Localising English in Lleida

Kids&Us: The Natural English Fallacy Franca Amongero, Aida Becerra and Rosi Silva Introduction There are several factors that affect the learning of a second language (L2), among which we can find age and setting (Hummel, 2009: 1). The general public, however, ignore the research that has been made by applied linguists on the matter and hold beliefs based on what they hear. One of these is that the younger one begins to learn a language, the faster the rate of acquisition and the closer the skills will be to a native-like level, which is not hard to believe since many teenagers and adults struggle with learning English. Another assumption is that the best setting to learn a L2 is the natural setting. These are the two assumptions that Kids&Us, an English language school, uses to call people’s attention, offering classes to children from one year of age until they are 18. The token we will be analysing is the window display of a branch of the English language schools chain Kids...

STOP ISLAM(OFÒBIA):  A Clapback to Racism Paula Díaz, Berta Puig, Oriol Solé  1. INTRODUCTION         Our chosen token is a piece of graffiti writing on a wall, which reads “STOP ISLAMOFÒBIA ”. The writing, however, seems to have been done in two steps, and the original message appears to have been “STOP ISLAM”, which would have later been transformed to “STOP ISLAMOFÒBIA” by adding “-OFÒBIA”. As it is graffiti, it belongs to the activity domain of urban art (Mooney & Evans, 2015), and because of its location we can affirm it is of a transgressive nature. The message is composed of two languages, English (“stop Islam”; although “Islam” could also be Catalan or Spanish) and Catalan (“islamofòbia”),  both of which we can consider as main or foregrounded languages, with no secondary or backgrounded languages. The alphabet used is the Roman alphabet. 2. CONTEXTUALISATION The graffiti is located in Avinguda Pearson, 23, in a neighbou...