Many of us in the ReaLiTea project share a concern about the ways in which scholarly communication is dominated by English, and how the hegemony of English is impacting other languages. In the context of our project, we are conscious that English is our de facto language of communication, many of our outputs (e.g., learning resources) will be made available in English in the first instance, and even the language of this communication is English. We feel that the Research Literacy of Teachers must be more than the ability to only access research written in English or being able to share questions and findings in just English.
This is why we are making an effort to increase the visibility of ReaLiTea in other languages and to increase the visibility of other languages in ReaLiTea. One of the ways in which we attempt to do this is by creating dedicated spaces for ReaLiTea on our local university websites and the websites of our research groups. Here are some examples:
We are aware that challenging the global dominance of English involves more than increasing the visibility of languages that are less widely used; we are equally aware of the complicated roles that our own languages have in our respective countries of origin. But we think that even such a modest start can help us all start thinking about the ways we use languages, and the effects of our language choices.
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