Our Centre for Language Education Research (CLER) invites you to join a webinar on MS Teams. See https://tinyurl.com/8pr4h4a to register. All welcome!  

Speaker: Prof Bassey Edem Antia, University of Western Cape, South Africa 

DAAD-Guest Professor, University of Education Heidelberg, Germany 

Abstract: Assessment is currently taking a ‘multilingual turn’ judging by the plethora of ongoing initiatives (conferences, books, special journal issues, organizations, funded research projects) devoted to the subject. However, there is a sense in which conceptualizations of the concept, its drivers and its operationalization may differ across stakeholder-communities and hinder the development of a coherent and critical body of scholarship. This presentation disentangles conceptualizations of multilingual assessment and surfaces the language ideological canvas undergirding different conceptualizations. Coupling the foregoing with a reading of the goals to which initiatives in multilingual assessment appear to be responding as well as with a mapping out of implementational opportunities, the presentation undertakes some conceptual ground-clearing and makes a contribution to what I would like to refer to as multilingual assessment literacies. 

Speaker Bio: Prof. Bassey Edem Antia is Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His teaching and research interests span language policy and planning, terminology, multilingualism, health communication and corpus linguistics. Some of his ongoing work is attending to the diversification of languages and language varieties used in teaching, learning and assessment in higher education; the cultural politics and political economy of language; and the social semiotics of COVID-19. He has also researched the dynamics of terms in pedagogical discourses, the intellectualisation of African languages, and applications of terminology in a range of contexts (medical and veterinary anthropology, regulatory pharmacy, text analysis, specialised translation, etc.). As a consequence of holding university leadership positions and involvement in several capacity-building initiatives, he intermittently writes on facets of higher education management. He has authored, edited and co-edited books (Benjamins Press, Amsterdam/Philadelphia); his articles on language education have appeared in journals such as Linguistics & Education, South African Journal of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Language Policy, and the International Journal of the Sociology of Language.