What are the Main Issues Within ELT Today?

In this post Rod Bolitho and Richard Rossner, authors of our book Language Education in a Changing World, answer some questions on the issues within ELT today and how things have changed since the pandemic.

How did the two of you come to collaborate on this book?

We have worked together before and have shared ideas about language education. We felt that there were few recent and accessible books that explore the broader picture of how language education, including learning of the language of schooling, has developed in response to changes in society and due to ‘globalisation’. Working together enabled us to pool and synthesise our accumulated experience.

Your book was published right at the start of the pandemic, and obviously a lot has changed in language education as a result of Covid. What would you add to the book now? 

One of us (Richard) was closely involved in a European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) initiative on the impact of the Covid emergency on foreign language education. The results of the various surveys and consultations undertaken are described in a recent publication called Rethinking language education after the experience of Covid. In general, while the experience was traumatic for many learners and for some language teachers, language education professionals adapted quickly to the challenges of online language teaching and to using the various internet resources that are available. The publication contains ‘guidelines’ arising from the research which highlight the importance of greater flexibility and of developing a willingness to experiment and adapt methods and resources to circumstances, while at the same time giving attention to the individual and collective well-being of learners and teachers, especially (but not only) during periods of crisis, like the pandemic. We might well have wanted to bring some of these points to the fore if the book had been published later.

What fundamentals of language education haven’t changed over the past three years?

The general neglect of language issues in school curricula and especially in teacher education. Despite isolated initiatives, mainly in parts of Europe, there is still no widespread acceptance of the fact that every teacher is effectively a language teacher, or of the need for teacher education to take this fully into account. Teachers of any subject working online with their learners during the pandemic must have felt this even more keenly than they had during face-to-face teaching.

What do you think is the main issue ELT faces today?

An issue that ELT has faced for many years but has never really confronted is the status of English as (currently) the dominant foreign language, and the impact that this has on the status of other languages, particularly those that are under threat. The fact that, for a large majority of speakers of English in the world, it is not their first language, has implications for the ‘ownership’ of the language and what versions and varieties of the language should be considered acceptable. Moreover, the dominance of English has tended to lead to lack of collaboration and interaction between teachers of English and teachers of other languages, and perhaps less attention to, and regard for, other languages in the practice of ELT.

One of the main goals of the book was to influence positive change, from classroom practice to policy. Do you see any signs that this is happening?

There are some signs of positive change that we are aware of. These include reflections on what all teachers including language teachers had to do to cope with the constraints arising from Covid, and national and international initiatives to promote language sensitivity across the curriculum, which is the topic of our most recent book and is the focus of an ECML project called ‘Building Blocks for planning language-sensitive education’. But we can’t yet claim that Language Education in a Changing World has played a role in these developments.

What are the key messages that you hope teachers and teacher educators might take away from the book?

The main ones are that all stakeholders in education, including especially teachers and also decision-makers and parents, should understand the critical importance of the role of language and communication as the lifeblood of any educational process. This has implications for pre-service teacher education as well as for the continuing professional development of all teachers, and for the way it is organised and resourced.

What are you working on at the moment (separately or together)?

As mentioned, we have already collaborated intensively on a new book published in late 2022 called Language-Sensitive Teaching and Learning. This is a resource book for teachers of all subjects and for teacher educators containing well over 100 tasks of different kinds focusing on language, mainly in educational settings. These are accompanied by commentary and discussion of what we see as the key practical implications of language-sensitive teaching and learning. In addition, Rod is working on a book of ‘Case Studies in CPD’ with Amol Padwad in India. Meanwhile Richard continues as a member of a Council of Europe team working on resources for use by those providing language support to migrants.

Rod Bolitho and Richard Rossner

For more information about this book please see our website.

Rethinking Language Learning for Accountants

We recently published Communication that Counts by Pia Patricia P. Tenedero. In this post the author dispels the myth about accountants and poor communication.

More than a decade of teaching English language courses to accounting professionals and students in the Philippines has shown me that these people are serious about improving their English skills. They are among the most eager and diligent adult learners I have had the joy to teach. While they are not all A+ students, it is NOT true that they are poor in communication any more than professionals and students in other disciplines. But somehow, their number-smartness seems to be constantly leveraged against their identity as corporate communicators.

 “Accountants are not good communicators.”

Echoes of this complaint have motivated me to interrogate it. Is it true? Certainly, it is easy to believe especially with the introverted quant persona repeatedly portrayed in movies, and the skills gap discourse reported in mostly Anglophone-based communication research. But as in all stereotypes, its truth has limits.

To uncover the limitations of this claim, Communication that Counts unpacks the issues by clarifying what counts as ‘good communication’ in globalized accounting schools and workplaces? Who sets these norms? For what ends? In the process, the book challenges other deeply held beliefs about language, higher education, and the workplace.

“The language curriculum should be aligned with workplace practices to ensure the communicative competence of future accountants.”

I partially agree with this and propose some practical innovations in the communication training provided to future accountants. (In January 2023, I begin teaching Communicating for Globalized Accounting, an elective course based on the findings of this study.) At the same time, I caution against viewing perfect alignment in school-workplace communication practices as a panacea to the supposed gap in the communicative ability of university students. It is an impossible target, to begin with! Higher education and the workplace are interrelated domains, yes, but they also have distinct goals. School is only partly a preparation for the workplace, so we can only target partial alignment at best. This dynamic, however, does not make schools any less of a ‘real world’ than corporate and home offices. Naturally, what happens in accounting schools is not an exact replica of what happens in accounting workplaces, including how teachers, students, and practitioners communicate, what languages they use, and who they view as effective communicators.

“English is the language of global accounting.”

I also examine this, and other ideas about language held by accounting students, teachers, employers and professionals. The way people think about languages is shaped by and, in turn, shapes language education and experiences. Yet we do not reflect on it enough. I believe it is especially important for language teachers like me to be more aware of our language attitudes as this affects the practices we (dis)allow in the classroom and which our students may expect to see in the workplace (a.k.a. ‘the real world’). But, as I’ve discovered in my ethnographic work with onshore and offshore accountants, English is, in fact, NOT the only language spoken or written in the highly multilingual and multicultural space of globalized accounting.

Globalized accountants engage in complex language and communication work. In this field, effective communication has multiple, shifting meanings. While English is treated as a superstar, it is not the only skill that counts in this multilingual field. These and more are part of the Global South story I share in Communication that Counts.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Language Management by Natalie Victoria Wilmot.

What’s It Like Growing Up With Three Languages?

Last month we had a work experience student with us from Germany. Loïc grew up speaking three languages (his father is one of our authors and you can read about his multilingual journey in our book Raising Multilingual Children), so we wanted to ask him about his experience of being multilingual.

How many languages do you speak?

Loïc (left) and Laura on a tour of our distributor’s warehouse with our account manager, Matt

I would say that I fluently speak three languages: German, Dutch and English.

Did you grow up learning all those or did you learn any later in life?

The first language I learnt was Dutch, as my mom is a Dutch native speaker. Shortly after that, through my father speaking English with me, I became proficient in English as well. Then lastly by living in a German environment, going to German kindergarten and having mostly German friends, German was the third language I learnt.

Do you think of any one language as your ‘mother tongue’ or do you count them all?

I would count all of them as my ‘mother tongue’ even though I speak some better than others and also feel more comfortable depending on the language I speak.

Do you feel your personality changes depending on the language you’re speaking?

I personally can only refer to me feeling most comfortable whilst speaking English. From my friends and family I have heard that I get annoyed a lot faster, and on account of that, curse a lot more, when I speak German.

Which language do you find most difficult and why?

It is most difficult for me to speak Dutch, because I don’t often have the opportunity to speak it. My mom and I stopped speaking Dutch to each other about five years ago as I usually just responded in German. The reason for that I still haven`t figured out (ultimate act of teenage defiance?) I must say that I do regret that, but if I stay with my Dutch family for more than 3 days I usually get the hang of it again.

Which is your favourite language to speak and why?

Loïc on a visit to Sarah’s new house in Dawlish with Tommi and Laura

My favourite language to speak depends a lot on who I’m talking to – with my friends I feel the best speaking German, with my family English or Dutch (depending on what they would rather speak). Overall I must say though that English is my favourite language and usually that is the language I go with when I am emotional.

You live in Germany – how do you maintain your other languages?

I do live in Germany, yes. Maintaining my German is understandably easy and my English also mainly easy, as I practice in school, with foreign friends, online, with media and with my father most of all. My Dutch on the other hand is somewhat more difficult to maintain, but I recently starting speaking more Dutch with my mom and some of my Dutch friends. Mainly I practice my Dutch though when I am in the Netherlands or in Belgium.

What are the advantages of being multilingual?

The range of people I can speak to is a lot bigger. In general, all the benefits you gain from speaking other languages, just that I didn’t have to undergo the time-consuming process of learning a different language… which is supremely helpful. I think every person who has tried to learn a language knows the frustration of not being able to express yourself correctly in that language, because of a lack of proficiency. So I am very happy and lucky that my parents brought me up to be trilingual.

There are also some disadvantages of being multilingual. These disadvantages for me would be that I often switch words in languages or sometimes forget to address a person in the correct language. Generally speaking though I think the cons are strongly outweighed by the pros.

 

Raising Multilingual Children is available on our website.

The Impact of English as a Lingua Franca on EFL Teaching

This month we published English as a Lingua Franca for EFL Contexts edited by Nicos C. Sifakis and Natasha Tsantila. In this post the editors discuss the rise of English as a Lingua Franca and its impact on EFL teaching.

Thinking about the function and impact of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is not new. The fascination for the global character of English has been around for at least four decades. Scholars have been discussing and analysing the (mostly idiosyncratic) uses of English by so-called “non-native speakers”, predominantly people working in the field of banking and economics, since the late 1970s. Those were simpler times. As the 20th century gave its turn to the 21st, and as the internet took the world by storm, people, and not just businessmen, needed a quick and easy way to communicate, to exchange ideas, to become understood and to express themselves on a global level. English was the ideal vehicle for this. Everything happened so fast. Suddenly, there were millions and millions of instances where people (yes, mostly “non-native”) were using English without the least concern for established norms. When you want to communicate and be understood, you have to consider what the other person is able to understand and therefore you are bound to tailor your entire linguistic behaviour (i.e., choice of words, intonation, speed of delivery, etc.) to the communicational needs of the circumstance; you find that your interlocutors feel and act very much the same way.

This is fine, except that now it is suddenly happening everywhere and by everyone. Online and offline, in virtually all geographical latitudes, people use English when no other language is shared, and even when this is the case, English seems to be the “go-to” primary linguistic vehicle. All this makes the task of describing and making sense of what is happening fascinating but extremely taxing. There are simply countless contexts and situations where English may be used by the “non-native speaker”, and these contexts are now many many more than those demanding compliance to the native-speaker norms will ever be. Even native speakers have to buy into this ELF mindset if they want to successfully communicate with non-native speakers.

On top of everything, the critical perspective in applied linguistics, developed in the 1990s, shook scholars’ confidence in many of the perceptions and terms that had shaped the field for decades. Certain things that were considered fundamental in applied linguistics and foreign language teaching were fundamental no more, the very notion of the “native speaker” being one of the first in the fray. The cornerstone of modern linguistics, the native speaker, was deemed not useful and more a politically incorrect term that fails to describe reality and, to make matters worse, carries with it a string of convictions that are old-fashioned and, well, plainly wrong. Also consider the notion of “mistake” and that of “feedback provision” in the EFL classroom: what constitutes a mistake is arguably no longer a simple matter of looking up the grammar of English, and how the teacher will focus learners’ attention to different aspects of their use of the language is no longer straightforward.

Of course, we are not arguing that EFL, as we all understand it and have experienced (or are experiencing) it, is not still valid. Far from it. It’s just that it is now becoming clearer that so-called EFL-focused practices tend to be predominantly (some would say, exclusively) native-speaker-oriented, and this is the remit of a huge and highly profitable field in applied linguistics and teaching, called high-stakes testing. But the world is not the same as it was 30 or 20, or even 10 years ago and the point that we and the other authors make in the book is that this needs to be reflected in the way that English is taught.

In a nutshell, this book aims to present the case of ELF for EFL contexts. The colleagues that wrote the various chapters are top scholars in their respective fields and the cases they are presenting in each chapter are grounded in extensive research they have undertaken. What we are concerned with is making sense of the impact that ELF can have for teaching, and specifically EFL teaching. We have done our best to incorporate all aspects of EFL teaching, including pedagogy, materials evaluation, teacher education, policy, assessment and testing. Our ultimate aim is to kickstart a dialogue on the principles and processes of what we call ELF awareness in EFL teaching. ELF awareness is a lot more than awareness of ELF: it first and foremost incorporates an awareness of context and an appreciation of pedagogical style, learner needs and usage of English inside and outside the EFL classroom and, fundamentally, an awareness of our attitudes and convictions regarding English.

Nicos Sifakis, sifakisnicos@gmail.com

Natasha Tsantila, ntsantila@acg.edu

For more information about this book please see our website. If you found this interesting, you might also like Preparing Teachers to Teach English as an International Language edited by Aya Matsuda. 

Critiquing the Notion of English as the Global Lingua Franca for Academic Journal Publishing

We recently published Global Academic Publishing edited by Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis. In this post the editors examine the idea of English as the global language of academic publishing.

It is commonly asserted that English has become the global language of academic publishing. The push for scholars in many parts of the world to publish their research in English-medium journals has grown markedly in the past two decades, affecting researchers working not just in the natural sciences but also in the social sciences and humanities. This trend has developed against a backdrop of neoliberal policies in many global contexts that have strongly affected the aims, activities, and working conditions of higher education. In many cases, using English and writing for publication in English signal the ‘internationalization’ of higher education, with little attention being paid to what might be lost in this move or what the costs may be to individual academics and to knowledge production more broadly. In fact, the shift to English means that knowledge published in English may not be available in local languages, hindering the development of local research cultures and societies more broadly.

In the past 25 years, research has documented many of the barriers to multilingual scholars gaining access to the global academic marketplace (in English); their perspectives on their successes and challenges; and the policy conditions that foster the growing pressure to publish in English. The chapters compiled in our new edited book, Global Academic Publishing, critically examine how these pressures and policies play out in specific geographic contexts, some of which have not been previously explored. The book’s section on policy explores the effects and inequities of both implicit and explicit policies for the use of English in academic knowledge production. Implicit policies for English-medium publishing include the nesting of English in many of the metrics now being used to evaluate the work of academics, for example, the journal citation indexes published by the Web of Science and journals published by Elsevier, Springer and other European and North American publishers. Evaluation systems driven by such metrics tend to ignore other ways of evaluating research quality and sidestep deeper conversations about what topics and questions are valuable and to whom.

The perspectives section of the book investigates the dynamics of academic publishing in English that continue to develop even in contexts that have historically had high levels of access to English such as Scandinavia and western Europe, where pressures for English have an impact on scholars’ multilingual identities and engagement with knowledge production for various audiences. The book’s section on journal publishing pushes the boundaries of research on academic publishing to look at how editors respond to pressures for English-medium articles in terms of their journals’ policies and practices. It also examines the rising phenomenon of open access publishing including those unscrupulous open access publishers who prey on scholars’ desires for English publications. The final section of the book draws together research critically examining different types of pedagogies supporting scholars and graduate students in their publishing efforts, from courses to workshops to self-support structures using mobile technology.

This volume marks the launch of the new book series we are editing, Studies in Knowledge Production and Participation.

Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis

For more information about this book please see our website. If you found this interesting, you might also like International Student Engagement in Higher Education by Margaret Kettle.

 

Stories of Dreamers: Linguistic Privilege and Marginalisation

This month we published Narratives of East Asian Women Teachers of English by Gloria Park. In this post the author explains how her book has provided a platform for six East Asian women to share their experiences of living in the midst of linguistic privilege and marginalisation.

Writing Narratives of East Asian Women Teachers of English: Where Privilege Meets Marginalization has been an amazing journey. Amazing in a sense that I was able to revisit the stories of the five fabulous women who have opened their lives to me, but also, being able to reflect on my life – the very stories that have shaped me into who I am today. While this book is about Han Nah, Liu, Xia, Yu Ri, Shu-Ming, and Gloria, the stories that unfold in each chapter can touch the lived experiences of many other women teachers of English around the world.

The stories in this book are symbolic of how issues of privilege and marginalization continue to (re)surface in our lives – how issues of race, gender, and class intersect with the English language and traverse the territories of the US and our mother lands. In our times of political turmoil where difference is negated, placed on chopping blocks, and silenced, our stories and other stories of transnational and mobile individuals become critical. Critical because these are shared stories of experiences of the Dreamers – those of us who seek out opportunities, both directly and indirectly, to live and interact humanely in this world. The stories of the six women depicted in this book may be privileged narratives, but I can’t negate the ways in which even the most privileged are somehow marginalized – the stories of privilege intersecting the linguistic and racialized discourses that continue to haunt these women and others in similar minority positions in the United States. Yes, indeed, this book has been my platform to shout out the lives we all know exist for those who are perceived to be (il)legitimate speakers and users of the English language.

Yet, these platforms are not always accessible to everyone. Those who are perceived to be powerless or special victims will never have the opportunity nor a platform to fight their battles for voice, for democracy, for visibility, for a better life, and most of all, for a chance to live out their DREAMS as the DREAMERS. While those who think that they can MAKE AMERICA GREAT have no clue about the legacy of America and those who have stepped up to build America in more ways than one. There is no singular truth in our complex world – there is no supremacy in the United States – it is a land of opportunity that should and MUST continue to champion those who need to live out their DREAMS. Each person’s dream is unique, as depicted by the stories of these six women, in that it changes with time given both local and global contexts. Narratives of East Asian Women Teachers of English is one step toward finding our voice, our agency, our democracy, our opportunity, and most of all, our DREAM to live and interact safely in this world now and in the years to come.

For more information about this book please see our website. If you found this interesting, you might also like Desiring TESOL and International Education by Raqib Chowdhury and Phan Le Ha.

Three decades working with language learner autonomy

This month we are publishing Language Learner Autonomy by David Little, Leni Dam and Lienhard Legenhausen. In this post the authors reflect on three decades’ work in the field.

Learner autonomy entails that learners are fully involved in planning, implementing and evaluating their own learning. We were first introduced to the concept in the 1980s. For Leni Dam it offered a way of responding to the challenge of differentiation in teaching and learning at school; for Lienhard Legenhausen and David Little it was a prerequisite for successful self-access language learning at university. Our collaboration of almost three decades, however, has focused on classroom learning. Leni and Lienhard have used empirical techniques to explore the outcomes of autonomous language learning and compare them with the outcomes achieved by learners working with a ‘communicative’ textbook; while David has been concerned to derive pedagogical principles from successful practice to facilitate replication in other contexts.

Although learner autonomy has been a focus for innovation in language education for almost forty years, it’s equally relevant to other areas of the curriculum. In our view its operationalization entails that learner self-management and reflective learning are exercised and further developed via ‘practice’ appropriate to the curriculum subject in question. In a language classroom, practice means use of the target language as the preferred medium of communication and reflection. Under guidance from their teacher, autonomous language learners use the target language from the beginning to plan, implement and evaluate their learning. Writing plays an indispensable role: learning is documented in logbooks and portfolios, and this supports use of the oral language and facilitates reflection on the process and content of learning.

It is sometimes assumed that learner autonomy is concerned exclusively with individual learning, but this is a misunderstanding. All effective classroom learning is based on interactive communication; what makes the autonomy classroom different is the fact that, by definition, the learners have equal right of access to all discourse roles, initiating as well as responding. Our experience leads us to define the autonomy classroom as a self-generating and self-maintaining community of practice whose members develop proficiency by using the target language to manage their own learning individually and collaboratively. This means that they devise their own learning materials and produce a wide variety of creative texts – stories, poems, plays, and reports on projects of many different kinds.

Some years ago, Leni asked a class of 15-year-olds, ‘After four years of learning English, how would you assess your overall progress?’ This is what one girl wrote (transcribed without correction):

“I already make use of the fixed procedures from our diaries when trying to get something done at home. Then I make a list of what to do or remember the following day. That makes things much easier. I have also via English learned to start a conversation with a stranger and ask good questions. And I think that our “together” session has helped me to become better at listening to other people and to be interested in them. I feel that I have learned to believe in myself and to be independent.”

Clearly, in four years this learner has acquired a proficiency in English that extends her communicative and reflective capacity and with it her identity. Her facility in writing implies that English is a fully integrated part of her developing plurilingual literacy.

The autonomy classroom shares fundamental pedagogical principles with inclusive education. It is thus not surprising that autonomous learning succeeds with students whose learning difficulties might cause them to fail in more traditional pedagogical settings. We have also found that learner autonomy empowers adult refugees learning the language of their host community; and that when primary pupils from immigrant families are encouraged to use their home languages in the classroom (even though their teacher may not understand them), this not only helps them come to grips with curriculum content but also gives them an interest in taking autonomous learning initiatives.

Everything we have written about learner autonomy over the past thirty years or so has taken successful practice as its starting point, and we have always believed that learner autonomy is first a pedagogical imperative and only secondly a fertile research topic. Aimed at student teachers, teacher educators and language learning researchers, our book will have served its purpose if it encourages more language teachers to embrace the principles of learner autonomy and find ways of implementing them in their classrooms.

For more information about this book please see our website. If you found this interesting, you might also enjoy Managing Diversity in Education edited by David Little, Constant Leung and Piet Van Avermaet.

Understanding Racialized Expectations in the ELT Profession

This month we are publishing Race and Ethnicity in English Language Teaching by Christopher Joseph Jenks. In this post the author discusses where racialized expectations come from and how they shape language teaching and learning.

Expectations are everything; they help us make decisions and make sense of existing life experiences. Our expectations shape decisions to seek out particular food items, holiday destinations and places of residence, and influence the extent to which we are satisfied with them. For instance, the satisfaction that I receive from eating a kale salad is not tied to my expectation that this particular food item tastes good. This would, without saying, be a foolish expectation. Rather, consuming a kale salad brings me satisfaction because of my expectations that it will result in good health and allow me to align myself with the all-important hipster community. Of course, the belief that kale is a food item of both a health-conscious individual and an advanced human being is the result of many years of cultural conditioning, which materializes in my decision to seek out particular foods and shop at grocery stores that will remain unnamed.

The decision to enrol in a particular school taught by an instructor that looks a certain way and speaks a specific language variety is also shaped by an existing set of expectations. My book, which examines race and racism in English language teaching and learning, is essentially about understanding where racialized expectations come from, and how they shape our understanding of, and actions pertaining to, the profession. That is to say, a preference for hiring White instructors from so-called Western countries does not materialize in a vacuum – a key observation in my book – but this ideology is rather rooted in a history of cultural conditioning that informs individuals what they should expect to see and hear in the language classroom.

What discourses and ideologies are responsible for such expectations? The expectation that English is a language (best) spoken, and therefore taught, by a small group of countries comes from a number of discourses and ideologies, and indeed varies from one region of the world to another, including colonial and imperial histories; in a place like South Korea, English is often associated with North America because of the role the United States has in military, political, and economic affairs.

My interest in writing this book comes from the many unanswered questions that exist regarding how such expectations become racialized in and through the discourses that are circulated within the English language teaching profession. For instance, I was motivated to understand how neoliberal forces shape the expectations one has when thinking about what English course to take. Although I am not interested in criticizing neoliberalism as an economic theory necessarily, I was motivated to show that the commodification of English facilitates the creation and circulation of racialized expectations. The book was also written because I was very much interested in examining how expectations are formulated from the point of view of privilege, such as White instructors from places like the United States. I show in my book, for example, that racial privilege creates the expectation among White instructors that they are in the best position to facilitate language learning, and this in turn influences how said teachers orient themselves within the profession; I refer to this expectation as White saviorism.

Although this project is ultimately about understanding where racialized expectations come from and how they shape language teaching and learning, the book also explores what needs to be done in the profession to create new discourses and ideologies that attend to the racial diversity that exists within the workforce. Like my desire to eat kale salads, I attempt to show that racial discrimination and privilege are misplaced expectations that come from years of cultural conditioning. This is no easy task, as racism is tied to decades of complex political and cultural struggles; yet I will be happy if my book makes even the smallest of contributions to the eradication of racism in the profession.

For more information about this book please see our website. If you enjoyed this, you might also be interested in Why English? edited by Pauline Bunce, Robert Phillipson, Vaughan Rapatahana and Ruanni Tupas.

Advancing the Research Agenda on Child Foreign Language Learning

This month we’re publishing Learning Foreign Languages in Primary School edited by María del Pilar García Mayo. In this post the editor explains what inspired her to put the book together and what she hopes readers will gain from it.

Back in October 2014, and together with the members of a Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness-funded research project of which I was the principal investigator, we organized the First International Conference on Child Foreign Language Acquisition at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Surveying the field, it was obvious that most of what was known about the second language acquisition process came from research on adult and adolescent learners, or on younger learners but in immersion and second language contexts, that is, rich input contexts in which the learners are exposed to relevant stimuli outside the classroom. However, little was known about school-based programs in foreign language (FL) settings and much less about FL programs at the primary school level.

This was somewhat surprising as the number of FL programs for children mainly with English as a FL is on the increase worldwide. More studies on the topic were needed in order for stakeholders to make decisions on pedagogical measures based on research evidence. Sometimes research findings from language acquisition in immersion settings have been extrapolated to FL settings where conditions regarding number of pupils per classroom, exposure to appropriate input and curriculum time available are clearly not the same. FL contexts opportunities for exposure to the target language are often restricted to the classroom and because of this learners are almost completely reliant on their teachers. Besides, these different aged learners vary in terms of linguistic, cognitive and social development and, therefore, the process of adult and child second language acquisition is quite distinct.

After the conference, I decided to contact some of the participants and put together the proposal for what is now the volume Learning Foreign Languages in Primary School. Its main goal is to advance the research agenda on child FL learning. The twelve chapters that comprise the volume contain data gathered from primary school children (ages 6-12) while performing different tasks, answering questionnaires or providing feedback on diagnostic tests. The first languages of the children are Chinese, English, Hungarian, Persian and Spanish; and, except for data reported in one the chapters where the children were exposed to Esperanto, French, German and Italian, the second language learned as a FL was always English, thus representing the world-wide tendency referred to above. The volume offers contributions on what children are capable of doing and provides a wealth of data for researchers and educators. Besides, enhancing pedagogy through research is one of its key outcomes and the various chapters provide valuable insights about methods and teaching practices for young FL learners.

I hope Learning Foreign Languages in Primary School shows the reader that young FL learners are not passive recipients in their language learning process and that their insights are crucial for forthcoming research on the topic.

For more information about this book, please see our website. If you found this interesting, you might also like Beyond Age Effects in Instructional L2 Learning by Simone E. Pfenninger and David Singleton, which was published in April 2017, as well as Early Language Learning edited by Janet Enever and Eva Lindgren, due for publication in July 2017.

The Pleasure of Raising Multilingual Children

Last month we published Raising Multilingual Children by Julia Festman, Gregory J. Poarch and Jean-Marc Dewaele. In this post, Jean-Marc discusses his own experience of bringing up a multilingual daughter and explains what inspired him and his co-authors to write the book.  

Parents everywhere in the world want the best for their children. It means looking after their physical and psychological health as well as their education. I remember reading books with my wife when she was pregnant with Livia about the best ways to raise children. We felt a little overwhelmed by the amount of information and the occasionally contradictory suggestions on how to be good parents. We were also struck by the strong opinions people had about early multilingualism. Many expressed doubts about it being beneficial for the child “before a first language” settled in: wasn’t there a risk of the child ending up with a “muddled” linguistic system, unable to distinguish between the languages? Others wondered whether growing up with multiple languages might lead to an absence of clear linguistic and cultural roots for the child.

Having read my former PhD supervisor, Hugo Baetens Beardsmore’s (1982) book, Bilingualism: Basic Principles, my wife and I decided that the potential benefits of early multilingualism outweighed the potential drawbacks, and when Livia was born in London in 1996, my wife used Dutch with her, I used French, with English spoken all around us. She picked up Urdu from her Pakistani child-minder, who spoke English and Urdu with the English-speaking children. We were a bit concerned that the introduction of a fourth first language might be too much for Livia, but this fear turned out to be unfounded and her languages developed at a normal pace – though Urdu faded away after the age of two and a half when she moved to an English nursery school. From the moment she started speaking, she was perfectly capable of separating her languages, and switching from one to another effortlessly depending on the linguistic repertoire of her interlocutor. She still sounds like a native speaker in her three languages and consistently got some of the highest marks for English during her primary and secondary education. The brain of a baby is like a sponge: sufficient and regular linguistic input will allow it to absorb the languages in its environment. There is no danger of the brain ‘overheating’ because of exposure to too many languages.

Livia’s case is the first story in the book Raising Multilingual Children that has just come out. It includes Livia’s own view on her multilingualism at the age of ten and sixteen. My co-authors Greg Poarch and Julia Festman tell the story of their trilingual children. Greg’s son, Loïc, speaks two minority languages (English and Dutch) at home and uses German outside of his home. Julia’s daughter and son, Aya and Noam, grew up as trilinguals from birth, with two minority languages (English and Hebrew) at home and German outside. The situation changed when Julia’s husband passed away and the input in Hebrew dried up. Now German is the majority language spoken inside and outside of their home and English is the language used at school. Greg, Julia and I decided to pool our family experiences with three languages to produce a book for the general public informed by the academic research. We adopted an issue-related approach and agreed that we would present tips based on examples from our daily lives to highlight things that worked, and strategies that backfired with our children. The book contains concrete and practical ideas to implement multilingualism in the household.

For more information about this book, please see our website. If you found this interesting, you might also like A Parents’ and Teachers’ Guide to Bilingualism by Colin Baker, Language Strategies for Trilingual Families by Andreas Braun and Tony Cline, and Xiao-lei Wang’s books, Growing up with Three Languages and Maintaining Three Languages.