时间：3月21日（下周二）下午2:00-4:00

地点：一楼报告厅

讲座题目：Global Languages and Local Identities

主讲人：Professor Richard F. Young

M.A. (Oxford), M.A. (Reading), Ph.D. (Pennsylvania)，professor of English Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Richard F. Young, M.A. (Oxford), M.A. (Reading), Ph.D. (Pennsylvania), is professor of English Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches courses in English Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, and Research Methods. His abiding research passion is to understand the relationship between the use of language and the social contexts that language reflects and creates. He has always seen that relationship as dynamic and reflexive, and his research has focused on change -- how newcomers learn to participate in the practices of a new community. Four of his books indicate that interest: Variation in Interlanguage Morphology (Lang, 1991), Talking and Testing (Benjamins, 1998), Language and Interaction (Routledge, 2008), and Discursive Practice in Language Learning and Teaching (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). He has published over 70 essays in journals and anthologies and serves on the editorial boards of three major journals. He has held visiting professorships in the U.S., Germany, Malaysia, Singapore, and China. During 2005-6, he served as President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and chaired the 14th World Congress of Applied Linguistics in Madison. Until 2004, he served as a consultant to Educational Testing Service during a major redesign of the TOEFL test.

Title. Global Languages and Local Identities

Abstract. Identity is a concept that has been defined in many ways and scholars have built theories of identity to explain persons’ and people’s sense of the term. In this lecture, I compare and contrast theories developed in second language acquisition, social psychology, anthropology, and communication sciences and conclude that each is grounded on the particularity of a social context. To expand the particular contexts studied by identity theorists, I consider the varied responses of individuals and groups to the influence of hegemonic languages in China, Ecuador, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia. Although contact by speakers of a local language with a hegemonic language is sometimes seen as endangering the local language and threatening speakers’ identities, I reject that as a pessimistic oversimplification. The studies I review of persons in contact with hegemonic languages provide new insights into how personal identities are contested and creatively constructed.