Colloquia - British Association for Applied Linguistics

BAAL Conference 2004 37 th Annual BAAL Meeting
allows or invites different interactional regimes, including perceptions of what counts as an acceptable
set of (enacted) language resources from its users. Such densely layered patterns of multilingualism
allow us to analyze the production of locality in the globalized era in which old and new forms of
transnational movement and intra-national response intermingle.
Key words: Multilingualism, neighborhood ethnography, polycentricity, globalization, migration
Paper two: Lost in communism. Narratives of post-1989 Polish migrant experience
Dariusz Galasinski and Aleksandra Galasinska
School of Humanities Languages and Social Sciences, University of Wolverhampton
d.galasinski@wlv.ac.uk
In this paper we are interested in constructions of migrant experience in the narratives of Polish post-
1989 immigrants to the UK who perceive their migration as unsuccessful, despite their wish to
contribute to and be integrated into the British society. More particularly, we shall focus upon the
positioning of the migrant and her or his immediate family in the social and economic reality of the host
country. The central argument of our paper is that the migrants‟ narrated experience is anchored in the
communist discourses of labour, social security and the state.
We shall demonstrate that the migrants construct themselves and their immediate families as the
those failed by the state and its social support agencies. While ready to train, work, and, more
generally, contribute to the society, the informants see this readiness as one which should to be
complemented by the state‟s help in obtaining employment. Not only are such constructions
reminiscent of discourses of communism in which the state is the distributor and guarantor of
employment, but also such narratives are predisposing the migrants to failure.
We shall finally argue that the immigrants‟ engagement with the dominant discourses of the host
country, their new „learning to labour‟, must start right at the level of the positioning of work and the
worker in the discourses of the state.
Paper three: Roots and routes through literacies: changing participation in a changing
environment
Clara Keating, University of Coimbra
The present paper draws on ethnographic research into the routes through language and literacy
practices experienced by a group of Portuguese women who have migrated to London. It focused on
the role of language and literacy in people‟s processes of creating identities in migrant situations. This
was a dynamic process where people played their own active role, located in the changing
environment of the Portuguese community in London that sees its profile shift rapidly from that of
„migrant‟ (with all the restrictions that „being a migrant‟ implies) to that of „European citizenship‟ since
1986 (with all the apparent social and economic possibilities that „European citizenship‟ implies).
Social transition opened space for conflicting, ambiguous and hybrid ways of doing that overlapped
the old and the new. New ways of understanding business, work, education, community associations
and public institutions were emerging for the Portuguese in the city of London, but they did not replace
the restrictions (in terms of language, work or social welfare) that people still experienced in their daily
lives, and that confined a vast majority of them to the traditional places of social activity (usually,
domestic help and the service sector). The study focused on the mechanisms of agency, resistance
and transformation revealed by personal experiences with language and literacy as these experiences
emerged from the changing structural and historical factors that configured them in many-faceted
ways (Keating, Maria Clara, 2001).
By drawing on insights taken from social theories of learning, the study of language and literacy as
social practice and critical discourse analysis to focus on the person in the doing (Wenger, 1998,
Engeström 1999, Barton and Hamilton 1998, Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999), this paper focuses on
Zelia‟s lived experiences with literacy upon her relocation to the city of London as these experiences
were narrated by her and observed by me in events. In particular, I will focus on the ways in which
Zelia “became an interpreter” fully recognised both by her community and the institutional context of
legal interpreting as it happened in the city of London at the moment of research. In this process,
Zelia followed a path through literacies that resonated the lived experiences of other people in the
research. Upon her relocation to London, Zélia held on to what she knew, named the practices around
her, legitimised them and eventually created new literacies of her own. Underlying this path were a
number of actions, or mechanisms, that she used as she participated in social practices of literacy. I
have called this a recycling process where the women in the research repeated, recognised, reflected,
recombined and reinvented the literacies at their disposal. In my view, these mechanisms can be seen
as as acts of learning, i.e., as changing participation, changing practice and changing identity. In other
words, as acts of both personal and social change.
King‟s College, London 9 – 11 th - 44 -
September, 2004