In the 21st century, voluntary and increasingly forced migration has brought about linguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and religious diversity that continues to enrich educational settings. Australian early childhood centres and schools, like many others around the world, are increasingly comprised of teachers and young people who speak multiple languages and dialects, and who connect to and interact with diverse cultures and traditions within a range of new and evolving spaces. Yet in English speaking countries in the global north and south there is a persistent and widespread adherence to a monocultural, monolingual orientation ‘English-only’ approach. This comprises of placing emphasis on knowledge created in and communicated through English only. This orientation has a significant influence on inclusion and engagement for all young people and the ways educators teach and students learn across educational contexts.

The chapter explores how plurilingualism potentially influences young children's perspectival cognition, including understandings of false belief and implications for cooperative science inquiry.

In an increasing number of families and communities, children grow up in multilingual and multicultural environments. Children thus negotiate their identities while navigating across linguistic practices and ideologies at home, in school, and in community spaces. This paper has two main aims. First, it develops a clearer understanding of developments in the research domain of plurilingualism, identity, childhood and education. Second, it provides insight into the nexus between children’s’ identity construction and larger societal discourses and practices. In the first part, the focus lies on the concept of identity itself and the way it relates to language(s), discourse(s) and societal language ideologies. In the second part, the focus is on some contexts that are especially relevant for the development of children’s linguistic identities and agency, such as family language policies, early childhood education in nurseries, language regimes and pedagogical traditions of language teaching in schools. The important role of educational institutions with regard to the lingua-cultural identity development of children and adolescents in a globalized world becomes more than evident.

This chapter presents some of the complex issues relating to the teaching/ learning of (emergent) pluringual children within the context of formal education. In addition to defining key concepts, the chapter exemplifies research findings by giving voice to the learner through the inclusion of short extracts from a personal testimony in which early education experiences in relation to plurilingualism are discussed. When the language(s), cultural codes and expectations at school differ from those at home, both teachers and learners can feel destabilized. Inadequate teacher education about plurilingualism leaves a void all too easily filled with misguided and unhelpful practiced language policies, fuelled by ideologies rather than research. This chapter discusses the consequences of language (de)legitimization, focusing on the complex dynamics and interplay of language, power and relationships. It examines how schools and their staff acknowledge and build on or ignore and impede plurilingual children’s knowledge and skills development.

In this chapter, the author presents some of her creative courses or workshops at Aix-Marseille University and in a local medical centre, as well as a new action research project in creative pedagogy. As a lecturer, she has developed an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research, infusing her academic teaching with creative, plurilingual practices. She became aware of the pleasures of thinking and writing between languages when studying English poetry for her PhD in French, as well as of the negotiation of the cultural and conceptual mismatches between the discourses of English poetry criticism and French academia, and between interior and exterior languages, but with a crossover effect: a language of intimacy from which one was estranged by distance, a language of exteriority in the immediate environment. The creative energy of language learning, and the pleasure learners take in the phonetics and physicality of foreign words, led the author to develop a pedagogical approach designed to include what Yoann Loisel calls the ‘maternal side of language’. She references Julia Kristeva’s chora to convey the way creative translation and plurilingual creative writing workshops offer the possibility of playing with new ‘ways of [writing]’, new ‘manners of being’.

In this chapter the author revisits the concept of “super-diversity” from the perspective of colonial history. He presents the phenomenon as the outcome of the reversal of migrations, this time from especially the European former exploitation colonies to the European metropoles since the wake of World War II. The opposite direction of migrations had prevailed before, ignoring those of non-European enslaved and contract laborers from trade and exploitation colonies to settlement and other colonies. The author highlights differences in political and economic power associated with the differing directions of migrations, with the Europeans always having the upper hand, including in how to identify the migrants. Differences include the superposition of European languages as High varieties, associated with new communicative domains, over indigenous ones in the (trade and) exploitation colonies. This is in contrast with the marginalization and resentment of “allochthonous” languages in European urban centers, in addition to the stigmatization of the xenolectal and mixed character of the “autochthonous” language varieties produced by the migrants. The label “super-diversity” appears to reflect this fear of the foreigners from the colonies. Otherwise, the increase in societal multilingualism is not new. “Super-diversity” indexes the Othering of the immigrants.

From Italy to France and then Canada, Enrica Piccardo experienced a multifaceted journey with Italian, French, English, classical languages and dialects which nourished a holistic and complex approach of language learning that focuses on “the ensemble of linguistic, cultural and semiotic means that allows students to find their place in the world.”

This chapter discusses the setting of standards for language learning in formal education and focuses in particular on the role that assessment plays in that context. Some challenging dilemmas that face educators in seeking to apply standards are discussed. In a globalized world, one such dilemma occurs when setting international standards while respecting diversity and the need for locally determined norms and context-specific policies and practices. Three specific meanings of standards and standardization are explored in relation to language education in formal schooling. These three key aspects of standardization are interrelated. Standard languages: what is to be taught and learned in school. Standards of proficiency: the levels of competence that is to be achieved as the outcome of language learning. Professional standards: how languages are taught and assessed and how the quality of the teaching and assessment is determined and monitored. These three meanings are explored by taking into account the context where the language learning takes place and in relation to the intended uses of the target language outside of the classroom; the challenge for policymakers and educators is ultimately a multilingual one that involves the languages used in the home, in civil society and in school as curriculum subjects.

This chapter traces the evolution of language learner autonomy under the impact of transformative classroom practice. It begins by summarizing Holec's definition of the concept, and then describes an approach to teaching and learning that sought to operationalize that definition, but with two added features: use of the target language for all classroom communication; and a strong emphasis on collaborative learning. This gave the concept of language learner autonomy explanatory power: learners acquire L2 proficiency when their agency is channeled through the target language. The chapter then turns to inclusive education, describing an approach to the integration of immigrant pupils that engages their agency by encouraging them to use their home languages in the classroom. This enables them to develop a capacity for agentive behavior in English and Irish with the cognitive support their home language provides. The chapter concludes by briefly associating the two learning environments described with the concept of plurilingualism as it is defined in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

Chapter 5 draws together the different aspects of language, grammar and acquisition to explore applications to language education and teaching. We first address the question of the purposes of language education and based on these, we explore dichotomies of nativeness versus foreignness; awareness versus ability; and grammar acquisition versus grammar skills. This permits a reconsideration of familiar problems in language teaching, such as the use of the L1 in foreign language teaching, or the development of meta-linguistic knowledge compared to communicative competence. The use of Virtual Grammar and grammatical concepts as a way to enhance and develop language awareness to address educational goals of language teaching is outlined. The chapter concludes by considering, in general terms, the role of descriptive and theoretical linguistics in applied linguistics.

This chapter considers what lessons might be learned from a plurilingual perspective on CLIL in Anglophone contexts and implications for CLIL pedagogy in settings where English is the dominant language for the broader education system. Through a close analysis of different strategies used by two Australian teachers to provide comprehensible input about new content, we highlight how the use of English L1 can potentially benefit an integrated focus on content and language while also detracting from those aims. The chapter concludes by considering the issues this raises for teachers’ professional learning in such contexts – in particular for shifting teachers’ pedagogic focus from having learners merely understand and ‘receive’ messages to scaffolding their ability to work with all the language resources that they have available to them to access and build new concepts.