OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
A growing amount of attention has been devoted in sociolinguistics to what we may call linguistic border crossings in the last decade or so. With clear references to sociocultural aspects of globalisation, a sizeable body of scholarship has developed specifically examining phenomena such as language hybridity, translanguaging and, in general, language practices in conditions of (super-)diversity. Especially with regard to English applied linguistics and TESOL, this can be seen as being part of a broader process of reconceptualizations of the English language as a trans-national entity which has gone on since at least the mid 1970s.
With this in mind, in my talk I will do two things:
1 trace the history, and provide a critical overview, of the analytical frameworks within which such reconceptualizations have been theorized and discussed, such as World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca;
2 discuss challenges in the ways this scholarship on “English across borders” can (should?) get its message(s) across to audiences beyond the borders of academia: how do we talk about language, nationality, identity, belonging? How do we talk about language change? How do we talk about messy language data?
