected in their discursive practices?

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To address these three broad research issues, she has examined language policies in mainstream schools and transnational migration contexts in Quebec, France, Singapore and the UK on topics of curriculum policy, language-in-educational policy and family language policy. Committed to migrant children’s overall social and academic wellbeing, her recent research projects have examined how language policy at national, educational, and institutional levels (macro) impact on individual agency. 

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She is the principal investigator of the FLP project. Working closely with Professor Li Wei (UCL) and Zhu Hua (BBK), she is responsible for overall management of the project. She will also lead the investigation of the Chinese community. To view her full profile, please see: http://www.bath.ac.uk/education/staff/xiao-lan-curdt-christiansen/.

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CO-INVESTIGATORS

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Professor Li Wei is Chair of Applied Linguistics and Director of the UCL Centre of Applied Linguistics at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London, UK. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS), UK. He is Principal Editor of the International Journal of Bilingualism (SSCI, Sage) and Applied Linguistics Review(SSCI, De Gruyter), co-editor of Global Chinese (De Gruyter) and Chinese Language and Discourse (Benjamins), and series editor of ‘Guides to Research Methods in Language and Linguistics’ for Wiley-Blackwell. His research interests cover a wide range of topics within the field of bilingualism and multilingualism. Amongst his recent publications are Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education(with Ofelia Garcia, 2014, Palgrave Macmillan), which won the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) 2015 Book Prize, Applied Linguistics (2014, Wiley-Blackwell), Multilingualism in the Chinese Diaspora Worldwide (2016, Routledge), and The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Multi-Competence (with Vivian Cook, 2016, CUP. Shortlisted for 2017 BAAL Book Prize). He is currently involved in a number of research projects including Translation and Translanguaging, funded by AHRC, and Cognitive Benefits of Language Learning, funded by the British Academy.In this project, he leads the investigation of Somali Community.

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Zhu Hua is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Communication, Birkbeck College, University of London. Her main research interests span across multilingual and intercultural communication and child language. She seeks to bring together different areas of her research interests by investigating multiple language use, learning and socialisation in relation to intercultural understanding and identity in a range of contexts including multilingual, diasporic families, the workplace, children’s international summer camps, and formal and informal learning situations. The key theoretical concept she has been working on is Interculturality which problematises the ‘cultural account’ for mis- or non-understanding in interactions and emphasises the ‘inter’ nature of interactions. Her main role in the current FLP project is to lead the investigation in the Polish Community, building on her experience as a co-investigator on a large AHRC-funded project on investigating linguistic and cultural transformations among multilingual speakers, using an ethnographic approach.  Her full profile is available at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/linguistics/our-staff/academic-staff/zhu-hua

 

 

 

TEAM

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Sahra Abdullahi is a research assistant to Professor Li Wei at University College London, where she is working on the ESRC funded FLP project with a focus on the Somali community.

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Sahra Abdullahi earned a BA degree from the University of Portsmouth in English Literature and Creative Writing in 2014, after which she worked as an ESL instructor at the University of Al Baha in Saudi Arabia. As an ESL teacher, Sahra was able to exercise her passion in developing educational opportunities for young people, and upon her return, set up a community interest company in 2016 by the name of Alima Tutors C.I.C., which is designed to help disadvantaged children from ethnic minority communities succeed in academia. She is now the co-director of the Ofsted recognised centre.

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Sahra joined UCL as an MA student in 2016 where she studied Applied Linguistics. The course allowed her to develop her interest in and understanding of research methodologies and techniques, specifically regarding ethnography and conversation analysis. Her main interests lie in embodied multimodality and bilingualism. Sahra completed the MA course in 2017 and joined the FLP research team shorty thereafter.  

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Based at the University of Bath, Dr Jing Huang works as a research associate on the project.

Jing achieved her PhD in Education at the University of Birmingham in 2016. Her doctoral research was an ethnographic study on the Chinese community and Chinese complementary schools in the UK, with a particular focus on how global mobility and socio-economic changes impact on the local discourses of language ideology and identity in such communities and schools.  Prior to and after her doctoral study, Jing has taught English language and sociolinguistics in various contexts. She has worked as a visiting lecturer teaching MA TEFL programme at the School of Education in the University of Birmingham in 2017, and a college English tutor in China from 2006 to 2009. Jing’s previous experience also includes teaching English for general and business purposes in China and teaching Chinese as a foreign/heritage language during the past ten years.

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Jing is interested in using ethnographic methods and questionnaire survey to research multilingual practices of individuals, families, schools, and communities, particularly in relations to language ecology, minority language education, social mobility, ethnic identity, and transnational communication. 

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Dr Kinga Kozminska is a sociolinguist working on identity formation within the Polish-speaking diaspora. She completed her DPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford in autumn 2016, where she conducted a sociophonetic study of the Polish spoken by a group of Polish-speaking migrants living and working in Oxford and the Greater London area. She holds two MA degrees from the University of Chicago and University of Warsaw. Her research interests include: language ideologies, language variation and change, language contact, sociophonetics and language socialization. Before coming to Birkbeck, she taught sociolinguistics at Oxford and worked as a Visiting Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Brighton. She has presented her research at various conferences (e.g. 18th ICPhS, Georgetown University Linguistic Roundtable). She has also co-organised e.g. two linguistic anthropology conferences at Oxford (Language, Indexicality and Belonging 2016, Language, Mobility and Belonging 2017). 

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