Call for papers > Call for papers

!!!Final date for submission of proposals: extended to June 23rd, 2019 !!!

Aix-Marseille University welcomes you for the 27th RANACLES convention.

The RANACLES Convention is the annual meeting of the RANACLES association. It takes place during the last week of November and is organized by one of the association's language centres, in collaboration with RANACLES. RANACLES was created in the early 1990s and counts about sixty institutional members, such as universities, faculties or departments, IUTs, Grandes Ecoles, etc. All of them are also ex-officio members of the European Association of Language Centres, CercleS.

The RANACLES Convention focuses each year on a different theme related to practices and research in language centres. The 2019 edition will be an opportunity to deepen the topic of "Interactions and learning in language (resource) centres".

Since their origin, language (resource) centres have been places of multiple interactions in the service of learning. A reflection on the different forms of interaction has developed in two directions: on the one hand, the formalization and theorization of interaction practices aiming at, among other things, their dissemination; on the other hand, the study of the relationship between these interactions and the development of language, intercultural, digital and learning skills. The emergence of fast-changing technologies has also contributed to bring these questions into ever new directions, questioning the forms of interaction in various environments, the effects and potentialities for the development of different skills, as well as the methodologies for studying these situations. This year’s convention aims to investigate the notion of interaction at different levels – micro, meso, macro – intervening in language (resource) centres.

Proposals may focus on one of the following areas:

- Axis 1: Interactions and autonomisation

- Axis 2: Interactions for non-formal and informal learning

- Axis 3: Telecollaborations in language (resource) centres

- Axis 4: Language (resource) centres interacting with language education policies

Axis 1. Interactions and empowerment

From its first definition by Henri Holec (1979), language learner autonomy has been linked to an autonomisation process to make learners (more) able of taking charge of their learning. These interactions have taken various forms: counselling sessions theorized, in particular, by the work of CRAPEL (e.g. Gremmo, 1995, Ciekanski, 2006); workshops or group sessions to share learning practices, resources and strategies (e.g. Rivens Mompean & Eisenbeis, 2009); language classroom interactions involving collaborative and / or creative activities (Little et al., 2017); interactions in digital spaces, including Web 2.0 (Cappellini et al., 2017). In addition, one of the facets of autonomy that can be investigated relates to the exploitation of corpora (Boulton & Tyne, 2014), particularly for the development of skills on the types of discourses related to interactions in academia (Ravazzolo et al., 2015). Particular attention will be given to studies that focus on the emergence of communities of practice among learners, communities supporting autonomisation processes, be it face-to-face, online or hybrid.

In this area, the following questions may be addressed (among others):

- What forms of interaction shox promising potential for the autonomisation of learners?

- What is the place of these interactions in broader educational environments?

- What interactions are possible to support learners’ adoption of resources and tools, including digital ones?

Axis 2. Interactions for non-formal and informal learning

Unlike other spaces such as the language class, language resource centres are often non-formal and informal learning places, as defined by the European Commission (2012). These interactions take many forms: conversation workshops, language cafes, cinéclubs, tandems in presence and via videoconference and buddy programs. In the case of study-abroad periods, this can take the form of scenarios and pedagogical interactions with the non-university environment, such as associations. These interactions often connect students from different cultural backgrounds, thus generating an intercultural contact which, if it is properly addressed in terms of pedagogical engineering (Barbot, 2009), can be conducive of intercultural competence development (Dervin, 2017).

In this area, the following questions may be addressed (among others):

- What are the characteristics of these interactions in terms of discursive positioning, negotiations of places and relations of power, staging multiple identities?

- What type of language learning can take place in these interactions, both in traditional terms of lexical and grammatical content and in terms of discourse competence (Beacco, 2007) and interactional competence (Hall et al., 2011), possibly related to intercultural dimensions (Liddicoat & Dervin, 2013)?

- Under what conditions can these interactions guide learners in the development of their intercultural competences, whether in terms of acquisition of new knowledge, decentration, or development of discovery strategies?

- What formalizations of learning are possible and by what means (portfolios and e-portfolios, certifications ...)? Which ones are most desirable?

Axis 3. Telecollaborations in language (resource) centre

Language centres have always been one of the privileged places for the implementation of telecollaboration (O'Dowd & Lewis, 2016), since the first etandem projects (Little & Brammerts, 1996). These projects have been shaped according to various models (O'Dowd, 2007, 2018, Mangenot, 2013), such as e- or teletandem (Telles, 2009), Le français en (première) ligne (Mangenot & Zourou, 2008), Soliya (Genet, 2010). Telecollaboration has also taken the form of interaction between learners and Internet users, which has been defined in terms of telecollaboration 2.0 (Guth & Helm, 2010) or informal language learning online (Sockett, 2014).

In this area, the following questions may for example be addressed:

- Which integrations of different models of telecollaboration are possible in the language (resource) centre? Under which conditions? Through what kind of articulation with other elements of the centres, such counselling in its different forms?

- How does interaction occur through the manipulation of technical artifacts and under what conditions can this mediatization (Barbot & Lancien, 2003) hinder or, on the contrary, develop digital literacy skills (Lacelle et al., 2018)?

- What effects can be observed in terms of learning during and as a result of telecollaboration interactions?

- What are the conversational and cognitive dynamics in these types of exchanges? For example, what is the role played by psycholinguistic phenomena such as alignment (Pickering & Garrod, 2004) in the acquisition of languages in telecollaboration (Michel & O'Rourke, 2019)?

Axis 4. Language (resource) centres interacting with language education policies

Like any component of higher education, language (resource) centres are not isolated and their action is part of a broader vision of language education policies. They thus interact with orientations and objectives that lie beyond them and with different agents, at the local level of the university, as well as at the territorial and international levels. Therefore, these interactions at micro (university) meso (national) and macro (supranational institutions) levels deserve to be studied. In this area, the following questions may be addressed (among others):

- To what extent are language (resource) centres instruments of national and European language education policies? How can this role be critically examined in the light of national and European societal projects? What is the impact of language (resource) centres on linguistic ideologies and linguistic practices?

- What is the place of language (resource) centres in the design and implementation of language policies? What is the role of language (resource) centres in the internationalization policies of higher education? To what extent do language (resource) centres help to transform these policies? How to measure the agentivity of language (resource) centres as actors in these policies?

- What are the interactions between language (resource) centres and the CEFR? For example, what is the role of language resource centres in the harmonization of language tests and certifications or in the practice of some didactic approaches?

- What organizational configurations emerge in the interactions with university departments / faculties and in the managerial process, in the budgetary and administrative framework? What management and organizational solutions can be transferred / adapted?

- What interactions emerge between different language centres driven by calls for projects, for telecollaboration projects, for the development of open source tools...?

The terms of submission of papers are detailed in the tab "Submit a proposal (oral / poster)".

Deadlines

- Call for papers: mid-February 2019

- Final date for submission of proposals: extended to June 23rd, 2019

- Announcement of acceptance of proposals: July, 19th 2019

- Early-bird registration: until September 30, 2019

- End of registration period: 1st November 2019

- Convention: 21-23 November 2019

Contact: ranacles2019@sciencesconf.org