Focus on Multilingualism as an Approach in
Educational Contexts
Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter
Abstract “Focus on Multilingualism” is a holistic approach to the study of multilingualism
in educational contexts. This approach can be characterized by focusing
on the following three elements: the multilingual speaker, the whole linguistic
repertoire and the context. Multilingual speakers use languages as a resource to
communicate successfully and to develop their own identities through multilingual
practices. In this chapter, “Focus on Multilingualism” is illustrated with examples
from multilingual education in the Basque Country.
Keywords Language ideology · Multilingual education · Cross-linguistic
interaction
13.1 Introduction
Language always has an important role in the school curriculum not only because
language (or language arts) is usually one of the compulsory school subjects in
primary and secondary school but also because the content of any other subject is
learnt and taught through language along with other semiotic signs (gestures, images,
etc). Moreover, school is much more than a learning and teaching institution,
it is also a place where social interaction takes place, and language has an important
role in this interaction.
In the European context, the European Commission has as a policy goal that all
European citizens have to be able to speak two European languages in addition to
their mother tongue (Commission of the European Communities 2003). The main
policy measures to achieve this goal are to start instruction in a foreign language from
an early age, and the use of foreign languages as additional languages of instruction.
The latter is usually known as “Content and Language Integrated Learning” (CLIL)
in the European context (Coyle et al. 2010; Cenoz, Genesee and Gorter 2013). The
most common foreign language in the school curriculum is English with the exception
of English-speaking countries. Other languages such as French, German or Spanish
are also studied as foreign languages. In some bilingual regions, minority languages
are used in education such as German in South Tyrol, Welsh in Wales, Catalan in
Catalonia or Basque in the Basque Country. The combination of foreign, national
and minority languages can result in a strong presence of language arts subjects in
the curriculum, and multilingual education may use different languages as languages
of instruction (Cenoz and Gorter, 2008; Cenoz 2009). At the same time, the linguistic
diversity of schools is increased by the presence of students with other home languages
that are not part of the school curriculum (Extra and Gorter 2008). Multilingualism
in school contexts is also a well-known phenomenon in other parts of the world
(Skutnabb-Kangas and Torres-Guzman 2006; Skutnabb-Kangas et al. 2009).
Taking into account that schools set the teaching and learning of languages
amongst their most important goals, it is not surprising that research on multilingualism
in school settings has focused on the measurement of language proficiency
in one or more languages (see, for example, Johnstone 2002; Genesee et al. 2006;
Baker 2011). The focus has been on language as a system and research studies have
looked at linguistic, cultural, economic, political and social factors that influence
language acquisition (Brisk 1998). When looking at the acquisition of language proficiency,
languages have been considered as separate entities and the transfer of elements
from one language into another has traditionally been regarded as negative.
This position is related to the development of monolingual ideologies that developed
hard boundaries between languages and associated individual languages with states,
nations and empires (see Martin-Jones, Blackledge and Creese 2012). These ideologies
are still influential in school contexts. In fact, many teachers believe that they
have to isolate the target language from other languages students use, and research
has tested oral or written comprehension and production in each separate language in
very controlled situations. As Musk (2010, p. 182) says, the predilection for language
competence has sidelined the communicative function of language.
A different approach to the study of multilingualism in education is to place the
emphasis on spontaneous multilingual speech in its social context. This approach
considers language as a social resource and it highlights individual agency when
using different languages and other semiotic devices and makes reference to heteroglossia
(Creese and Blackledge 2011). The simultaneous use of different languages
in school contexts has been referred to as “flexible bilingualism” (Blackledge and
Creese 2010) or “translanguaging” (García 2009; Creese and Blackledge 2010).
In this chapter, we propose an alternative to the traditional focus on monolingualism,
which we call the “Focus on Multilingualism” approach. In the following,
we first define “Focus on Multilingualism” and its scope and then explain its threedimensions and its application to multilingual education. Examples are provided
from schools in the Basque Country that aim at multilingualism in Basque, Spanish
and English.
13.2 What Is “Focus on Multilingualism”?
“Focus on Multilingualism” is an approach to research in education that has important
teaching and learning implications. It is related to concepts such as “flexible
bilingualism” (Blackledge and Creese 2010) or “translanguaging” (García 2009).
According to Blackledge and Creese (2010, p. 109), “flexible bilingualism represents
a view of language as a social resource (Heller 2007) without clear boundaries,
which places the speaker at the heart of the interaction”. García and Sylvan
(2011, p. 389) define translanguaging as “the process by which bilingual students
and teachers engage in complex discursive practices in order to make sense of, and
communicate in, multilingual classrooms”. Both concepts are a reaction to the ideology
of separate bilingualism.
“Focus on Mmultilingualism” shares the heteroglossic character of multilingualism
with the concepts of flexible bilingualism and translanguaging. Similarly to
the proposal made by Creese and Blackledge (2011), it places the language users at
the centre rather than the languages. It is also close to “translanguaging” because
“it considers multiple language practices in interrelationship” (García 2009, p. 7).
However, the scope of “Focus on Multilingualism” is in some aspects also different
from “flexible bilingualism” and “translanguaging”.
“Focus on Multilingualism” has its roots in multilingual education understood
as “the use of two or more languages in education provided that schools aim at
multilingualism and multiliteracy” (Cenoz 2012). According to this definition, multilingual
education includes schools and higher education institutions provided that
the acquisition of competencies in different languages is a goal. Some examples of
multilingual education are schools aiming at multilingualism in bilingual regions
where a minority language is spoken such as Wales, Catalonia, South Tyrol or the
Basque Country in Europe. Another example of multilingual education is Canadian
immersion where French is used as the language of instruction for English
first language learners, or dual immersion schools in the USA with English and
Spanish as the languages of instruction. Additional examples are Intercultural Bilingual
Education in Latin America which uses indigenous languages and Spanish,
or international schools in different parts of the world. All these different types of
schools aim at developing proficiency in two or more languages. Schools that aim
at multilingualism can be found in some parts of the world and can involve different
types of languages, different pedagogies and sociolinguistic contexts. In practice,
it is impossible to develop a straightforward typology of multilingual education involving
two or more languages because of the great diversity of elements involved.
Following Hornberger (1989), the “Continua of Multilingual Education” is an alternative
to typologies that can be used to analyse and compare the complex reality
of multilingual education resulting from the interaction of linguistic, sociolinguisticand educational variables such as linguistic distance, status of the languages or the
use of languages in the curriculum (Cenoz 2009). The “Continua of Multilingual
Education” can be used as a tool to describe different types of multilingual education
and make international comparisons.
“Focus on Multilingualism” uses Hornberger’s idea of continua and looks at
the languages in the school curriculum as linguistic systems and at multilingual
practices in which speakers use their multiple linguistic resources in interaction.
Therefore, it looks at the interrelationship at two different levels. “Focus on Multilingualism”
considers that languages can be distinct entities because they are treated
as such by social actors in the school context who study languages as a subject or
as language arts. For example, English, Basque and Spanish are compulsory school
subjects in primary and secondary Basque schools and French is an optional subject
in secondary school. Basque is the main language of instruction but also Spanish
and English are used as languages of instruction. The four languages are considered
separate objects in the school context and they are listed as such on the timetable.
Languages are also treated as distinct objects by many other researchers in multilingual
education who tend to focus on issues such as the acquisition of proficiency
in one specific language, the transfer from one language to another or the acquisition
of content taught through a specific language. In comparison to school ideologies
and research traditions that create solid boundaries between languages, “Focus
on Multilingualism” considers that boundaries should be more flexible, as will be
discussed in the next sections. “Focus on Multilingualism” also considers complex
discourse practices that can be more often found in spontaneous interaction
amongst multilingual students both at school and outside school. In these situations,
translanguaging is a common practice amongst multilinguals. It can have a pedagogical
value but this value in many contexts has not been explored sufficiently.
“Focus on Multilingualism” originates in situations where three languages are
part of the school curriculum. Having three or more languages in the curriculum
is quite common in many parts of the world such as India (Mohanty 2008), China
(Jiang et al. 2007), Morocco (Ennaji 2005), Luxembourg (Kirsch 2006) or the Netherlands
(Gorter and Van der Meer 2008), to mention just a few. “Focus on Multilingualism”
is also a valid approach for schools with two languages in the curriculum
but when it comes to research the complexity of school multilingualism involving
three or more languages can provide the opportunity to observe interesting patterns
of interrelationships involving different directions. “Focus on Multilingualism” is
an approach for teaching and research in multilingual education that relates the way
multilingual students (and multilingual speakers in general) use their communicative
resources in spontaneous conversation to the way languages are learnt and
taught at school. It analyses the gap between the traditional focus on one language
at a time at school and in research and real multilingualism that considers all the
languages and multilingual discursive practices. It explores the possibility of establishing
bridges that can link these two realities so that multilingual students can use
their own resources to a larger extent in formal education.In the next sections, we will look at the three dimensions that we distinguish in
“Focus on Multilingualism”: (1) the multilingual speaker; (2) the whole linguistic
repertoire and (3) the social context.
13.3 The Multilingual Speaker
The communicative skills of multilingual speakers have traditionally been measured
from a monolingual perspective against the yardstick of the ideal native
speaker of each of the languages involved. This practice produces a sense of failure
and lack of self-confidence when learning languages because the level to be
reached in the target language is seen as an impossible goal (Cook 2010). When
more than two languages are learnt at school, the possibility of becoming “an ideal
multilingual” with native competence in several languages is even more remote.
The idea of the bilingual who is expected to be like two monolinguals (that can be
extended to the idea of the multilingual as several multilinguals) was criticized by
Grosjean almost 30 years ago (Grosjean 1985). Grosjean proposed a holistic view
of bilingualism, according to which bilinguals are considered as fully competent
speaker-hearers who have a unique linguistic profile. In the field of second language
acquisition, Cook (1992) proposed the notion of “multicompetence” as a
complex type of competence, which is qualitatively different from the competence
of monolingual speakers of a language. Cook (2003, p. 2) defines “multicompetence”
as “the knowledge of more than one language in the same mind”, a concept
based on the idea of the second language user as a whole person in opposition to the
monolingual native speaker.
In the real world, multilinguals acquire and use their skills at different levels depending
on their communicative purposes, and the holistic-multilingual approaches
proposed by Grosjean and Cook seem to reflect multilingual speakers’ discursive
practices more accurately. Being competent to communicate in several languages
does not only imply acquiring syntactic rules or vocabulary but also implies using
languages in different contexts. A multilingual speaker uses different languages either
in isolation or mixed, for different purposes instead of using one language for
all possible situations. An example of a Basque L1 speaker who is fluent in Spanish
and is attending a course in English can be useful to illustrate this point. Itziar (not
her real name) is a 20-year-old female student of Social Education at the University
of the Basque Country. She has been asked to indicate which languages she uses in
different situations. These questions were part of a questionnaire carried out to analyse
the complexity of multilingual proficiency. More than 100 university students
filled in a questionnaire on their perceived competence in three or more languages
and the use of these languages in different everyday life activities. Itziar’s answers
are given below:
• Talking about a personal problem with a close friend. Only if I always speak
Basque to this friend I would use Basque, otherwise I use Spanish.• Chatting on the internet. If it is with my friends I would use Basque, if it is that
I just join a “chat” I think that I would use Spanish.
• Reading the newspaper. I usually read newspapers in Basque and Spanish.
• Listening to what your friend did at the weekend. That would be in Basque, I
have very few friends who use Spanish to talk about daily things.
• Writing an application for a job including your CV. As we live in the Basque
Country I would use Basque but there can be exceptions. I have my CV ready in
Basque but if I need a job in Spain I would translate it.
• Reading a novel. I tend to use Spanish, there are more things to read in Spanish
and the things I am interested in are usually written in Spanish.
• Watching a movie. The same as for books, usually in Spanish.
• Listening to a lecture on multilingual education. In Spanish or Basque, I could
follow well in both, but not so well in English.
• Reading a legal text like the Basque Country Official Gazette. I would read
it in Spanish because we have learned most technical words in Spanish.
• Sending an e-mail to ask for information about a job. I would look at the information
first and then depending on what it is I would use Spanish or Basque.
• Sending an SMS to a friend. Basque or Spanish depending on the friend.
• Talking to a doctor in hospital about a health problem. I would probably use
Spanish because most doctors prefer to speak Spanish.
This example shows that Itziar alternates the use of Basque and Spanish depending
on the activity and the interlocutor. In comparison, a monolingual student with
Spanish as the first language will use only Spanish for all activities and with all
interlocutors. Itziar as a bilingual speaker will have fewer opportunities to use each
of the languages for each of the activities and there are some activities that she does
preferably in Basque, others in Spanish and others in both languages. It may be difficult
for Itziar to read a legal text equally well in Basque and Spanish because she
is not used to reading this type of text in Basque, even if she is a native speaker of
Basque. The type of competence Itziar has in either Basque or Spanish is difficult
to isolate without considering the other language because they are intertwined. If
we adopt a holistic multilingual view, we can consider Itziar a competent bilingual
speaker who can carry out many activities in both Basque and Spanish and navigate
between languages according to the context. She is not less competent than a monolingual
speaker because she can carry out all these activities. However, she is different
from a monolingual speaker because she uses one or two languages (or even
three) and she can even do so in different ways using her bilingual repertoire. The
holistic approach to bilingualism proposed by Grosjean (1995, 2008) or the concept
of multicompetence proposed by Cook (1992) seem more adequate approaches to
define Itziar’s competence than a practically non-existent monolingual speaker of
Basque and a monolingual native speaker of Spanish when looking at Itziar’s communicative
competencies and language practices.
Even though the ideas proposed by Grosjean (2008) and Cook (1992) have received
attention in studies on multilingualism and second/third language acquisition
and are often mentioned in the literature, they have rarely been put into practice inresearch and teaching. The atomistic/monolingual native speaker ideal competence
is still the reference for researchers and language teachers who usually focus on one
target language at a time. “Focus on Multilingualism” proposes to consider multilingual
speakers as such and not as monolingual speakers of each of the languages
because monolingual competence cannot be applied to multilingualism (see also
Jessner 2008). The communicative competence of multilingual speakers is fluid,
not fixed, difficult to measure but real. “Focus on Multilingualism” looks at multilingual
speakers and proposes to look at the different ways these speakers learn and
use their languages without comparing them to ideal native speakers of different
languages.
13.4 The Whole Linguistic Repertoire
As we have seen in the previous section, multilingual speakers navigate between
languages. However, the intersection between languages has not received enough
attention (Gorter 2013). This is quite surprising if we take into consideration that, as
Li Wei and Wu (2009, p. 193) point out, codeswitching is “the most distinctive behaviour
of the bilingual speaker”. The study of codeswitching has been an important
development in sociolinguistics (see, for example, Gardner-Chloros 2009) but it has
received less attention in research conducted in educational settings. In general, the
language separation ideology is well rooted in education and teaching practices try
to avoid translation and the interaction between languages, and have been referred
to as “parallel monolingualism” (Heller 1999, p. 271), “two solitudes” (Cummins
2005. p. 588) or “separate bilingualism” (Blackledge and Creese 2010). The preference
for what Li Wei (2011, p. 374) calls the “One Language Only (OLON) or One
Language at a Time (OLAT) ideology” creates a gap between school communication
and the practices of multilingual speakers in real life.
Interaction between the languages can be analysed with reference to approaches
to second language acquisition based on the Complex systems theory or dynamic
systems theory (De Bot et al. 2007; Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008; Van
Geert 2008; Jessner 2006). In his volume on developmental psychology, Van Geert
(1994) compares the similarities and differences between a child learning about
time telling and money counting in terms of connected growers. There is support
because both growers share some underlying principles and there can be strategies
learnt in one that can be applied to the other. At the same time, there is competition
between these growers because the child needs resources such as time, attention
and effort to learn them. There can also be some confusion because the time units
and the money units are different (adding to 60 in the case of time and to 100 with
money). This example can be applied to learning two or more languages at school.
The relationship between the languages can be at the same time competitive and
supportive. Learning languages require resources such as time, effort, attention and
interest. This is clearly seen at school and there have been many attempts in different
parts of the world to try to get more time for second and foreign languages
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