Raúl Alberto Mora – Revisiting Today’s Language Ecologies

This webinar was presented live on April 12, 2015 for Global Conversations in Literacy Research 2014-2015 Series (http://globalconversationsinliteracy....) APA Citation: Mora, R. A. (2015, April 12). Revisiting Today’s Language Ecologies: New Questions about Language Use and Literacy Practices. [Webinar]. In Global Conversations in Literacy Research Web Seminar Series. Retrieved from    • Raúl Alberto Mora – Revisiting Today’s Lan...   Dr. Raúl Alberto Mora is a professor of English education and literacy at UPB-Medellin in Colombia. At his university, he currently coordinates the MA in Learning and Teaching Processes in Second Languages (Maestría en Procesos de Aprendizaje y Enseñanza de Segundas Lenguas), or ML2 and holds the post of Research Coordinator for the School of Education and Pedagogy. He also chairs the Literacies in Second Languages Project, a research team featuring preservice teachers and master’s student that studies the emergence of alternative literacies in urban, virtual, and school contexts in the city. Dr. Mora participates on several editorial boards, including Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (where he currently serves a Policy and Advocacy Department Editor), and the Editorial Boards for PROFILE and HOW journals in Colombia. He is currently involved in diverse research and publication efforts with scholars in Colombia, the U.S., and England. He has presented and published his research (both in person and virtually) in Colombia, the U.S., Brazil, Argentina, Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Vietnam, Spain, India, and Russia. A former Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Mora earned his Ph.D. in Language and Literacy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Today, he is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Colombian Fulbright Commission. Dr. Mora’s first language is Spanish, but he also speaks English, French, Portuguese, and is learning Russian. He has presented and published his research (both in person and virtually) in Colombia, the U.S., Brazil, Argentina, Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Vietnam, Spain, India, and Russia. Abstract of his web seminar: In the last decade, literacy researchers have agreed that language practices are in a faster state of evolution than previous times. Technology, social mobility, and the new community configurations via social networks are opening new spaces for language use and are reconfiguring how we understand and frame today’s language ecologies, languages themselves, and literacy at large. These new configurations call for new frameworks that promote equitable language and literacy practices and that offer language users in our cities a wider range of options to play with the different languages that already dwell there. This seminar will introduce some of those questions as we have explored them in our research agenda at the Literacies in Second Languages Project (LSLP). The first part of the seminar will revisit the question of whether we should still use the notion of “foreign languages” today. I will problematize some of the issues I have found with this term and why, instead, we are talking about “second languages” as a more fluid concept. Then, I will share our current work at LSLP, including our conceptual frameworks, where we look at how literacy practices in second languages are reshaping a city that conventional wisdom and government policy assume as “monolingual”. We will discuss our current findings and ongoing research as they keep showing us that language policies for Colombia and other countries should keep in mind the existing multilingual literacy practices that already exist in our cities. Please visit the following link to learn more about Dr. Mora's work: https://globalconversationsinliteracy...