Teaching of a second language in the contexts where it is dominant has traditionally been done through immersion in the target language and culture. But the monolingual pedagogy has been increasingly seen as ideologically disempowering (Ryan, 1998; Kubota, 2003), unreflective of the learner’s sociocultural identity (Pavlenko and Blackledge, 2004), economically limiting in a globalized world (Cummins, 2003; Banks, 2004), and, whose success, from a pedagogical standpoint, is questionable (Cummins, 2009; TESOL Quarterly, 2009a). Read more

In the overall context of teacher education there is very little space left for shaping the pre-service teachers’ skills and competences to work in a multicultural environment. In our days there is a growing tendency that schools in Europe and beyond enroll the children with different linguistic and cultural background. How can education facilitate the learners’ efficacy in a multicultural environment? Read more

Plurilingual education

The Language Policy Unit and the ECML of the Council of Europe seek to contribute to making an "education of quality" available to all. But what do we mean by quality? The title of the present programme of the ECML is "promoting inclusive, plurilingual and intercultural education" which implies that these approaches really do improve the quality of education for all. This raises the question : in what way? Read more