“English as an Additional Language”
8 July
Presented in Part 2 of the Panel “Constructing ‘Worlds of Literature‘”, moderated by Dustin Breitenwischer and Samira Spatzek. 17:00 – 19:00 (Berlin time).
The recent movement in Writing Studies and Sociolinguistics from teaching “English as a Foreign Language” to teaching “English a Second Language” and now to teaching “English as an Additional Language” signals one key effort to recognize the simultaneity and relativity of language knowledges and the presence of intralingualism within national cultures. The change in monikers reminds us that we are all English language learners. But it also reminds us that being an English language learner isn’t enough even for fluency in English. The future of any truly capacious, multilateral literary history will require engaging robustly and generously with the history of language contact, the history of media, the changing shape of languages across and within our comunidad.
Introduction by Samira Spatzek, Postdoctoral Researcher RA 1 “Competing Communities”
Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Dean of Humanities in the School of Arts and Sciences, Distinguished Professor of English, and Affiliate Faculty in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She is the author of Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015; 2021 Japanese) and Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (2006), and editor of eight books, including, with Eric Hayot, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (2016). Her special issue on “The Postlingual Turn,” edited with Yasser Elhariry and including her essay “Less Than One Language,” appeared in the journal SubStance this spring. That work is part of a project on “Future Reading,” which argues that new experiments of multilingual fiction, by migrant novelists, essayists, and nonfiction fabulists, are changing the way we encounter world languages, as well as how we count, know, and teach them.
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