Foreign Language Education In Multilingual Classrooms

This volume challenges traditional approaches to foreign language education and proposes to redefine them in our age of international migration and globalization. Foreign language classrooms are no longer populated by monolingual students, but increasingly by multilingual students with highly diverse language backgrounds. This necessitates a new understanding of foreign language learning and teaching. The volume brings together an international group of researchers of high caliber who specialize in third language acquisition, teaching English as an additional language, and multilingual education. In addition to topical overview articles on the multilingual policies pursued in Europe, Africa, North America, and Asia, as well as several contributions dealing with theoretical issues regarding multilingualism and plurilingualism, the volume also offers cutting edge case studies from multilingual acquisition research and foreign language classroom practice. Throughout the volume, multilingualism is interpreted as a valuable resource that can facilitate language education provided it is harnessed in appropriate conditions.

This book offers practical research-based advice for teachers and other educators on how to adapt school and classroom procedures, curriculum content, and instructional strategies in order to provide a supportive learning environment for students of minority language backgrounds who are learning the language of instruction at the same time as they are learning the curriculum.

This book promotes linguistically responsive foreign language teaching practices in multilingual contexts by facilitating a dialogue between teachers and researchers. It advances a discussion of how to connect the acquisition of subsequent foreign languages with previous language knowledge to create culturally and linguistically inclusive foreign language classrooms, and how to strengthen the connection between research on multilingualism and foreign language teaching practice. The chapters present new approaches to foreign language instruction in multilingual settings, many of them forged in collaboration between foreign language teachers and researchers of multilingualism. The authors report findings of classroom-based research, including case studies and action research on topics such as the functions and applications of translanguaging in the foreign language classroom, the role of learners’ own languages in teaching additional languages, linguistically and culturally inclusive foreign language pedagogies, and teacher and learner attitudes to multilingual teaching approaches.

This book brings together research from six different countries across three continents where teacher educators and policy makers are addressing the under-preparation of content teachers to work effectively with multilingual learners. By highlighting this relatively young field of research at an international level, the book advances the research-based knowledge of the field and promotes international research relationships and partnerships to better support the education of multilingual learners and their teachers. The chapters represent high-quality empirical qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods studies about pre-service and in-service teachers. Comprising four sections, each represents a critical aspect of the equitable teaching of multilingual learners. All the research was conducted in countries that belong to OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) enabling the reader to compare contexts and outcomes. This book will be of particular interest to academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of language education, teacher education, and education for multilingual learners. It will be of great value to anyone concerned with equity and social justice for multilingual learners whose languages, cultural practices, and resources are often overlooked and/or marginalized in the schools they attend.

This edited book uses the concept of diversity in child foreign language education as a major organizing principle. Since a foreign language, most typically English, is taught globally to an increasing number of children, the variability in the process and varied learning outcomes are inescapable phenomena. This book has been constructed on the premise that heterogeneity, first, concerns young language learners, who due to the disparity in the pace of development need appropriately tailored educational solutions, and, second, it refers to a diversity of contexts in which learning takes place. The contexts can be defined on a macroscale (e.g. different countries), mesoscale (e.g. different institutions), and microscale (e.g. specific learner groups). The book consists of four thematic strands. In Part One the learner-internal causes of heterogeneity of young language learners are clarified. Part Two presents a sample of classroom studies in which learner variables, such as gender, learner preferences, and special needs are taken into account. Part Three looks at teaching materials and how they meet learners’ needs. Finally, Part Four highlights diversity issues that teachers should be prepared to face.

This hands-on guide shows elementary school teachers how to create multilingual classroom communities that support every learner's success in reading, writing, and general literacy development. The author provides a practical overview of key ideas and techniques and describes specific literacy activities that lead to vocabulary and oral English proficiency. Instructional chapters will help teachers create a language-rich classroom environment, scaffold reading and writing tasks to match students' needs, and use students' language backgrounds as a bridge to literacy learning in English. As with all titles in The Practitioner's Bookshelf Series, this resource includes many user-friendly features such as bulleted summaries and checklists as well as photographs of linguistically diverse classrooms modeling the types of instructional interactions described in the book.

This volume offers fresh perspectives on a controversial issue in applied linguistics and language teaching by focusing on the use of the first language in communicative or immersion-type classrooms. It includes new work by both new and established scholars in educational scholarship, second language acquisition, and sociolinguistics, as well as in a variety of languages, countries, and educational contexts. Through its focus at the intersection of theory, practice, curriculum and policy, the book demands a reconceptualization of code-switching as something that both proficient and aspiring bilinguals do naturally, and as a practice that is inherently linked with bilingual code-switching.

This edited book explores critical issues relating to Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI), setting out their similarities and differences to demystify the terms and their implications for classroom practice. The authors show how CLIL and EMI practices are carried out in different institutional contexts and demonstrate how both approaches can benefit language and content acquisition. This book is addressed to second/foreign language teaching staff involved in teaching in English at primary education, secondary education, and higher education levels.