Making multilingual teaching a regular norm in today's classrooms

What is it about?

The multilingual student has, recently even more, become a daily reality within classrooms around the world. Yet multilingual teaching concepts, directed towards productively integrating various first languages as resource-based approach, only marginally exist. The article suggests three different multilingual teaching methods for facilitating the emergence of so-called translanguaging spaces within classrooms. As final result, these three models are integrated into a comprehensive yet elastic content and language integrated learning (CLIL) teaching model that can be adapted by teachers, in accordance with different local contexts.

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Photo by Leonardo Toshiro Okubo on Unsplash

Photo by Leonardo Toshiro Okubo on Unsplash

Why is it important?

As consequence of globalization, migration and the emergence of the plurilingual speaker as a regular norm, the demand for multilingual teaching concepts that are resource-based and really work in various local contexts has been growing steadily. Yet studies thus far mainly analyze classroom dynamics and reveal deficits, without offering tangible multilingual pedagogies for teaching. This article is the result of a design-based study by the teacher-researcher together with students of the learning group. It responds towards the given deficit in building on the novel concept of translanguaging. Furthermore, in a quest to contribute towards pragmatic and bottom-up research methods, it gives the stakeholders a voice within academic research.

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