This event in person and online. Please email olivia.knapton@kcl.ac.uk to receive the Teams link.

Simon Coffey and Carmen Quijada Van den Berghe, both members of the AILA research network HoLLT, will present on their work within the History of Language Learning and Teaching.  

Moral instruction and the performance of patriotism in pedagogical texts- Simon Coffey, King’s College London

The first foreign language teaching materials were developed to teach French in England, and French instruction has been a feature of English educational culture since the Middle Ages. Viewed as a social practice, however, the pedagogical encounter reveals a longstanding tension inherent in the dual objective of teaching a ‘foreign’ language while simultaneously ensuring the formation of patriotic subjects through education as moral training within a nationalist ideological framework. This presentation examines pedagogical texts from different periods and teaching contexts in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show how, although French serves as the language of instruction, the content is designed to reinforce a positive view of England and to foster patriotic values. Native speaker teachers especially, often foreign born and viewed with suspicion, had to balance presenting French as a desirable cultural asset while simultaneously demonstrating allegiance to the host society, particularly its polity and church.

The Spanish language in the nineteenth-century English press: Teaching, teachers and ideology-Carmen Quijada Van den Berghe, Universidad de Salamanca

Newspaper archives constitute a valuable primary source that has received relatively little scholarly attention in the study of language ideologies. This talk presents current research on the representation of Spanish as a foreign language in the nineteenth-century English press. The project has three main aims: first, to identify key newspaper and periodical sources relevant to the study of Spanish teaching in England, including cultural sections of the general press, specialised pedagogical and language-teaching journals, and the Hispano-British press; second, to develop a classification of relevant materials, such as advertisements for academies and textbooks, reviews, opinion pieces on methodology, and reports on educational institutions or legislation; and third, to present a case study of publishing companies and their pedagogical publications as advertised and reviewed in the English press, examining the gradual shift from individual grammar writers to large publishing firms that used the press for mass dissemination.

Simon Coffey is Reader in Languages Education at King’s College London where he is director of the PGCE Languages and deputy director of the MA in Language & Cultural Diversity. Approaching language learning primarily as a historically situated social practice, his research examines the different discourses that shape individuals’ motivations and actions, both in the classroom and in broader social contexts. He is a co-founder of the research network ECLE (Emotion and Creativity in Language Education) ECLE - Emotissage and is currently writing a book, supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, on historicising language education Historicising Language Education | King's College London 

Carmen Quijada Van den Berghe, currently a visiting scholar at King’s, is Associate Professor of Spanish language at the University of Salamanca, where she leads the research group Descriptive Grammar and the Historiography of Spanish Grammar. Her research focuses on two complementary areas: the historiography of linguistics and the grammatical and phonetic analysis of present-day Spanish. Her recent work seeks to integrate these perspectives within a comprehensive approach to language analysis. Her publications address the history of grammatical and phonetic ideas in the Hispanic tradition, the history of language teaching, language contact in the Hispanic press (1857-1939), Hispanic dialectology through regional linguistic atlases, and Spanish sociophonetics and phonology.