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Offers a window into the lived experiences of multilinguals, not only as learners, but as languagers, highlighting language cafés as meaningful beyond their potential for informal language socialization
This book showcases the human endeavour of communicating across languages and cultures as a pleasure and a sought-after experience.
It explores language cafes, which provide an informal conversational space for people interested in speaking a specific language or languages, thereby fulfilling a specific gap in the social ecologies of multilingual speakers (including both learners and proficient speakers), who look for opportunities to use and socialise in languages with multilingual and cultural others without the need to travel far.
The author expands notions of language and intercultural learning, blurring the boundaries between learning and leisure, and putting the multilingual and intercultural subject in interaction with others at the heart of the learning process. The focus on what happens outside of the language classroom will raise teachers’ and learners’ awareness of how to create and maintain better interconnected language learning ecologies.
Nuria Polo-Pérez is an Assistant Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Durham, UK. Her research is focused on intercultural communication, multilingual identities and informal language learning.
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Researching the Ecologies of Language Cafés
Chapter 3. “We Are All in the Same Boat”: Co-constructing Multilingual Socialisation and Collaborative Learning Spaces
Chapter 4. “I Didn’t Know I Could Do That!”: Experiencing Multilingual Identities in the Language Cafés
Chapter 5. Experiencing Interculturality and Otro Mundo in Language Cafés
Chapter 6. Conclusions