UM to hold international seminar on multilingualism on 25 September

UM will kick off an international seminar on multilingualism on 25 September

An international seminar titled ‘Multilingualism in Greater China, Asia and Beyond: Policies, Mobility and Transculturality’, co-organised by the Chinese-Portuguese Bilingual Teaching and Training Centre (CPC) under the University of Macau (UM) Department of Portuguese, and the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Chair of Language Policies for Multilingualism at UM, will open on Wednesday 25 September. During the event, experts and scholars from different parts of the world with share the latest research results in multilingualism education. All are welcome.

The three-day seminar will be held from 25 September to 27 September. Macao’s multilingual and multicultural environment gives the city a unique advantage to carry out projects related to multilingualism. This upcoming seminar will focus on research projects related to UNESCO’s goals. It aims to create, among other things, a network of partner universities in different countries, to identify common research objectives and methodologies, and to promote the dissemination of research findings on topics such as language education, language acquisition, migration and mobility, multilingualism, and multiculturalism.

Five keynote speakers will speak at the seminar. They are Dr Gilvan Mulher de Oliveira from the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, Dr Evgeny Kuzmin from NGO Interregional Library Cooperation Centre in Russia, Dr Christopher John Stroud from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, Dr Yan Qiaorong from the Communication University of China, and Dr Edleise Mendes from the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil.

In 2018, UM joined the UNESCO Chair ‘Language Policies for Multilingualism’ initiative. Since then, it has been developing different projects involving its own academic staff and students and those from other institutions in Asia, with the hope of creating an international and inter-institutional network of researchers. This seminar is part of that effort. It consists of conferences, panel discussions, mini-courses, and presentation of research papers.

The event will be held in Room G010, in the Faculty of Business and Administration (E22). All the sessions will be conducted in English. For more information, please visit https://go.um.edu.mo/vv8nhl7r. For enquiries, please call 8822 4532 or email to BilingualCentre@um.edu.mo or robts@um.edu.mo.