Category: ILT

The recently completed Island Voices project “Multilingual Memories: Birmingham 1984” was on prominent display at this year’s annual conference of NATECLA, the National Association for Teaching English and Other Community Languages to Adults, held in Birmingham on 27^th and 28^th June. Project representatives Harmesh Manghra (first on left) and Sardul Dhesi (second from right) are joined in the picture by Paul Sceeny, NATECLA co-chair, and Mary Osmaston, trustee of the association.

With QR codes incorporated in the display poster, as well as on leaflets for each of the 350 conference packs, conference participants were enabled to view any of the 22 recordings in the 13 different languages in the collection on their own devices and at their own convenience.

Over the years, NATECLA has consistently lobbied and argued for due attention to be paid to the other languages used in the UK beside English. As Industrial Language Training (ILT) practitioners in Birmingham back in the 1980s, both Harmesh and Sardul, alongside others, were involved in onsite language training in factories and other workplaces across the city. The Island Voices documentary, in tracing the life stories of ILT workers and how their careers developed and diversified, reinforces the point that multilingualism is an established fact of UK life, and always has been.

With Mary also running a workshop on using other languages in the English language classroom, it was an opportunity not to be missed to profile some of these languages in actual use through these Island Voices recordings. Many thanks to NATECLA for accommodating us!