This book showcases the human endeavour of communicating across languages and cultures as a pleasure and a sought-after experience.
It explores language cafes, which provide an informal conversational space for people interested in speaking a specific language or languages, thereby fulfilling a specific gap in the social ecologies of multilingual speakers (including both learners and proficient speakers), who look for opportunities to use and socialise in languages with multilingual and cultural others without the need to travel far.
The author expands notions of language and intercultural learning, blurring the boundaries between learning and leisure, and putting the multilingual and intercultural subject in interaction with others at the heart of the learning process. The focus on what happens outside of the language classroom will raise teachers’ and learners’ awareness of how to create and maintain better interconnected language learning ecologies.
Nuria Polo-Pérez is an Assistant Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Durham, UK. Her research is focused on intercultural communication, multilingual identities and informal language learning.