This volume is a response to the increasingly plurilingual and pluricultural focus of practice and thinking in language education. Plurilingualism and pluriculturalism would seem to be, and always to have been, at the heart of the language-teaching endeavour. However, in much thinking and practice about language education, plurilingualism and pluriculturalism have been almost invisible and therefore compilations such as the present one that emphasise plurality in language education are much needed.
In language education, linguistic and cultural pluralism become invisible in different ways in different contexts. In situations where language education has aimed at the teaching of official languages to members of linguistic minorities, the aim and approach have usually been monolingual and monocultural, with assimilation of the minority student to the majority language and culture the main aim. This means that, although the individual student students’ experiences of lived reality may be plurilingual and pluricultural, educational responses to such students have rarely recognised this reality, and where it has been recognised it has often been seen as a problem for the ultimate aim of acquiring the language and culture of the dominant group. In foreign language learning, where the aim would seem to be more overtly pluralistic as the agenda was to add languages to a students’ linguistic repertoire, thinking and practice have still often been monolingual and monocultural. Languages have been taught in ways that exclude the learners’ own linguistic and cultural practices, knowledge and identities from the language classroom, often considering them more as problems than as resources. Often, even where the overt discourse of education has been to develop intercultural and plurilingual abilities, a monolingual and monocultural habitus has largely shaped the field.
This volume draws inspiration from recent work in language education scholarship, which has begun to challenge this monolingual and monocultural construction. This work has increasingly recognised that language abilities form part of a complex repertoire of knowledges and practices that mutually inform and influence each other and that language education needs to support and enhance the development of such repertoires. Cultures and identities have also come more into the foreground, and there is growing understanding of the complex interactions that exist between identities, cultures, languages and learning. Insights into how plurilingual and pluricultural individuals experience, use and develop their repertoires has had significant implications for rethinking how language education programs are developed and taught and for the sorts of learning that education should produce.
One important part of this rethinking has been the emergence of interculturality as a central focus in language education and the recognition that interculturality is not on the periphery of language learning but at its heart. There has been a realisation that language learning without a specific intercultural focus has not developed the sorts of capabilities that are central to many of the claims for the educational significance of language learning, as they do not appear to challenge negative attitudes to linguistically and culturally different others and problematic stereotypes, and often leave students with limited abilities to adapt to the languages, cultures and perspectives of others. The monolingual and monocultural habitus of language education has thus not been effective in shaping the sorts of linguistic and intercultural capabilities required in contemporary contexts of diversity, increasing mobility, internationalisation, and technologically mediated contact across languages and cultures.
Revising language education programmes to integrate a plurilingual and pluricultural perspective has not proved to be easy. This is because such integration does not simply involve a revision of language curricula but a complete reconceptualisation of the nature of language teaching and learning. This reconceptualisation involves new understandings of some of the fundamentals of language education, notably how we understand the core concepts of language, culture and learning. It also has strong implications for how we educate future language teachers, as traditional models of teacher education do not respond well to new complex understandings of language, culture, learning and communication. If language education is to realise and extend the sorts of capabilities that are now recognised to be central to communication, reconsidering teacher education is an important challenge to be addressed by researchers and educators.
In plurilingually and pluriculturally oriented language education, developing practice is complex because practice cannot be reduced to a prescribed methodology for teaching that can be easily used in classrooms. This is because the phenomena that teaching needs to address are highly contextualised and highly responsive to experiences of both teachers and learners; there is no one-size-fits-all way of developing plurilingual and pluricultural capabilities through language education. Therefore, it is more appropriate to consider language teaching and learning in terms of a perspective on learning in which teachers themselves take an active role in developing practical responses to teaching and learning in their own contexts. Emphasising the idea of language teaching as a perspective entails the development by individual teachers of a comprehensive approach driven by reflective practice and informed by theory that can be used to scaffold the systematic integration of a coherent language and culture pedagogy.
This volume highlights some of the issues and complexities involved in moving language teacher education into a more plurilingual and pluricultural direction. It outlines some of the new demands that are placed on language teachers and ways that teachers can be better prepared as reflective practitioners responding to the needs, affordances and constraints of local contexts.