[Linganth] Call for papers for AAAL 2016

[Bal Krishna Sharma]

Sorry for cross posting.

I am writing to invite contributors for a panel on global Chinese for
the upcoming AAAL conference to be held on April 9-12, 2016 in
Orlando, Florida. Below is an a draft of the abstract, and it will be
revised before final submission. Please let me know with a brief
abstract (about 150 words) by the 25th of July, 2015, if you are
interested in contributing a paper. Any correspondence should be sent
to my personal email: bsharma at hawaii.edu



Chinese in the globalizing era: Negotiating identities and ideologies

With the rise of China as a global economic and political power, the
Chinese language is gradually establishing itself as another global
language in diverse world contexts. Some researchers even go further
to argue that Mandarin Chinese has a potential to challenge the
decade-long hegemony of English as default lingua franca in the future
(Kobayashi, 2014). Teaching and use of Mandarin is further enhanced by
China’s setting up of Confucius Institutes, modeled on the British
Council, in many parts of the world. Due to the internal shifts in
China and global changes around the world, the role and status of
Mandarin Chinese is changing inside China, in the Chinese diaspora,
and in contexts where Chinese is gaining a growing space as an
important foreign language.  Drawing insights from recent changes in
the study of language in society (Blommaert, 2010; Coupland, 2010;
Pennycook, 2012), this colloquium aims to bring together empirical
studies from around the world and present cases from business,
tourism, linguistic landscapes, new media, heritage language contexts,
and foreign language education settings. The findings from these
studies show important sociolinguistic nuances of Mandarin Chinese as
consequences of the current phase of globalization.

Sincerely

Bal Krishna Sharma
Doctoral Candidate, Second Language Studies
University of Hawaii at Manoa
https://manoa-hawaii.academia.edu/BalKrishnaSharma