Conference: Rethinking how language background is described in academia and beyond

This award supports a symposium designed to address challenges with how language researchers have described and measured the varied ways that people use and feel about the language or languages they know. Terms that are often used to describe people, such as “native speaker” or “monolingual”, are often not accurate or specific enough for research purposes, and often end up mischaracterizing people’s experiences and abilities. This has had effects as broad as miscounting the number of speakers of a language, hiring discrimination, ineffective language instruction, and misdiagnoses of learning disorders. Because these problems originated in language research, it is urgent that language scholars come together to work towards solutions, within research and beyond. This two-day event brings together researchers to first outline the challenges with how these concepts are currently used across contexts such as language learning, bilingualism research, speech and hearing sciences, and psycholinguistics. Then, participants work together to identify solutions, including more accurate ways of capturing language background and abilities, put together suggestions for how to improve practice in research, assessment, and instruction. Finally, participants work to package these messages for various audiences, including funding agencies, other academics, and the general public. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.