Hello, and thank you for visiting our site
We are Alessia Cogo, Martin Dewey, Jenny Jenkins and Gonzalo Pérez Andrade, a group of researchers committed to investigating multilingualism with English, particularly focusing on how multilingualism is experienced, understood, identified with, promoted, resisted/challenged and the like in a range of social settings (schools, healthcare, employment, public services).
We recognise the invaluable contribution of ELF research and build on the development of the field through the various phases of its paradigmatic transformation but move beyond previous approaches by taking multilingualism as our starting point and engaging with English/ELF only to the extent that our research participants do so. Thus, while we have strong empirical connections to ELF research, we adopt a distinctive framing of the work we do and the objectives we set.
What do we mean by ‘Multilingualism with English’?
In disciplinary terms, “Multilingualism” and “English” are often oriented to as distinct fields, but in CME we are drawing on and integrating research in multilingualism and English as a lingua franca (ELF).
MwE moves on from the notion of English as a Multilingua franca (EMF). In line with EMF, multilingualism was foregrounded in ELF further than in previous understandings of ELF. In MwE, we develop this further by bringing multilingualism to the fore and prioritising it over English, while English still remains in the multilingual mix. In other words, while English is available within a multilingual’s repertoire, their multilingual repertoire as a whole is our primary focus. Putting multilingualism first in the name ‘multilingualism with English’ symbolically demonstrates this point.
See a selected list of publications here:
multilingualismwithenglish.org 