Langscape conference:
Multilingualism: minority & majority perspectives
Date: 12-14 October, 2017
Conference venue: Hampshire Hotel - Oranje Leeuwarden
Hosted by Mercator, European Research Center
Conference organised in the light of the activities of the Langscape network

About the conference
From 12 – 14 October 2017 Mercator European Research Centre hosted the annual Langscape conference: “Multilingualism: minority & majority perspectives”. The three-day conference took place at Hotel Oranje in Ljouwert, the Netherlands. Themes under discussion included: identities, perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, values, motivations, norms, behaviour, language policies.
The programme started with an excursion to two trilingual (Dutch, Frisian and English) schools: primary school “De Pôlle” in Marssum, and trilingual secondary school “CSG Liudger” in Burgum. Excursion participants attended lessons, interviewed pupils, and, in turn, were interviewed themselves. After lunch, opening words were spoken by Itesh Sachdev (SOAS), Stephan Breidbach & Lutz Küster (Humboldt-Universität), and Cor van der Meer (Mercator). First to present was keynote speaker Piet van Avermaet who discussed ‘Multilingualism in Education. Problem or Asset?”. His talk was followed by many interesting others, including the keynote lecture from Jasone Cenoz about perceived threats and opportunities of translanguaging, and the keynote lecture by Durk Gorter on making use of the linguistic landscape, in the classroom and beyond. In addition to the main conference, a doctoral seminar was held from October 12th to 14th 2017.

Conference programme
Keynote speakers were:
- Jasone Cenoz, University of the Basque Country
- Piet Van Avermaet, University Ghent
- Durk Gorter, University of the Basque Country
The full conference programme, including abstracts for all talks, may be viewed here:
Powerpoints for some of the presentations can be viewed here (in order of appearance):
- Lesley Harbon (Sydney) & Ruth Fielding (Canberra): Urban multilingualism embedded in Australian educational contexts
- Eva Juarros Daussa, Tilman Lanz & Renee Pera-Ros (Groningen): Two-way integration of migrants and minoritized speakers: voices from Catalonia
- Tanya Day Clark (Exeter, Berlin): “Why am I teaching this way?” Negotiating complex bilingual instructional language change in a secondary maths classroom; its effect on teacher identities
Photo's
Photo's taken during the conference may be found here.