Recollections Recorded of Industrial Language Training

As part of the CIALL-supported Island Voices Extensions initiative, the “Multilingual Memories: Birmingham 1984” project looks back 40 years through the spoken recollections of former ILT staff and community associates.

The LSI’s CIALL project manager and researcher, Gordon Wells, returned to England to apply the Island Voices “language capture and curation” model in an urban and highly diverse linguistic context, with the help and hospitality of South and City College Birmingham and NATECLA – the National Association for the Teaching of English and Other Community Languages to Adults. The project also drew on previous collaborative partners in Mediating Multilingualism and Talking Points with Norman Maclean in order to resource the production of the short introductory documentary in nine of the most widely spoken South Asian languages in the UK as well as English, Gaelic, Jamaican, and Welsh.

Individual members of the Birmingham ILT team of the 1980s (now mostly retired) and associates reminisce in a range of languages about the multilingual milieu in which they operated at the time and critically recall strengths and weaknesses of some of the approaches the service took in relation to workplace-based ESOL, Equal Opportunities and Anti-Racism advice and consultancy, and Community Language support. Online Landscape or Portrait PDFs enable direct linkage to the online recordings, with further summary video descriptions and links to support available on the Island Voices site.

Here's the English version of the introductory video: