Kollegiale Fachtage
English Roundtable
The next English Roundtable will take place in September 2023. Date still to be announced. We will continue the work with curriculum development and diversity. The focus of the next roundtable will be on Ecolinguistics. Ecolinguistics as a field of inquiry, has its genesis in an article published in 1972 by the US American linguist, Einar Haugen: The Ecology of Language – Language Science and National Development. The field has developed in contrast to form-based theoretical and research endeavors in 20th century linguistics, and four historical streams of conceptualizing language ecology can be identified: “language ecology 1) as symbolic ecology, 2) as natural ecology, 3) as sociocultural ecology and 4) as cognitive ecology” (Vork Steffensen & Fill, 2014: 6 – 25). These four streams do not represent clearly demarcated branches of inquiry or theory building chronologically replacing each other, but rather intertwine and even contradict, and for the roundtable, the definition by John Wendel will be used as orientation: “The ecological approach to language considers the complex web of relationships that exist between the environment, languages, and their speakers” (Wendel, 2005:51).
