The Multilingual Edge Of Education

This book highlights the need to develop new educational perspectives in which multilingualism is valorised and strategically used in settings and contexts of instruction and learning. Situated in the current educational debate about multilingualism and ethno-linguistic minorities, chapter authors examine the polarised response to heightened linguistic diversity and how the debate is very much premised on binary views of monolingualism and multi- or bilingualism. Contributors argue that the diverse linguistic backgrounds of immigrant and minority students should be considered an asset, instead of being regarded as a barrier to teaching and learning. From its title through to its conclusion, this book underlines the current perspective of multilingualism as possessing cutting edge potential for transforming diverse classrooms into more inhabitable, more equitable and more efficiently organised spaces for learning. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in educational linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, pedagogics, educational studies, and educational anthropology.

"This cutting edge volume explores holistic trends in multilingualism, analysing the processes of both 'becoming multilingual' and 'being multilingual'. Multilingualism has increased in recent years due to globalisation, transnational mobility and the spread of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). This volume explores some of the trends in the study of multilingual education by putting together research studies that analyse the processes of both 'becoming multilingual' and 'being multilingual' in educational contexts."--Publisher's website.

Diversity - social, cultural, linguistic and ethnic - poses a challenge to all educational systems. This book aims to address these issues by examining current policy and its implications, pedagogical practice and responses to the challenge of diversity that go beyond the language of schooling. This volume will appeal to anyone involved in the educational integration of immigrant children and adolescents.

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.

Starting from the key idea that learners and teachers bring diverse linguistic knowledge and resources to education, this book establishes and explores the concept of the ‘multilingual turn’ in languages education and the potential benefits for individuals and societies. It takes account of recent research, policy and practice in the fields of bilingual and multilingual education as well as foreign and second language education. The chapters integrate theory and practice, bringing together researchers and practitioners from five continents to illustrate the effects of the multilingual turn in society and evaluate the opportunities and challenges of implementing multilingual curricula and activities in a variety of classrooms. Based on the examples featured, the editors invite students, teachers, teacher educators and researchers to reflect on their own work and to evaluate the relevance and applicability of the multilingual turn in their own contexts.

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.

With increasing mobility of people across the world, there is a pressing need to develop evidence-based teaching practices that lead to high-quality education, which serves the needs of inclusive societies and social and epistemic justice. This book presents cutting-edge qualitative case-study research across a range of educational contexts, research-method contributions and theory-oriented chapters by distinguished multilingual education scholars. These take stock of the field of translanguaging in relation to the education of multilingual individuals in today’s globalized world. The volume breaks new ground in that all chapters share a focus on teachers as ‘knowledge generators’ and many on teacher-researcher collaboration. Together, the chapters provide comprehensive and up-to-date applications of the concept of pedagogical translanguaging and present recent research in educational contexts that have hitherto received scant attention, namely secondary-level education, education for adult immigrants and the school-wide introduction of pedagogical translanguaging in primary school. Chapters 1, 3, 4 and 8 are free to download as open access publications. They can be downloaded from our website: https://www.channelviewpublications.com/page/open-access/.

Drawing on the latest developments in bilingual and multilingual research, The Multilingual Turn offers a critique of, and alternative to, still-dominant monolingual theories, pedagogies and practices in SLA, TESOL, and bilingual education. Critics of the ‘monolingual bias’ argue that notions such as the idealized native speaker, and related concepts of interlanguage, language competence, and fossilization, have framed these fields inextricably in relation to monolingual speaker norms. In contrast, these critics advocate an approach that emphasizes the multiple competencies of bi/multilingual learners as the basis for successful language teaching and learning. This volume takes a big step forward in re-situating the issue of multilingualism more centrally in applied linguistics and, in so doing, making more permeable its key sub-disciplinary boundaries – particularly, those between SLA, TESOL, and bilingual education. It addresses this issue head on, bringing together key international scholars in SLA, TESOL, and bilingual education to explore from cutting-edge interdisciplinary perspectives what a more critical multilingual perspective might mean for theory, pedagogy, and practice in each of these fields.