Abstract

As a social scientific enterprise second language learning and teaching values precision, enumeration, coding and precision. It has benefited from the ways positivism has helped to clarify and isolate phenomena and has, since Firth and Wagner’s seminal work, wrestled with its social construction and the many ways in which language has been described, determined and represented through what we might call western, normative scholarship.In this lecture, I will examine and situate myself, respectfully, within the long tradition critical of this approach, but which also symbiotically benefits from its work and determinations. I will present the theoretical work of scholars engaged in decreating and decolonising these approaches and the exciting new publications emerging in recent years which seek to give much greater credence and value than has been henceforth the case, to the linguistic scholarship undertaken in low to middle income countries and in indigenous contexts. I will draw on my own recent studies in arts and languages, working as an anthropologist, but also on the work I have undertaken within the normative frameworks offered by UNESCO and its reports on arts, culture, languages and intercultural dialogue.Through this often tense relationship with the critical and the normative, which I inhabit I will demonstrate the value of multipolarities; of the multilingual stance and the importance of interruptions to and within second language learning contexts. I will do this focusing especially in those whose learning is profoundly interrupted by the search for safety and refuge, and through recourse to poetry and the arts. In so doing, I will argue for an approach to language education in general and SLA in particular that proceeds using methods which are interculturally dialogic, trauma-informed and conflict transformational, and that for this to be possible, the arts are required in equal measure to the social scientific.