LiDi 2026
Linguistics at school in a European perspective
LiDi 2026
University of Zurich
April 13-14, 2026
Confirmed speakers
Ann-Marie Moser (University of Zurich)
Anna Pineda (University of Barcelona)
Tom Rankin (Masaryk University Brno)
Michelle Sheehan (Newcastle University)
Jimmy van Rijt (Utrecht University)
Organizers
Europe’s linguistic landscape is increasingly diverse. It encompasses standardized national languages (taught to both L1 and L2 learners), regional minority languages and dialects, home and heritage languages, as well as learned/taught foreign non-European languages. Language education has been a key pillar in European education policy, which endorses the importance of plurilingual and intercultural education for democratic culture. In addition to the longstanding policy aim of European Union citizens gaining proficiency in two additional languages, an important principle of the recommendation relates to language awareness.
The 8th edition of the LiDi conference series focuses on a specific perspective to raise such language awareness in the European education systems, which can be summarized as linguistic awareness—an approach where contents and insights of the academic discipline of linguistics (both theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics) are adapted to pre-university language classrooms. Linguistic awareness will ultimately result in language awareness, which advances the students’ consciousness of different forms and functions of language and promotes analytical, critical, and science-based thinking.
The workshop will bring together leading experts who are already involved in relevant initiatives in their own countries, but who do not yet have a joint platform to cooperate and interact with each other at a European level. The goal is to shift the focus from views where knowledge about language is mostly regarded as an instrument (subservient to the development of literacy) to a perspective valuing knowledge about linguistic concepts itself for their societal and cultural significance.
Therefore, we seek contributions from a wide range of linguistic subfields, including but not limited to the following questions:
• Variation and Change (social and multilingual): How can we help student teachers and schoolteachers understand the broad linguistic concepts of language variation and change (including dialects and sociolects)? How can we address linguistic discrimination in various European societies, and how can it be overcome?
• Linguistic Form (phonology and morpho-syntax): How can we make fundamental aspects of language structure accessible to language education? How can we best bust the myth that language structure is linear and introduce basic concepts of hierarchical structure?
• Linguistic Meaning (semantics and pragmatics): How can we teach the underlying principles of ‘meaning’ in pre-university classrooms? We are particularly interested in connecting linguistic ways to analyze linguistic meaning with phenomena we encounter in the digital world, such as generative AI tools (ChatGPT) or fake news.
Please see our detailed Call for Papers.