Multilingualism, Language in Education, and Academic Literacy. Applied Linguistics Research in the Language Centre

Publisher Marketing: The Language Centre was founded in 1970 as a language research department in the University of Ghana, under the then Faculty of Arts. Its mandate was to focus on research and teaching related to the improvement of performance in English, the official language, and the various Ghanaian languages as vectors of education, culture and community interaction. Since the 1970s, the Centre has been focusing on research related to language learning, teaching and assessment, language endangerment and documentation, multilingualism, intercultural communication, and the interconnected areas of language and literature. This book, in essence, reflects these research areas, but more than that the constitutive research articles were produced jointly or severally by different generations of directors and research fellows of the Centre, over the four decades of the organization's existence. The ten chapters of this commemorative anthology comprise selected research articles from a very large pool of previously published works with continuing relevance, as well as more recent works that have not yet been published. The book is not designed for release as a discrete and independent publication. On the contrary, it feeds into a much wider set of commemorative collections from diverse units, all of which are thematically linked in a manner designed to project the mission of the University of Ghana. Contributor Bio:  Aidoo, Ama Ata Ama Ata Aidoo has distinguished herself as a writer and as a consultant on education and gender issues. She graduated from the English Department of the University of Ghana, Legon, where she was immediately appointed Junior Research Fellow of Advanced Creative Writing Program at Stanford University and, in the early 1980s, a Minister of Education in Ghana. While lecturing in the Department of English at the University of Cape Coast in the 1970s she was also appointed to serve on the Board of Directors of the Ghana Medical and Dental Council. She has travelled widely, and has been appointed Visiting Professor and Distinguished Visiting Professor to the English, Theatre, African, and African American Studies departments in a number of universities and colleges in the United States. She is the Executive Director of Mbaasem, a foundation to support African American women writers and their work. Her publications include the dramas The Dilemma of a Ghost (Longman, Harlow, 1965) and Anowa (Longman, Harlow, 1970); the short stories No Sweetness Here (Longman, Harlow, 1970); the novels Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (Longman, Harlow, 1977 and Changes (The Women's Press, London, 1991); the poetry Someone Talking to Sometime (College Press, Harare, 1985) and An Angry letter in January and Other Poems (Dangaroo Press, Coventry, 1992); and the children's books The Eagle and the Chickens and Other Stories (Tana Press, Enugu, 1986) and Birds and Other Poems (College Press, Harare, 1987). Ama Ata Aidoo's many awards include the Nelson Mandela Prize for Poetry in 1987 for Someone Talking to Sometime and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa for Changes in 1992.