The Routledge Handbook of Plurilingual Language Education

Enrica Piccardo, Aline Germain-Rutherford, Geoff Lawrence, Enrica Piccardo, Aline Germain-Rutherford, Geoff Lawrence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351002769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

The Routledge Handbook of Plurilingual Language Education is the first comprehensive publication on plurilingualism, offering a multidimensional reflection on the nature, scope, and potential of plurilingualism in language education and society.

Authored by a range of internationally recognized experts, the Handbook provides an overview of key perspectives on plurilingualism in a complementary range of fields. After a comprehensive introduction to the concept itself, 24 chapters are organized in six parts, each examining plurilingualism through a different lens. The Handbook spans historical, philosophical, and sociological dimensions, examines cognitive and neuroscientific implications, and the limitations of boundaries before moving to a pragmatic perspective: How is plurilingual language education developing in different contexts around the world? How can it contribute to language revitalization? How can it be expected to develop in education, digital spaces, and society as a whole?

Written for an international audience, this handbook is an indispensable reference tool for scholars in education and applied linguistics, educators, graduate and post-graduate students, and policy makers.

Part I

Historical Perspectives on Plurilingualism

Edited by Brian North

DOI: 10.4324/9781351002783-1

1

Promoting Plurilingualism and Plurilingual Education

A European Perspective

Georges Lüdi

DOI: 10.4324/9781351002783-3

1.1 Introduction¹

This chapter is about the challenge of linguistic diversity, rooted in history and increased by multilateral migrations, and the ways individuals and educational systems respond to it. The focus is on the European continent and its two major institutions. The Council of Europe is an international organization whose stated aim is to uphold human rights, democracy, and the rule of law in Europe. It was founded in 1949, has 47 member states with a population of approximately 820 million people; it should not be confused with the European Union (EU), a political and economic union of 27 member states with an estimated population of about 450 million. In a series of publications, both of these institutions have contributed to the development of new perspectives on the coexistence of different linguistic varieties – whether or not they are formally recognized as languages in Europe – to the management of multiple repertoires, and to the promotion of appropriate forms of pluri-/multilingual education.

The first challenge in relation to this topic is terminological. Linguistic diversity in the sense of the cohabitation of groups of speakers using different languages is probably as old as mankind itself. All large states in human history have been multilingual. Varieties can, firstly, simply coexist in a multilingual geographical area without intensive contacts. Heteroglossia can even be observed in smaller areas, e.g., when immigrants from different places of origin live secluded in various districts of the same city. Secondly, when groups of speakers of different varieties do mingle, this can, however, lead to various forms of social multilingualism or polyglossia where the varieties assume different functions in the society. Examples include the coexistence of standard German and dialectal varieties in the German part of Switzerland, the role-allocation of state and historical minority languages (e.g., in Latvia or in France), the strong presence of international languages like English as a high status variety in academia or in multinational companies, and the survival of many languages of origin in multi-ethnic cities resulting from significant migration (some might speak in this case about ‘new minorities’ [Gogolin, 2002; Lüdi, 1990]). Thirdly, and in many cases, this entails institutional multilingualism where institutions or organizations offer their services in two or more languages. Cases often quoted are Switzerland and Belgium at a national level, ‘Südtirol’ / ‘Alto Adige’ at a regional level, and international organizations like the United Nations or the European Union, but also include multilingual academic institutions like the universities of Luxemburg and Fribourg. The fourth form of linguistic diversity results from the impact of these phenomena on a person’s linguistic repertoires as a result of spontaneous contact with two or more varieties and/or of educational policies, which will be called hereafter plurilingualism.

Traditionally, the term ‘multilingualism’ was used to describe all these phenomena, including the last concerning personal linguistic repertoires. This is in fact still the case in many parts of the world; indeed even the European Union continues this practice in its policy papers.²

However, a very useful conceptual innovation has emerged from the work of the Council of Europe and its Language Policy Division in the period since the 1980s. As a conceptual frame for the Council’s concern for language education policy, an essential terminological distinction was proposed in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 1996, 2001, 2020)³ and related studies (Coste, Moore, & Zarate, [1997] 2009) between territorial, social and institutional ‘multilingualism’ on the one hand and individual ‘plurilingualism’ on the other.

Plurilingualism thus refers to the repertoire of varieties of language which a person uses in the course of his or her linguistic trajectory, including the variety referred to as ‘mother tongue’ or ‘first language’ and any number of other languages or varieties. In the case of a migrant worker from Sicily living in Basel, these could be a Sicilian dialect, regional standard Italian, Swiss German dialect, standard German and other, additional languages. The CEFR first presents the concept thus:

… as an individual person’s experience of language in its cultural contexts expands, from the language of the home to that of society at large and then to the languages of other peoples (whether learnt at school or college, or by direct experience), he or she does not keep these languages and cultures in strictly separated mental compartments, but rather builds up a communicative competence to which all knowledge and experience of language contributes and in which languages interrelate and interact. In different situations, a person can call flexibly upon different parts of this competence to achieve effective communication with a particular interlocutor. For instance, partners may switch from one language or dialect to another, exploiting the ability of each to express themselves in one language and to understand the other; or a person may call upon the knowledge of a number of languages to make sense of a text, written or even spoken, in a previously ‘unknown’ language, recognizing words from a common international store in a new guise. (Council of Europe, 2001, p. 4)

Plurilingualism, as opposed to monolingualism, is more and more considered as the normal and even preferable case. It should be emphasized that plurilingual competence is not expected to be perfect or even balanced; it is defined as the ability to interact, even imperfectly, in several languages in everyday settings (Council of Europe, 2001, 2020). We will see below how multi- and plurilingualism respectively have become keywords in policy statements emanating from both the Council of Europe and the European Union. The distinction between plurilingualism and multilingualism is a crucial, functional one to highlight the more dynamic and interconnected view of linguistic and cultural diversity that plurilingualism offers. In what follows, therefore, the accent will be laid on plurilingualism, in particular on the ways plurilingual repertoires are put into practice in daily life and on the effects the prioritization of linguistic diversity in general and plurilingualism in particular have on educational language policies. For more detail on the distinction between multilingualism and plurilingualism, see Piccardo (2019, this volume) and Marshall (this volume).

1.2 New Research Perspectives on Plurilingualism and Plurilingual Speech

Linguistically, Europe is less diverse than other regions of the world like Africa or Asia (see Canagarajah, 2009; Canagarajah & Liyanage, 2012). In addition, the processes of nation-building and language standardization in the last few centuries have resulted in the prevalent image of linguistic diversity as a patchwork of rather homogeneous language communities that are in contact at their peripheries, through trade and political relations (including exogamous marriages), but fundamentally monolingual in the sense of ‘one state, one language’. Typically, changes in sovereignty, such as in the case of Alsace or Alto Adige, led to language shift – or at least attempts to encourage or even enforce it. Political objectives of this kind – particularly visible in France and Spain – are rooted in immemorial ideologies, i.e., in the popular belief that the normal human being speaks only one language and lives in a homogeneous linguistic community, as illustrated by the biblical story about the Babylonian confusion of tongues. In this sense, a famous professor of the University of Cambridge affirmed in 1890:

If it were possible for a child to live in two languages at once equally well, so much the worse. His intellectual and spiritual growth would not thereby be doubled, but halved. Unity of mind and character would have great difficulty in asserting itself in such circumstances. (Laurie, 1890, p. 15)

It took decades and a multitude of new experimental data to prove that the contrary is in fact true. Today, there is a broad consensus among specialists that bi-/plurilinguals enjoy several social as well as cognitive advantages (Adesope, Lavin, Thompson, & Ungerleider, 2010; Alladi et al., 2013; Bak, Vega-Mendoza, & Sorace, 2014; Berthoud, Grin, & Lüdi, 2013; Bialystok, 2005, 2009; Compendium, 2009; Furlong, 2009; Hakuta, 1985; Hakuta & Diaz, 1985; Nisbett, 2003; Peal & Lambert, 1962). Generally speaking, plurilingualism appears to favour creativity (Piccardo, 2017), be it in linguistic terms, at a cognitive level, at an interactional level, or even at a strategic level.

Thus, since the 1970s and 1980s, an important change of perspectives has occurred and a plurilingual approach has been developed, grounded in two strands of research: (a) the linguistic aspects of migration and (b) second language acquisition, both guided and unguided. The European Science Foundation (ESF) project on second language acquisition by adult immigrants (ESF, 1988; Noyau & Veronique, 1986) made relevant contributions to this evolution. An increasing number of migrant workers crossing language and national borders in Europe – and today large numbers of refugees from all over the world – fostered the perception that the growing linguistic diversity that results in constituted a real social problem. However, at the same time, an awareness grew that the acquisition of the host language cannot be dissociated from other linguistic dimensions of migration, for instance the restructuring of the L1-competence under the pressure of the L2 and the maintenance or loss of competence in the language of origin, mainly by children of the second or third generation. In at least educational circles, migrants came to be seen progressively as competent speakers who must indeed adapt their repertoire to the challenges of a new social reality, but who had different options for doing so. These options included embraci...