Available	2023-03-29 – 2023-08-17
Contact person	Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi, employed at Department of Modern Languages

The purpose of this two-day conference is to explore different aspects of mother-tongue, or more specifically, home, heritage, and community language education. In today’s globalised world there is a need for trained teachers and innovative pedagogies to teach pupils from migrant backgrounds in schools. Moreover, it is the human right of linguistic minorities to have access to tuition in their heritage or home language, which contributes to an equal and democratic society. Home, heritage, and community language tuition is also a tool to reclaim and revitalise Indigenous and other historical minority languages (e.g. Yiddish, Romani) that are threatened. However, the tuition of the non-majority languages the pupils speak often faces challenges due to limited resources and classroom time. Moreover, approaches to teaching home languages that build on and reflect local languaging practices are needed.

The conference committee invites abstracts for individual presentations on original research or pedagogy-focused topics by one or more authors. Presentations will be a maximum of 20 minutes with 10 minutes for discussion. Abstracts of maximum 500 words (excluding references), addressing social, affective and classroom aspects relevant to education in non-majority languages are welcome. The conference language is English. Abstract submission will close on 15 August 2023. All abstracts will be reviewed anonymously, and notification of acceptance will be sent by 1 September 2023.

There will be a possibility to publish a full paper in a peer-reviewed edited volume or a special issue shortly after the conference (early 2024).