Earlier this year, prof. Luciana Pedrazzini, the co-founder (with prof. Andrea Nava) of the Italy ELT Archive, and principal investigator in the project, was invited to give a talk at the international seminar “A sociolinguistic historicisation of foreign language teaching”, organised by prof. Maria Rosa Garrido Sardà at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
In her talk, prof. Pedrazzini discussed the development of ELT in Italy between the 1960s and 1990s, emphasising how materials production was impacted by school reforms and the revision of syllabuses for foreign language teaching. Prof. Pedrazzini underlined how the pedagogical design of ELT textbooks by Italian authors swung between innovation brought about by situational and communicative oriented methods and tradition originating from grammar-translation.
The international seminar saw the participation of other important scholars who delivered thought-provoking talks about the teaching and learning of foreign languages in different European contexts between the 19th and 20th century. Prof. Nicola McLelland (University of Nottingham) considered the teaching and learning of French, German, and Spanish in Britain, accounting in particular for the promotion of Spanish beginning in the early 20th century, and its subsequent popularity. To explain the reasons behind the popularity of certain languages, prof. McLelland analysed socio-cultural, structural, and intellectual factors in depth. The slides of prof. McLelland’s presentation can be downloaded here.
Prof. Narcís Iglesias (Universitat de Girona) discussed linguistic ideologies during the Spanish Transition from Franco’s dictatorship to the establishment of the constitutional monarchy under Juan Carlos I. Research focusing on this period is still undeveloped, compared to the wealth of historiographical studies on languages conducted with reference to Francoism. Based on the question whether the Transition represented an ecolinguistics revolution (Baggioni 1997) in the Spanish local context, prof. Iglesias demonstrated how a multiplicity of discourses on languages emerged through various channels, and how these were promoted by different stakeholders, such as journalists, artists, and even citizens.
The final talk in the seminar was delivered by prof. David Block (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), who reported on his experiences in ELT in Barcelona between 1979 and 1990. In his talk, prof. Block not only connected his experiences to wider trends in ELT in the European and global context at the end of the 20th century, but he also took into account the current state of ELT in Barcelona.
This international seminar was organised in the context of the project English at a time of transition (1970-1990) in Catalonia, which centres on the discourses and ideologies emerging in foreign language teaching in European debates and recommendations, in Spanish educational laws, and in the Catalan press. The book of abstracts of the seminar can be viewed here.