I spent the past few days at UCLA, participating in Experiencing (In)Competence: A Symposium in Honor of Elinor Ochs. Here is an excerpt from the text sent out to participants in preparation for the symposium: “As humans, we are constantly thrown into unfamiliar contexts, wrought in a fluid world. At the same time, we orient to a sense of normalcy, anchored in hexis. In the midst of this tension, we may discover our own and others’ (In)Competence. (In)Competence is an experiential condition of social action, social life, and social order in motion. Central to this experiential condition is the sense that (In)Competence is imminent: one can become (In)Competent at any moment.” This photo includes several women with whom I have had the great privilege and pleasure of thinking in motion with over the years.
language socialization
Learning How to Look & Listen
A great resource for students interested in video-based research on social interaction is now available at Learning How to Look & Listen. This website brings together resources from a conference supported by the Spencer Foundation at Arizona State University where an interdisciplinary group of older and younger scholars gathered to document and illustrate the basic patterns of visual and auditory attention that are employed by researchers who use video to study social interaction. Two scholars who trained me, Chuck Goodwin and Barbara Rogoff, are part this fabulous group.
AAAL panel on transdisciplinary approaches in applied linguistics
At the 2017 meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics, I will be presenting on the Expanding Repertoires project as part of the Language and Ideology Colloquium, ‘Transdisciplinary Approaches in Applied Linguistics: Exploring Language Practices and Tracing Ideological Effects to Address Real-world Issues’, organized by Liz Miller and Doris Warriner. Our colloquium is on Sunday, March 19. ADDENDUM: Before the panel we had a great lunch of tamales, joined by Kathy Howard (photo by Liz Miller).
AAA 2016 paper
Today at the 115th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, my advisee Sirad Shirdon is presenting our paper ‘The co- and re-construction of classroom competence in a Somali-centric Kindergarten’. We are part of the panel Language Socialization in Classrooms: Culture, Interaction, and Development, organized by Matthew Burdelski and Kathryn Howard and invited by the Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group (ACYIG). The panel previews an volume edited by Matt and Kathy, to be published by Cambridge.
Navigating Languages, Literacies, and Identities
The edited volume Navigating Languages, Literacies and Identities: Religion in Young Lives has come out! Edited by Vally Lytra, Dinah Volk, and Eve Gregory, the volume showcases innovative research at the interface of religion and multilingualism, with an analytical focus on religion in children and adolescents’ everyday lives and experiences. I have a chapter on my research in northern Cameroon and Central Ohio.
Children Seen and Heard Across the Globe, Part II
I will be participating in a workshop this coming week at the Lorentz Center in Leiden. Child development research has been dominated by studies in western urban societies. The aim of the workshop ‘Children Seen and Heard across the Globe‘ is to bring together a small group of scholars working with hard-to-reach non-Western communities in order to build interdisciplinary collaborations around the collection and analysis of video data sets from these communities. This week-long workshop follows up on the NIAS workshop held in April-May 2015.
Expanding Repertoires project website live
Now live, the website for the NSF-funded project Expanding repertoires of practice: Improving informal science learning experiences for preschool dual language learners.
Interview in Psychology Today
An interview with me about language learning in multilingual communities went live today on the Psychology Today website. Here is the blurb from the front page: What is everyday interaction like in communities where everyone speaks several languages? What language learning strategies do they use? What assumptions do they make about language learning? Dr. Leslie C. Moore answers questions about the two multilingual communities in northern Cameroon where she did her research and about her own language learning in the field.
Talk at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
Today I give a talk for the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. The talk, ‘Moving across languages and learning traditions’, will be in 16:00 – 17:00 in Eyckhof 3/005. I will present my research on the social and cultural patterning of language learning in three multilingual African communities. In the late 1990s I was a visiting scholar in African Languages and Linguistics at Leiden University, and I am excited to see old friends and hear about the exciting work they are doing now.
NIAS Workshop
I spent the past few days in a workshop, Children seen and heard around the world: A multidisciplinary cross-cultural approach to video data of family life and child development. Professor Judi Mesman (Centre for Child and Family Studies, Leiden University) organized this international workshop with 17 researchers from the fields of child and family studies, anthropology, and linguistics to present their available video data sets and their perspectives on the data sets. We are working toward the creation of an international multidisciplinary network that will facilitate sharing video data, and integrating our perspectives, forming collaborative alliances for future projects, and producing multidisciplinary scientific output.