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The future of language education in Europe: case studies of innovative practices
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Linguistic diversity – including languages from outside Europe – is one of the great strengths of the European Union. To foster the potential of linguistic diversity to support multilingual competences and help overcome its possible challenges, innovative policies and practices in language teaching must be implemented across classrooms, schools, regions and countries. These novel language education practices need to overcome persisting language devaluation and isolation, deconstruct existing language hierarchies and apply an inclusive perspective of all languages both in education and in society.
In this context, the main purpose of this report is to explore emerging innovative approaches and strategies of language teaching in Europe supporting learners’ plurilingualism, inspire educators and policy makers to innovate and implement forward-looking policies and practices in language education, and contribute to the implementation of the EU Council Recommendation on a comprehensive approach to the teaching and learning of languages (adopted in May 2019).
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... Two previous NESET analytical reports (Herzog-Punzenberger et al., 2017;Le Pichon-Vorstman et al., 2020) 2 have focused on multilingualism in primary and secondary education systems. In these reports, the authors confirm that a multilingual stance within education systems is not yet a reality in most European countries. ...
... This is a challenge that must be tackled at various levels of the educational system: in concrete pedagogical practices, at the level of an institution's leadership, in the relationship between the school and the community, and in the pre-and in-service training of professionals. Moreover, support and valorisation for multilingualism must begin during early childhood, and continue throughout other levels of education (Herzog-Punzenberger et al., 2017;Le Pichon-Vorstman et al., 2020). This is in line with the recommendation of the Council of the European Union (2019b). ...
Please cite this publication as: Bergeron-Morin, L., Peleman, B., Hulpia, H. (2023). 'Working with multilingual children and families in early childhood education and care (ECEC): guidelines for continuous professional development of ECEC professionals'. NESET report, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. https://nesetweb.eu/en/resources/library/working-with-multilingual-children-and-families-in-early-childhood-education-and-care-ecec-guidelines-for-continuous-professional-development-of-ecec-professionals/
... Furthermore, there seems to be a shift in perception as to what the role of languages is in the language process. Significantly, one of the key findings is that the home language of a student is a resource for learning and never a problem (Le Pichon-Vorstman, Siavora and Szönyi, 2020). ...
... In psychology, there is a generally accepted that "socio-personal competence" includes knowledge, skills, abilities, and even ways of performing actions in certain social situations. Vorstman et al. (2020) define professional competence as socio-personal competence. According to Warwas and Helm (2017), the implementation of the competence-based approach should involve the widespread use of active and interactive teaching methods in the educational process and meetings with professionals. ...
The purpose of the articlewas to test the effectiveness of the influence of pedagogical conditions for online debates on the formation of future philologists’ professional competencies.Methods used:pedagogical observation, pedagogical experiment, and students' self-assessment methods, mathematical and statistical methods for research results processing (t-Student's criterion), interviews, questionnaires. Dialogicality (communicative level) was estimated by L. Michelson test and by the method of diagnostics of “General Communicative Tolerance” by V. V. Boyko. Results. In an experiment, it was found that, after the secondary survey, 33.75% of respondents view online debates as educational technology and 26.25% of respondents explain their participation in the debates by the desire to improve communication skills. When analyzing the results of the secondary survey, it was found that such qualities as determination, tolerance, and sociability are in the lead. Comparing the design value and critical value of the Criterion t and T-Critical, we have taken that T≤T-Critical, and therefore accepted the hypothesis of different average values in the two frames.
... 9-10). Sin embargo, a pesar de que la literatura sobre multilingüismo muestra el potencial de la población joven multilingüe para una comunicación eficaz en todos sus ámbitos de participación (Creese y Blackledge, 2015;Garcia y Li Wei, 2014;Le Pichon-Vorstman et al., 2020), se tiende a una interpretación problemática de cierta diversidad lingüística (Hélot, 2012;Martín-Rojo, 2008). ...
Los actuales cambios en el terreno lingüístico debido a las migraciones internacionales se reflejan de forma especialmente clara en los centros educativos. Este artículo presenta los múltiples aprendizajes lingüísticos del alumnado catalán de origen inmigrante de dos escuelas de secundaria con ideologías de acogida diferentes y en contextos socio-espaciales distintos, una pequeña ciudad costera de la región metropolitana de Barcelona y un barrio céntrico de la ciudad de Barcelona representativo del modelo de super-diversidad (Vertoveç, 2007). Contrastar las prácticas comunicativas del alumnado y las actitudes hacia la diversidad lingüística del profesorado en estos dos entornos diferentes muestra la riqueza de las prácticas comunicativas de este alumnado. Además, permite entender mejor si la escuela sigue reproduciendo jerarquías culturales a pesar de discursos más o menos inclusivos o si por el contrario hay procesos de cambio que pueden permitir incorporar el capital lingüístico de todo el alumnado.
The article aims to analyze meanings underlying the popular concepts of a good teacher, efficient teacher, novice, expert and experienced non-expert from a diachronic perspective. Criteria used across developmental stages of second language acquisition/ foreign language teaching in the process of teacher accreditation are examined, as well as social contexts influencing teacher evaluation. Reasons for teachers’ dissatisfaction with European school systems are presented, as well as coping strategies employed by frustrated teachers. New challenges springing from economic, social and cultural student diversity are also discussed. Implications are sought for pre- and in-service teacher education.
(This Introduction can be found in the website of the publisher under file:///C:/Users/WissMit/Downloads/9781003177197_previewpdf.pdf).
During the last decade, migrant and refugee flows toward Greece have contributed to the formation of a multilingual and multicultural mosaic within Greek schools. Due to the absence of their mother tongues from the class, non-native young students become “invisible” in the classroom and are confronted with adaptation difficulties. Within this context, utilizing all students’ languages in class seems a necessity, but also a difficult venture. However, the pluralistic approach “awakening to languages” could offer a solution, invoking a simultaneous cross-linguistic approach to many languages based on the students’ linguistic repertoire. Being taught since kindergarten, English is a significant part of young students’ repertoire. Hence, this chapter explores the role of English as a reference language within multilingual material for first schoolers’ awakening to other languages. The research consists of a two-stage qualitative study. First, 60 teachers were interviewed about language stimuli, appropriate materials, and the teaching and working mode within the first grade. Based on the answers elicited through the interviews and the principles of the awakening to languages approach, a tale about farm animals was created and tried out in three mainstream first grade classes. All three implementations were filmed, transcribed, and analyzed using the technique of thematic analysis. The conclusions reveal the importance of English as a facilitating factor in approaching untaught languages, serving as a bridge or reference for identifying words’ meanings, and recognizing letters’ pronunciation. It was also found that familiarity with an alphabet other than that of mother tongue seems to be an important vehicle to open up multilingualism.
This book challenges the reader to rethink and reimagine what diversity in language education means in transnational societies. Bringing together researchers and practitioners who contributed to the international LINguistic and Cultural DIversity REinvented (LINCDIRE) project, the book examines four pillars of innovation in language education: the Action-oriented approach, Plurilingualism, Indigenous epistemologies and Technology enhanced learning. The book critically discusses plurilingual pedagogical approaches that draw on learners' linguistic and cultural repertoires to encourage and support the dynamic use of languages in curricular innovation. It is a fundamental resource for language teachers, curriculum designers and educational researchers interested in understanding current thinking on the relevance and benefit of a plurilingual paradigm shift for language education in today's societies.
Code-switching (CSW) is the phenomenon where speakers use two or more languages in a single discourse or utterance—an increasingly recognised natural product of multilingualism in many settings. In language teaching and learning in particular, code-switching has been shown to bring in many pedagogical benefits, including accelerating students’ confidence, increasing their access to content, as well as improving their participation and engagement. Unfortunately, however, current educational technologies are not yet able to keep up with this ‘multilingual turn’ in education. and are partly responsible for the constraint of this practice to only classroom contexts. In an effort to make progress in this area, we offer a data-driven position paper discussing the current state of affairs, difficulties of the existing educational natural language processing (NLP) tools for CSW and possible directions for future work. We specifically focus on two cases of feedback and assessment technologies, demonstrating how the current state of the art in these domains fails with code-switching data due to a lack of appropriate training data, lack of robust evaluation benchmarks and lack of end-to-end user-facing educational applications. We present some empirical user cases of how CSW manifests and suggest possible technological solutions for each of these scenarios.
Selon leur niveau, leur format (cours, séminaire ou travaux pratiques), les disciplines impliquées et les conditions matérielles de l’interaction didactique (nombre de participants, type de salle, moyens audio-visuels à disposition, etc.), les enseignements bilingues peuvent présenter des configurations très variées, manifestant notamment un caractère plus ou moins interactif et un mode plus ou moins bi-plurilingue (et/ou exolingue). Ces deux dimensions, graduelles, correspondent à différentes manières de tendre vers l’accomplissement des objectifs ciblés. Les études sur l’enseignement bilingue, pourtant nombreuses (voir, par exemple, Les Langues modernes 3 et 4, 2009), peinent à thématiser ces variations tout en les intégrant à un « modèle » explicatif. Ceci tient notamment à la difficulté de trouver des outils analytiques permettant un croisement sérieux entre les dynamiques discursive- interactionnelle, acquisitionnelle et didactique, ainsi qu’une prise en compte du caractère bi-plurilingue.Dans la présente contribution, nous proposons l’examen d’un deces outils, celui de « saturation » des savoirs (Gajo & Grobet, 2008), entendu au sens chimique du terme.
What is the significance of culture as a foundation of bilingual and multilingual education? In this chapter, we address the significance of culture in bilingual education both in the United States and globally. First, we discuss the meaning of culture drawing from diverse perspectives in anthropology and sociology. We then present a historical overview of how culture has been understood as part of bilingual and multilingual education, both in international contexts and in the United States. We also analyze how culture has been misunderstood and misapplied, from superficial treatments in curricula, to more deeply grounded ideologies. In addition, because language maintenance and language reclamation have been tied to issues of cultural integrity and survival, we will illustrate this point with several examples. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of how culture can be more thoroughly theorized to be an essential component of bilingual and multilingual education.
This book is a collection of papers that explore the ways in which bilingual children cope with two language systems. The papers address issues in linguistics, psychology, and education bearing on the abilities that bilingual children use to understand language, to perform highly specialised operations with language, and to function in school settings. All of the papers provide detailed analysis about how specific problems are solved, how bilingualism influences those solutions, and how the social context affects the process. Finally, the implications of these findings for policy-setting and the development of bilingual education programmes are explored. This will be an important and useful volume at the forefront of topical research in an area which is exciting increasing interest among linguists and cognitive scientists.
Participants learned the meaning of novel objects by listening to two complementary definitions while watching videos of the new object, in a single‐language context (all in Spanish) or a mixed‐language context (one definition in Basque, one in Spanish). Then, participants were asked to assess the degree of functional relatedness between novel and familiar objects in two conditions: identical (both definitions overlap) or related (single definition overlap). Relatedness ratings differed significantly between conditions, but they were highly similar across language contexts. Furthermore, items in the identical condition elicited a P300‐like event‐related potential component, while related items elicited a wave of lesser amplitude. Critically, the amplitude differences between conditions did not differ between language contexts. No interaction was found with proficiency level across participants. In line with previous findings, we show no measurable impact of mixing languages during the establishment of a link between novel objects and existing conceptual representations in bilinguals.
In spite of the spark that plurilingualism has given throughout Europe and beyond to the idea that linguistic and cultural diversity is an asset rather than an obstacle, the term plurilingualism itself has not frequently been used in the English-speaking world. Beginning with an analysis of this issue, this paper aims to help readers better understand the nature of the concept of plurilingualism and reflect on its social and educational value. To do so, it firstly presents the term from a historical and comparative perspective in relation to other terms used in the English-speaking literature. It then moves on to explain the crucial difference between plurilingualism and multilingualism, thus introducing the notion of dynamic repertoire and its underlying theoretical perspective. Finally, the article introduces the descriptors for plurilingual and pluricultural competence from the newly released CEFR Companion Volume, together with the potential for these descriptors to facilitate mediation and plurilanguaging among learners and to foster a new, open, and positive attitude towards linguistic and cultural diversity in language classes. Keywords: plurilingualism, multilingualism, plurilanguaging, CEFR, mediation
This volume outlines a model of language that can be characterized as functionalist, usage-based, dynamic, and complex-adaptive. The core idea is that linguistic structure is not stable and uniform, but continually refreshed by the interaction between three components:
usage, the communicative activities of speakers;
conventionalization, the social processes triggered by these activities and feeding back into them;
and entrenchment, the individual cognitive processes that are also linked to these activities in a feedback loop.
I explain how this multiple feedback system works by extending the so-called Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model, showing how the linguistic system is created, sustained, and continually adapted by the ongoing interaction between usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Fulfilling the promise of usage-based accounts, the model explains how exactly usage is transformed into collective and individual grammar and how these two grammars in turn feed back into usage.
The book is exceptionally broad in scope, with insights from a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines. It provides a coherent account of the role of multiple factors that influence language structure, variation, and change, including frequency, economy, identity, multilingualism, and language contact.
Engaging with Linguistic Diversity describes an innovative and highly successful approach to inclusive plurilingual education at primary level. The approach was developed by Scoil Bhríde (Cailíní), Blanchardstown, as a way of converting extreme linguistic diversity – more than 50 home languages in a school of 320 pupils – into educational capital. The central feature of the approach is the inclusion of home languages in classroom communication.
After describing the national context, the book traces the development of Scoil Bhríde’s approach and explores in detail its impact on classroom discourse, pupils’ plurilingual literacy development, and their capacity for autonomous learning. The authors illustrate their arguments with a wealth of practical evidence drawn from a variety of sources; pupils’ and teachers’ voices are especially prominent. The concluding chapter considers issues of sustainability and replication and the implications of the approach for teacher education.
The book refers to a wide range of relevant research findings and theories, including translanguaging, plurilingual and intercultural education, language awareness and language learner autonomy. It is essential reading for researchers and policy-makers in the field of linguistically inclusive education.
This study examined Finnish teachers' (N ¼ 820) beliefs related to multilingualism and teaching multilingual Finnish language learners. Teachers' beliefs were mainly positive. However, teachers did not always consider home languages as learning resources. There were three categories of multilingual ideologies: advocacy for, allowance and denial of multilingualism in the classroom. Factors influencing the teachers’ beliefs were experience in teaching migrants, teaching area, training in linguistically responsive teaching and language awareness. The results indicate a need for professional development for all teachers to promote a move away from maintaining monolingualism to advocating for multilingualism to better reflect the realities of the classrooms.