Multilingualism in educational settings

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The papers in this volume deal with many questions emerging in the growing research literature on multilingualism. Language curriculum planners, education-policy makers and language learning-material writers increasingly find themselves preparing to face the realities of the multilingual rather than the monolingual classroom. The multilingual classroom, however, presents challenges that frequently are not met because its complexities are not always understood and its potential not always exploited. There is a lingering tendency to approach the teaching and learning of languages as if monolingualism were the norm, i. e. education partners including teachers tend to overlook the fact that bilingual or multilingual learners of any target language are not the same as monolingual learners. The qualitative differences between bi/multilingual and monolingual learners are ignored and remain largely unexploited. The papers in this volume written by researchers in France, New Zealand, Finland, Taiwan, The Basque Country, Mexico, Israel and Ireland highlight questions emerging from these qualitative differences that should be of interest to researchers on multilingual classrooms from primary to tertiary level, as well as to policy makers, curriculum designers and practitioners.