Sharing in practice

(participants sign up for one of three groups per slot at the beginning of the workshop)

Time slot Activity
14:00-14:45 Language taster Somali (Liban Ali Hersi) Language taster Wolof (Miriam Weidl) Foreign language learning with performative theatre – best practice (Sandrine Eschenauer)
14:50-15:35 The LILIEMA repertoire-based literacy programme: taster and language tree activity (Miriam Weidl) The LILIEMA repertoire-based literacy programme: taster and language tree activity (Friederike Lüpke) Nationalism and the perception of language: Nationalism and the perception of languages – examples from Hebrew and Hindi/Urdu (Riikka Tuori & Mikko Viitamäki)
15:35-16:00 Break with refreshments
16:00-16:45 Language taster Swahili (Teresa Temu) Language taster Wolof (Miriam Weidl Foreign language learning with performative theatre – best practice (Sandrine Eschenauer)
16:45-17:00 Closing remarks and event evaluation

Language taster Somali

Liban Ali Hersi, University of Helsinki

The Somali language has 25 million speakers worldwide. This language of the Afro-Asiatic family is the the ninth largest language in Africa. Somali is the official language of the Republic of Somalia, and is also spoken in Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya and by Diaspora speakers across the globe. There are approximately 20,000 Somali speakers in Finland; over fifty percent of them are minors. Somali is one of the languages taught at the University of Helsinki. In this session, you can make your first experience in learning Somali, through an interactive taster lesson.

Language taster Swahili

Teresa Temu, University of Helsinki

Swahili, the most widely known and spoken African language,  belongs to the Bantu language family. It is used as an identity language mainly in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya. As a  lingua franca, it has spread to  the African Great Lakes region and other parts of eastern and south-eastern Africa, for instance to Burundi, Mozambique, Oman, Somalia the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa. Swahili is regularly taught at the University of Helsinki. In this taster lesson, you can go beyond the Swahili words you surely know – tembu, daktari, simba and jambo, to give some examples – and learn greetings and some easy sentences.

Language taster Wolof

Miriam Weidl, University of Helsinki

Wolof, an Atlantic language of the Niger-Congo phylum, is the biggest and most widely spoken language of Senegal and the Gambia, but can also be found in Guinea Bissau, Mali and Mauretania. Wolof is used cross-culturally and functions as a language of wider communication. In Senegal, it is spoken by more than 90% of the population, even though only about 40% of these speakers identify as Wolof. Constantly spreading, the language has a wide reach not only in West Africa, but all over the world. Wolof is taught for the first time at the University of Helsinki in the spring semester. In this taster, you can learn your first words and expressions in Wolof.

Nationalism and the perception of language – examples from Hebrew and Hindi-Urdu

Riikka Tuori & Mikko Viitamäki, University of Helsinki

In this workshop, we explore how nationalism affects the perception of language and how this perception forms a potential obstacle to the co-ownership of a language. Hard-line nationalism supposes that each nation has one language and the language of a person is determined by their birth. Native speakers speak the languages within the borders of a nation state. They are also inherently the ultimate authorities in the usage of their mother tongue. In the international context, merging the limits of a language with the borders of a nation state has led to dividing languages with a centuries-long shared history into separate units.

In nation states, the ownership of a language is determined in several contexts: in legislation (Who has the right to use what language?), language policy and education (What is taught in what language?), language-learning materials (Who owns the correct standard of a language? How are they portrayed in the language-learning materials?) and culture (What belongs to the literary canon of a language?).

These are the themes we explore in the light of examples derived from the history and present of Hebrew and Hindi-Urdu.

The LILIEMA repertoire-based literacy programme: taster and language tree activity 

Friederike Lüpke/Miriam Weidl, University of Helsinki

Multilingual speakers have diverse and multilingual literacy needs. Language-based orthographies turn multilingual writing into a burden, since learners need to master different language-specific sets of conventions. Particularly in low-resource educational contexts, it is important to build on informal literacies that are adapted to multilingual contexts. We offer an interactive introduction to a method, inspired by West African grassroots practices. This programme is called LILIEMA (“Language-independent literacies for inclusive education in multilingual areas”) and has been developed in collaboration with the Senegalese LILIEMA association. Using the official alphabet of languages of Senegal, it offers multilingual literacy skills by teaching the sound-letter associations of this alphabet for all the languages present in the repertoires of learners in a classroom. This learning method is suitable for all multilingual areas where there are no strong language-specific standard cultures, for instance in language support classes for multilingual immigrant children and families who only have literacy skills in the colonial, official, languages of their home countries. LILIEMA does not only create adaptive and inclusive literacy skills. Through raising awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity present in the classroom, it valorises and celebrates multilingualism as a shared wealth. In this taster, we use the LILIEMA method with the repertoires of participants of the study day in order to create multilingual language trees that allow exploring how close and different languages can be in different vocabulary domains.