Who’s Teaching Whom? Co-Learning in Multilingual Classrooms

Transnational migration on a global scale in the last two decades has raised a range of important issues for language education in different countries. Amongst them is the question of what to do with the languages in the pupils’ linguistic repertoire that are not the school’s language of instruction. Bilingual and multilingual education come in different shapes and forms. A “strong form” of bilingual education, described by Baker (2012), occurs where “language minority children use their native, ethnic, home or heritage language in the school as a medium of instruction with the goal of full bilingualism” (Baker, 2012, p. 232). Examples of such strong forms of bilingual and multilingual education may include the European schools that have been described by Housen (2002), among others, where linguistically and culturally diverse students are taught in nonlanguage subjects in multiple languages as well as learning additional languages. Multilingual profi ciency and cultural pluralism are promoted through content learning and regular mixing of different language groups. It is fair to say that such schools are still in the minority and tend also towards the elite in the sense that they are not widely available to all pupils who are in need of bilingual and multilingual support. More common forms of bilingual education are often less structured, with less focus on balanced distribution of languages across the curriculum.