The‘Multilingualism and Families’ Academic Conference and Emerging Scholars’ Workshop is a scholarly event that situates language policy research in the state-of-the-art development of China’s Belt and Road (B&R) initiative. In response to the China’s developmental strategy, it is important to promote the learning and teaching of multiple foreign languages in the country’s educational system. Meanwhile, with China’s deepening engagement in the globalization process, Chinese families are moving around globally. This brings up some burgeoning issues that need to be addressed by Chinese language policy researchers: A large number of families will face linguistic challenges posed by the multilingual world. These issues highlight the necessity of family language planning and family language policy in China as well as relevant research.
To better explore and study the multilingual challenges that our educational system and families are faced with, our Conference and Workshop invites renowned international scholars to join the dialogue with Chinese academics. The Conference and Workshop is hosted by the School of Foreign Languages and Literature and the National Institute of Chinese Language Matters and Social Development, Wuhan University. Our focus is on practical issues in research methods and paradigms that emerge from real-life cases.Through intellectual exchanges, the Conference encourages responses from multiple perspectives to these issues. The Workshop aims to bring an opportunity to emerging scholars to have productive conversations with established academics in language policy, sociolinguistics, education and other relevant disciplines.