Liberating Language Education

The editors and contributors to this book liberate language and language education by placing them in a 'caravan' of unpredictable actions that are locally situated. This book masterfully centers the aesthetic ways in which people and learners liberate language by bringing art, digital storytelling, drama improvisation, poetry, song, and music into the center of meaning-making. * Ofelia García, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA *
This is a truly path-breaking volume. It provides a highly original, transdisciplinary vision of how language and language education can be reimagined in research and practice. Drawing on recent advances in theory-building relating to language in contemporary social life, the contributors present rich and engaging accounts of fluid, situated language learning practices and demonstrate, in clear and compelling ways, how language education can be liberated locally from long-dominant ideologies about fixity in language and prescriptive models of pedagogy. * Marilyn Martin-Jones, University of Birmingham, UK *

The stimulating title of this remarkable book reflects the original theoretical questionings of the conceptualisation of language education across multiple new facets of language learning experiences. Readers will discover an exiting alternative vision of language education through a wide range of new research dimensions explored to transform language learning and teaching. This volume is a seminal text that will stimulate researchers, teachers and learners alike to understand that our responsibilities regarding language education have changed and that we must all become engaged policy activists.

-- Christine Hélot, University Strasbourg, France

At the core of “Liberating Language Education” is an invitation to readers to problematize how they perceive language education. The diverse contributions that make up this volume engage with this question from multiple perspectives, and effectively challenge views of communication that are narrowly linguistic and views of learning that are narrowly formal. The effectiveness of the volume lies in the suggestive power of the various contributions, and in the opportunities these diverse chapters create for imagining alternative to normative practice in language education.

-- Achilleas Kostoulas, University of Thessaly, Greece * LINGUIST List 33.2271 *

This book certainly reaches its ‘liberating’ goals by presenting multiple ways of challenging static notions and thoroughly illustrates Tudor’s statement that “…language teaching is far more complex than producing cars”.

-- Tazin Abdullah, Macquarie University, Australia * Multilingua, 2022 *