Promoting plurilingualism in the majority language classroom

Abstract

This paper presents a European Centre for Modern Languages project about plurilingual majority language teaching. ‘Majority language’ is the term used in the project to refer to the national language(s)/language(s) of instruction in schools. ‘Plurilingualism’ is used with reference to Council of Europe terminology to denote individual learner's repertoires in multiple languages. The project aimed to find out how teachers of the majority language manage to cope with the challenge of plurilingualism, which they usually were not prepared for in their initial training. Firstly, the paper discusses the results of a small-scale survey among experts from 23 European countries that showed the large gap between perceived needs and concrete measures and resources in this field. Then, the project activities are described: collecting and documenting different varieties of resources, developing practice examples and providing classroom videos to illustrate the principles of plurilingual majority language teaching. Lastly, the paper explains how these principles identified by the project were structured and phrased to become easily manageable by teaching practitioners, how the practice examples illustrate the implementation of these principles in the classroom and how the project offers ideas on how to manage the change towards a plurilingual majority language classroom.

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