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8th International Language and development conference |
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23-25 June Dhaka Bangladesh |
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Our Intercultural Dialogue and Creative & Knowledge Economy agendas in Bangladesh were significantly advanced last week when we hosted the 8thInternational Conference on Language and Development. Some 230 participants
attended presentations by 31 international and 58 local speakers under the conference’s 5 themes of language, gender and development; the role of languages in national and cultural identity; sociolinguistic issues and challenges; capacity building and national development; and language and technology.
We presented the conference, part of our 75th Anniversary programme, in partnership with the Ministries of Education and Foreign affairs, the University Grants Commission of Bangladesh, the Institute for Education Research of Dhaka University and DFID who provided significant funding for the event. In his opening address the Minister of Education said, “I would
like to thank the British Council for their initiative and we are proud and deeply honoured that Bangladesh is hosting this conference.” It was indeed highly appropriate that the conference was held in Bangladesh – there are not many countries in the world in which language has played as key a role in national development and a number of presentations in the conference explored this from a number of different perspectives.
Professor Chris Kennedy of the University of Birmingham, our invited keynote speaker, set the context of the conference in a wide-ranging presentation that essentially looked at the question of language policy implementation since, he proposed, it is at the level of practice that language and development policies fail or succeed and he explored, for example, the differences between language in, as, of and for development.
Inevitably there were a large number of papers on English, whether from the perspective of teachers, learners, materials developers, researchers or project managers. The CSA project English for Teaching – Teaching for English was well represented with presentations from Council colleagues from Bangladesh, Nepal and Uzbekistan, and a paper on the Council-led Sri Lanka project on English as a tool for conflict transformation attracted significant interest.
But the focus was not only on Bangla and English – other languages, and issues around minority and indigenous languages, as well as questions around mother-tongue and other language education, were the subjects of many presentations and discussions. The conference successfully created an international forum where issues and challenges related to language policy, gender, cultural identity and the social dimensions of development and capacity building were energetically and enthusiastically debated. The collected papers of the conference, of which one of the Trustees of the conference said at the end, “this was the best L&D conference ever held”, will be published on soon.
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