NATECLA 2025

The CIALL-supported Island Voices project “Multilingual Memories: Birmingham 1984” was on prominent display at this year’s annual conference of NATECLA, the National Association for Teaching English and Other Community Languages to Adults, held at Aston University on 27th and 28th June.

Over the years, NATECLA has consistently lobbied and argued for due attention to be paid to the other languages used in the UK beside English. The Island Voices documentary, in tracing the life stories of Industrial Language Training practitioners as one example, reinforces the point that language diversity is now well established even in England, and has always been a feature of life across the UK.

With QR codes incorporated in the display poster, as well as on leaflets for each of the 350 conference packs, conference participants were enabled to view any of the 22 recordings in the 13 different languages in the collection on their own devices and at their own convenience. With NATECLA trustee Mary Osmaston also running a workshop on using other languages in the English language classroom, it was an opportunity not to be missed to profile some of these languages in actual use through the Island Voices recordings.