The Acquisition of English As a Foreign Language in Bilingual and Multilingual Contexts

In recent years, the concept of multilingualism has grown increasingly in the Council of Europe as well as among several institutions and schools. This is causing a shift in the approach to language learning and teaching in the classrooms, in which the goal is no longer to achieve “mastery” in the foreign language(s) but to develop a linguistic repertoire instead. The aim of this essay is to explore ways in which this goal can be achieved in the classroom and provide some ideas and hopefully inspiration to other teachers of English as a Foreign Language.

Let’s first take a look at my personal teaching setting. I currently live and teach Spanish and English in Hamburg, Germany, which is a quite pluricultural city – and I believe it is plurilingual too. Nationalities in Hamburg are quite diverse, and you can often hear several spoken languages on the streets too. Nevertheless, German is still the dominant language and most of the visitors speak it to some extent or at least they are learning it if they reside here. Despite the fact that German is the most spoken language in Hamburg, many other languages are part of the actual plurilingual repertoire of the city’s population. For instance, English is a very present language too, as it is used in TV advertisements, business meetings, tourist attractions, shopping centers, etc. Additionally, there are many immigrants who are maybe not so confident and fluent in German and therefore support their interactions with English words and utterances. Even if English is not their mother tongue, they use it because they know that most of the population here is at least bilingual in English and German.

This plurilingual diversity is reflected in the classroom too. Among my students, there are speakers of Polish, German, Turkish, Russian, English, Spanish, Italian, French… and the list could go on and on. The way I found out what languages my students can speak was through an informal interview in the classroom. Then, I planned an activity in order to raise awareness of their (and others’) plurilingual repertoires. The activity is the following:

Learners’ age: adults

Content: Language diversity and multilingualism in the classroom

English level: B2

Previous knowledge needed: vocabulary related to the topic of “languages” and verbs involving language use (such as speak, understand, talk, write…) conjugated in several verb tenses (present, past and future forms). Formulating questions (do-, how-, which-, etc.)

Objectives: Identifying and decoding different languages, raising awareness of students’ plurilingual repertoires, and teamwork

Development of activity:

• Pre-task: First, I play several short videos in different languages – including in languages spoken by class members but also in other languages that learners might know of as well as in some unknown languages. The pre-task consists in asking learners to raise their hands every time they hear a language in the videos that they can understand. Meanwhile, a volunteer briefly explains and/or translates some sentences of the videos that they are able to understand to the rest of the class.

• Task preparation: I make groups as plurilingual as possible so that all learners can contribute to the upcoming step, the task realization. Before that step, the task preparation consists in showing learners a sample of a dialogue written in mixed languages. Then I ask volunteers to decipher the different words in different languages in the dialogue and to translate them into English. In the end, the outcome is an only English dialogue.

• Task realization: In this stage, each group has a different dialogue and students in each group work together to decipher the meaning of the whole dialogue containing words in several languages. Once they have the whole dialogue written in English, they perform it together in front of the class. That is, each group performs a role-play of their dialogue in English.

• Post-task: Finally, each student individually answers a sheet with several questions to reflect on how important teamwork and plurilingualism are. I add questions such as “how many languages were you able to understand in the dialogue? which ones?”, “what languages were you not able to understand at all?”, “what languages were you not able to understand without the help of a group member?”, “what languages did you find interesting?”, “name a word you have learnt in a new language”, “what was your favourite new word?”, “list all the languages you found in the dialogue and write the name of the group members who understood them”, etc. Then, we comment on some of the answers all together in class.

This activity is a good example of a strategy through which language teachers can promote multilingual and plurilingual approaches to foreign language teaching and thus give learners credit for what they know and what they can do in certain languages. There are infinite ways in which educators can raise awareness of learners’ plurilingual repertoires in the classroom and therefore give recognition to their plurilingual and intercultural competences. For instance, The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL) proposes a European Language Portfolio (ELP), but it can also be done through language biographies, language glossaries, translation, visual repertoires, literature, music, etc. In brief, learning a language is a quite complex task and it takes lots of time and effort to achieve some kind of fluency. Therefore, language teachers should move towards more plurilingual approaches to language teaching, not only to acknowledge those who have undergone that process, but also to teach languages in a more integrated way which values linguistic diversity. Finally, the idea of reporting one’s own linguistic repertoire and identity, cultural resources and experience in class allows learners to feel proud for their achievements and hopefully encourages them to achieve many more.

References

Little, D. & Perclová, R. (2011). The European Language Portfolio: a guide for teachers and teacher trainers (pp. 55 – 64). Dublin. Retrieved from http://europe.hkbu.edu.hk/european_studies/files/ELPguide_teacherstrainers_EN.pdf