Distinguished Lectures in Humanities: Rethinking ‘Cultural Thought Patterns’: Translanguaging and Intercultural Communication

Abstract

The idea of translanguaging has disrupted much of the thinking about language, communication and learning and raised some fundamental questions about human language and human cognition. One of these questions concerns an assumption that seems to underlie a great deal of the work on intercultural communication, and that is, speakers of different named languages not only use language differently, but also think differently and have different worldviews. In this talk, I want to invite the participants to rethink about this issue, from the perspective of Translanguaging, which posits that bilinguals and multilinguals do not think unilingually and thinking goes beyond named languages and indeed beyond what has traditionally been conceived as linguistic versus non-linguistic processes. I offer my views on the existing work in intercultural communication and cross-linguistic studies of cognitive processing and Linguistic Relativity. Implications of this common-humanity-based conceptual stance for intercultural communication including business and workplace lingua franca communication, as well as for language learning and pedagogy, and research design are discussed.

About the speaker

Professor LI Wei is Director and Dean of the UCL Institute of Education, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, at University College London (UCL), where he also holds the Chair of Applied Linguistics. His research covers many different aspects of bilingualism and multilingualism. He is editor of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and the Applied Linguistics Review. He has won the British Association of Applied Linguistics Book Prize twice. He is a fellow of the British Academy, Academia Europaea, Academy of Social Sciences, UK, and the Royal Society of Arts, UK.