Dr. John Edwards has reason to celebrate. The internationally recognized author and StFX psychology professor has seen four long-term writing projects come to fruition. He’s received invitations to present at several international conferences, and his plate is full with more book projects in the works.
“It feels great. This is what scholars aim to do, to have their ideas pushed out in the world, to see how people react,” says Dr. Edwards, who has had a particularly active, exciting and rewarding last year and a half.
“To finally see the copies of the printed book arrive on your desk one day, there it is between the covers, it’s a very satisfying feeling.”
In particular he is pleased to see several ongoing book projects come to fruition, all coincidentally around the same time, Un món de llengües (published in both Spanish and Catalan by Barcelona: Editorial Aresta), Language and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Language Diversity in the Classroom (Bristol: Multilingual Matters) and Minority Languages and Group Identity: Cases and Categories (Amsterdam: John Benjamins).
While each book deals with a separate subject matter, Dr. Edwards says the connecting thread between all is language and its relation to identity and our sense of identity.
“It’s not linguistics, the nuts and bolts. It’s not even psycho-linguistics, how children learn a language, it’s really more socio-linguistics, the sociology of language, language as a window into different aspects of our social life.”
This theme – the relationship between language and group identity – has been the driving force in a stellar career.
Dr. Edwards, who is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Canadian Psychological Association and the Royal Society of Canada, has lectured and presented papers in 30 countries and has seen his work translated into half a dozen languages.
He is on the editorial boards of 12 international language journals and is the editor of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. He has authored over 250 articles, chapters and reviews, and is a member of several psychological and linguistic societies. At StFX, he has been honoured with both the President’s Research Award and University Research Award.
Along with the new books (he has now authored or edited 17 in total), he has been invited in the past months to give talks about discourse analysis at a conference this year in Brisbane, Australia; on language ecology at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in October; and to present at the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics in Fredericton, NB in May 2011.
“I’ve never been busier really,” he says.
Dr. Edwards says it all works together – the books, the articles, the conferences, and the years of scholarship, teaching and research – to reinforce each other.
The interest in his subject matter stems back to the very beginning of his career when he was a PhD student in Montreal researching how children became bilingual. In the course of this research, he started to become aware there was something more to language than just how people communicate. He started to think of how much identity – group and individual – is tied up in language.
The interest only deepened when he continued his career at an educational research centre in Dublin. “I gradually began realizing there is another aspect … the social life of language.”