Thematic Session

Organizer

Marina Mattheoudakis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, marmat@enl.auth.gr

The teaching of Greek as a second/foreign language (L2) was born in the 1980s, at that time being considered a “newly constituted field of study” (Moschonas, 2017, p.30). Forty years later, the educational contexts where Greek is taught as L2 have increased and become more varied, mainly due to global migration and digital technologies. Relevant research in Greece and abroad indicates that the educational and socio-cultural contexts where Greek is taught as L2 differ widely, thus creating different needs and expectations regarding material production, teacher training, instructional practices and learning outcomes (Mattheoudakis & Maligkoudi, forthcoming). As a result, it has transpired that Greek as L2 is an umbrella term that covers a large number of various educational contexts sharing a single common feature: the instruction of Greek to multilingual learners who are not L1 speakers of Greek. Due to the variability of socio-cultural contexts where Greek is taught as L2, there is a pressing need for studies that will raise educators’, researchers’ and policymakers’ awareness of their differences and similarities as well as of their significant implications for all stakeholders – families, educators, learners (cf. Kramsch, 2018). The proposed thematic symposium aims to focus on the instruction of Greek to multilingual learners and highlight the complexity of the categories of ‘Greek as heritage language’ and ‘Greek as foreign language’. The rising number of Greek heritage speakers as well as the relatively recent introduction of Greek as a foreign language to immersion programs in the US (Mattheoudakis, 2020), have led us to reconsider the dividing lines between those two categories of learners as, apart from any differences between them, they both include multilingual learners of Greek. This stance also aligns with the ‘multilingual turn’ in language education (Lytra et al., 2022; Lytra, 2023), which focuses on the study of multilingual language use across a wide range of contexts and participants. The papers of this thematic symposium will present and discuss four different educational contexts – in Europe and the US – where Greek is taught to multilingual learners in primary, secondary and tertiary education. Our presentations are expected to shed light on the role of linguistic diversity and the impact of the socio-cultural context on Greek L2 learners’ education.

Kramsch, C. (2018). Is there still a place for culture in a multilingual FL education? Langscape Journal, 1. doi 10.18452/19039

Lytra, V. (2023). Appraising the ‘multilingual turn’ in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. In S. Ainsworth, D. Griffiths, G. Macrory, & K. Pahl (Eds.), Multimodality and multilingualism. Towards an integrative approach (pp. 3–14). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Lytra, V., Ros i Solé, C., Anderson, J., & Macleroy, V. (Eds.) (2022). Liberating language education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Mattheoudakis, M. (2020). An American and Greek language integrated curriculum a dual language immersion program: The case of Odyssey Charter School. In F. Soumakis & T. G. Zervas (Eds.), Educating Greek Americans. Historical perspectives and contemporary pathways (pp. 129–154). Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mattheoudakis, M., & Maligkoudi, C. (forthcoming). Exploring Greek as a second language in Greece and beyond. Routledge Publications.

Moschonas, S. (2017). The discovery of Modern Greek as a second language. In E. Agathopoulou, T. Danavasi, & L. Efstathiadi (Eds.), Selected Papers on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from ISTAL 2015 (pp. 27–50). Thessaloniki: School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Papers

Maria Kaliambou
Yale University
maria.kaliambou@yale.edu

Modern Greek belongs to the Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL), indicating that it is a language with limited presence in higher education in the United States. The major challenge is that various programs or departments offering Modern Greek constantly face the stress of existential survival. Despite this pessimistic outlook, the number of students interested in Modern Greek, while modest, remains stable. The student body in Modern Greek classes is heterogeneous. Students come from a wide range of academic disciplines and represent various class years. This diversity in backgrounds and interests enriches the classroom experience. Among the students enrolled in Modern Greek programs, there is consistently a cohort of heritage students—students of Greek origin. Some of them have had prior exposure to the language and its culture through their families and community institutions. According to Gay, a responsive teaching has to include the histories and experiences of the different groups in class (2000).

The presentation focuses on the Modern Greek language program within the Hellenic Studies at Yale University. The language program at Yale implements several innovative pedagogical strategies to address the challenges within the field. Through interdisciplinary connections and projects that extend teaching and learning beyond the confines of the curriculum, Yale’s program aims to enhance the visibility of Modern Greek within the Yale community and beyond. The presentation will demonstrate the “Heritage Meets Heritage” project, one of the pedagogical and research initiatives in which the Modern Greek program at Yale participates. It is a collaborative research project among several languages at Yale University, targeting to empower and support heritage learners from different languages (Lee-Smith, A and Alexandrov, S. 2023). The project aims to unite heritage students from various language departments at Yale, and study their linguistic and cultural patterns (Fairclough, M. and Beaudrie S. 2016). The paper will mention briefly the history, the purpose, the characteristics, and the various phases of the project, and will conclude by focusing on the Modern Greek case.

References

Fairclough, M., & Beaudrie, S. (Eds.) (2016). Innovative strategies for heritage language teaching: A practical guide for the classroom. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. New York: Teachers College Press.

Lee-Smith, A., & Alexandrov, S. (2023). Heritage meets heritage: Empowering and supporting heritage language learners. The Language Educator, (Spring 2023 issue), 29–36, plus online content. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Vally Lytra
Goldsmiths, University of London
v.lytra@gold.ac.uk

This presentation is situated at the intersection of the emergent field of early heritage language education and pedagogy. Despite the proliferation of heritage, also known as community or complementary schools worldwide, early heritage language education in these socio-educational settings is beginning to attract attention (Aravossitas et al., 2022; Lee & Bang, 2011; Schwartz & Minkov, 2022). Extending this body of work, this presentation reports on a yearlong collaboration containing elements of action research between the researcher/educator and the class teachers. This collaboration grew out of the pedagogical necessity to rethink and adapt the curriculum and teaching methods to respond to the heterogeneous cognitive, linguistic, social, and emotional needs of the youngest children in the school and to mentor and support the class teachers with the purpose of developing and expanding their practice.

In this presentation, I investigate the multilingual, multimodal, and multisensorial resources a group of children draw upon in their creative text-making and talk about texts at a pre-kindergarten class at a Greek heritage school in Switzerland. I present examples from one of the video recordings where the children are sharing and discussing their text-making with the researcher/educator and the teachers. The study adopts a translingual and transcultural orientation to language and language learning. This orientation takes a broad view of language that encompasses children’s full range of semiotic repertoires, aesthetic resources, and multimodal practices (Lytra et al., 2022). It proposes a dynamic, fluid, and contingent understanding of language and highlights the interdependence of language and culture. It embraces not only the instructional and formal aspects of language learning but also emphasises the multimodal, multisensory, aesthetic, personal and affective elements. In this sense it moves away from dominant rationalist and pragmatic approaches to language teaching and learning. It focuses on the transformative process of language learning and how it might reconfigure existing communicative resources and nurture new ways of being, seeing, feeling, and expressing in the world (ibid; also, Leung & Scarino, 2016; Phipps, 2019; Ros i Solé, 2016). The presentation offers important insights for the development of Greek heritage language pedagogy in early years (Lytra et al., 2023), and implications for practice in diverse early language education contexts more broadly addressing ‘the current scarcity in research-based strategies for language teachers, who are struggling to apply an effective curriculum for early language learners’ (Schwartz & Minkov, 2022, p. 21).

Marina Mattheoudakis
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
marmat@enl.auth.gr

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of a one-way dual language bilingual education (DLBE) program on students’ academic growth. One-way DLBE programs address students from the same language background and in the particular program all students are language majority speakers (i.e. English language speakers); according to Baker and Wright (2021), such programs are essentially world language immersion programs. The specific program was launched in 2017-2018 in Delaware, U.S. in a K-12 school with Greek as L2. The school offers a choice between two programs of Greek: (a) the immersion, and (b) the CLIL program. Both programs provide curricular instruction in Greek; in particular, 25% of the curriculum in CLIL and 50% of the curriculum in the immersion program is taught in Greek. As students of both programs come from the same geographical area and a similar SES background, the context offers itself for various comparative studies between the two cohorts of students (immersion vs CLIL). The school is implementing the partial immersion type of education and the core academic content is split by subject area between two teachers; the Greek teacher teaches math, science and Greek language arts, while the American partner teaches social studies and English language arts. The program aims to give learners the opportunity to acquire Greek through the study of academic disciplines and also develop their interactive skills in Greek as a foreign language. The present study will compare the two programs as to their impact on students’ academic growth in Reading and Math. The study draws data from students 1-5 over a period of five years; the data include students’ results in standardized Reading and Math tests. Our findings indicate that the immersion group outperforms significantly the CLIL group in Math in grades 1, 2, 4 and 5. Regarding their performance in Reading, the immersion cohort lags behind the CLIL cohort in grade 1, but as students move up the grades, achievement differences in reading between the two groups tend to decrease and the immersion cohort manages to outperform the CLIL cohort in grades 3, 4 and 5. The results of our study add to current research in the impact of immersion education on academic achievement and support the positive impact of dual language education on curriculum performance.

References

Baker, C., & Wright, W. E. (2021). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism (7th ed.). Multilingual Matters.

Lindholm-Leary, K. J., & Genesee, F. (2014). Student outcomes in one-way, two-way, and indigenous language immersion education. Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education, 2(2), 165–180.

Georgia Nikolaou
Odyssey Charter School & University of Pennsylvania
Georgia.nikolaou@odyssey.k12.de.us

The [+ learned] elements of Modern Greek (henceforth: MG) pertain to all levels of linguistic analysis (Anastassiadis-Symeonidis et al., 2018) and include lexical units, sublexical items, structures (idioms and expressions), and processes (e.g. the construction of new lexical units), which have been the product of internal borrowing, i.e. they were copied from former phases of the Greek language, and are marked as high/formal/academic in terms of register (Agha, 2007, p. 146). These elements, which constitute an essential and exceptionally vivid part of contemporary MG, should be part of every standardized curriculum of MG as a second/foreign language not only because they can enhance the learners’ grammatical awareness, but also because they can foster their pragmatic competence and improve their ability to communicate in an effective way. Even though the [+ learned] elements of MG are intertwined with the academic language usually taught in high levels of language proficiency, we believe that they can be as successfully introduced in the lower levels of learning, provided that: (a) authentic texts are used from an early stage of instruction, (b) L2 users are involved in thematic learning activities, and (c) cognitive language strategies, such as morphological segmentation, are consistently implemented in the process of L2 teaching. The goal of this presentation is to discuss the curriculum and the instructional methods and materials used for the MG courses at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) over the last four years (2019-2023).

References

Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, A. (2015). Grammar of the Modern Greek academic language within the scope of linguistics [in Greek]. Proceedings of 10th ELETO Conference “Hellenic Language and Terminology”, 12-14 November. University of Athens, Greece.

Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, A., & Fliatouras, A. (2004). The distinction between learned and colloquial in Modern Greek: definition and classification [in Greek]. Proceedings of ICGL6, 18-21 September 2003. Department of Philology of the University of Crete, CD-ROM.

Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, A., & Fliatouras, A. (2018). From the learned register of Modern Greek to Ancient Greek: Research proposals and educational perspectives [in Greek]. In Studies for Greek Language (April 2017). Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, A., Fliatouras, A., & Nikolaou, G. (2018). The dictionary of the learned level of Modern Greek. In J. Čibej, V. Gorjanc,I. Kosem, & S. Krek (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th EURALEX International Congress: Lexicography in global contexts (pp. 631–640). Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts.

Kamilaki, M. (2009). The learned elements in communication amongst young people: sociopragmatological investigation of the variety [+_LEARNED] [in Greek] [PhD Thesis]. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece.

Laughlin, V. T., Wain, J., & Schmidgall, J. (2015). Defining and operationalizing the construct of pragmatic competence: Review and recommendations. In ETS Research Report Series, 1–43. https://doi.org/10.1002/ets2.12053

Snow, M. A., & Brinton, D. (Eds) (2017). The content-based classroom: New perspectives on integrating language and content (2nd ed.). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.