En un lugar de Loñdres (EulL) is the title of a project developed in the Spanish course LN 122 Spanish Language and Society (B1-B2 CEFR) and it is also the title of this blog.
A detailed description of the project and its pedagogical implications can be found in Hernández-Martín L., Skrandies P. (2020) Taking the Foreign out of Language Teaching: Opening up the Classroom to the Multilingual City. In: Malinowski D., Maxim H.H., Dubreil S. (eds) Language Teaching in the Linguistic Landscape. Educational Linguistics, vol 49. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55761-4_13
THE PROJECT
London is not monolingual. This city goes to sleep and rises in the morning to the hum of an impressive linguistic diversity, where English, the official language, mingles with the so-called foreign langauges. One of them, Spanish, has between 200,000 and 300,000 native speakers in the city.
Is Spanish a ‘foreign’ language in London? For how long does a language have to be spoken in a place for it to cease being ‘foreign’? Or in fact is it not even a question of time?
Why we do not look the existing linguistic reality and start to talk about «present languages» and «absent languages»?
And why, when a student wants to practice a language he or she is studying, does that student have to catch a plane or connect to the internet instead of walking out into the street? Why, in ‘foreign’ language classes, do we ignore the communities of immigrants?
En un lugar de Loñdres (EulL) seeks to respond to (some of) these questions.
The project also encourages students to leave the classroom and go out into the streets of London to meet the Spanish speakers who live here. The students listen to their stories, observe and analyze their presence in – and impact on – the city, and reflect on the linguistic diversity of this multilingual context.
The project consists in a series of activities and workshops, and it is divided in two stages over a period of 15 – 20 weeks.
- Stage 1: Observing and contextualising the Spanish linguistic landscape of London
- Stage 2: Meeting members of Spanish-speaking communities in London – Individual project
The individual projects of students and the information collected during the activities are the base of this blog.
BLOG
This blog is a publication platform for the project. Here you will find:
- The Main Page where we publish the work (interviews, photographic essays, opinion articles etc.) created by the students and articles by others which can be interesting for the project.
- About EulL: brief summary of the project and access to Activities and Workshops for the Spanish classroom
- Web Journeys which is a collection of webpages, compiled by students and the teacher, about the Spanish-speaking communities and the Spanish language in London.
- Vídeo-Interviews in which members of these communities or experts in the field help to understand the history of the Spanish-speaking communities in London, their participation in political and other groups, the challenges they face, etc.
- Workshops about the use of documentary photography and the production of podcasts.
CONTACT
If you wish to know more about En un lugar de Loñdres (EulL) or to have access to the project materials, please contact Lourdes Hernández-Martín, Coordinator of Spanish Projects and Coordinator of Arabic at the Language Centre of LSE,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Spanish Section of the Language Centre of LSE thanks the students of LN122 Spanish Language and Society for their participation in the project, their enthusiasm and their support.
En un lugar de Loñdres 
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