Learning to Teach English in the Multilingual Classroom Utilizing the Framework of Reference for Pluralistic Approaches to Languages and Cultures

Abstract

Positioned in a specific curriculum context, yet universal in its rationale, this paper illustrates how over the course of one term, student teachers experiment with designing and teaching language learning activities that foster plurilingual competence of young learners of English, while following the Framework of Reference for Pluralistic Approaches to Languages and Cultures. It presents two practical teaching examples (one for primary and one for secondary school level) not only to showcase the great learning and motivational potential of pluralistic tasks employed in L3 English classrooms but also to bear testimony to the creativity and plentiful resources today’s pre-service language teachers themselves bring into their multilingual classrooms if encouraged and opened up to such a practice. Based on the FREPA descriptors, the paper evaluates the developed teaching material to discuss implications for pre- and in-service training of teachers working with young learners of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

1. Introduction

This paper presents the aims and practical teaching examples of a seminar on learning and teaching English as a third/additional language (L3/Ln) for future primary and secondary school teachers in Germany. It is positioned within the broader field of L3 acquisition in which L3/Ln learners are conceptualised as specific learners who have acquired a first language (L1) and are still acquiring or have acquired a second language (L2). Such L3/Ln learners should thus be able to draw on greater previous language learning experiences and linguistic knowledge stemming from two languages than L2 learners do (e.g., De Angelis 2007; Otwinowska and De Angelis 2014). Furthermore, and relatedly, L3/Ln learners should differ from L2 learners in displaying enhanced metalinguistic awareness, while also being subject to greater cross-linguistic influence due to the potential interaction of three linguistic systems instead of two (Jessner 2014). We argue that such potential, both in terms of metalinguistic ability and cross-linguistic transfer (whether of facilitative or non-facilitative nature), can and should be put to use in a systematic manner by language teachers in today’s foreign language classrooms (cf. Jessner 2008; Krulatz et al. 2018). The aim of language teaching, after all, is to foster pupils’ communicative skills in the respective language, on the one hand, and to form a basis for pupils’ life-long language learning, on the other hand, which entails the development of plurilingual and pluricultural competence (Council of Europe 2001). This competence is understood as the ability to flexibly call upon the inter-related, uneven, and developing knowledge of multiple languages and cultures (Council of Europe 2018), and the teaching approach that exploits such an ability is referred to as a pluralistic approach (cf. Candelier et al. 2012). It is worth noting that a distinction is made between the terms plurilingualism and multilingualism in European documents to denote individual multilingualism and societal multilingualism, respectively. In the present paper, however, the two terms are used interchangeably in reference to the acquisition of multiple languages by learners of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Given that today’s classrooms in Germany are inhabited by pupils with and without migrant backgrounds, curricular requirements for foreign languages explicitly mention that all pupils’ language resources should be integrated in teaching to recruit previous language learning expertise and experiences. In other words, pluralistic approaches to learning should be implemented (see, e.g., curriculum for North Rhine-Westphalia; QUA-LiS NRW 2009). What makes this teaching situation significantly different than hitherto is a paradigmatic shift that acknowledges multilinguals not as speakers with several monolingual competencies but much more as speakers with a linguistic multicompetence (Cook 1991, 1992), in whom languages are co-activated and continuously interact at all linguistic levels (see Kopečková et al. 2016; Kroll et al. 2013; Rothman 2011). Furthermore, there is ample evidence that multilingualism can affect cognition (Bialystok 2017; Poarch 2018; see also Poarch and Krott 2019). Such multilingual interactions and cognitive effects may be modulated to varying extents by factors that include relative language proficiencies, language typology (and psychotypology), and contexts of usage (Gullifer and Titone 2021). According to Lüdi and Py (2009), the language resources mobilized by multilinguals are of an individualized, dynamic, and contextualised nature. As such, future teachers of English should, therefore, be aware and become knowledgeable of the possibly diverging learning paths of individual L2 and L3 leaners in order to foster all of their pupils’ learning process.

More specifically, we make out three concurrent objectives for English language teachers: (1) pupils with migrant backgrounds should be made aware of the possible language learning synergies originating from their native language(s) and their L2 German; they may profit from their enriched language learning history and language awareness in acquiring L3 English. At the same time, fostering language awareness and cross-language comparisons in these pupils may reciprocally accelerate and support the development of proficiency in their heritage language(s) and L2 German; (2) pupils without migrant backgrounds should be nudged towards perceiving it as meaningful and relevant to acquire an additional language. Such a process could be supported by fostering language awareness through cross-linguistic comparisons between L1 German (including German dialects if relevant) and L2 English (and any other foreign languages they are familiar with), and by reflecting their language learning process; (3) all pupils should benefit from co-creating knowledge about similarities and differences between languages and how languages work at different linguistic levels; this can include morphosyntactic, lexical, phonological, semantic, orthographic, as well as pragmatic features. Being in charge of their personally significant learning, pupils will arguably become more motivated and autonomous learners, confident to engage in life-long language learning.

To enable such learning spaces, foreign language teachers need to be supported with suitable pre-service and in-service training programmes that allow them to reflect on their attitudes towards multilingualism and pluralistic approaches, and to experience how to teach linguistically and culturally diverse audiences effectively. Recent studies from German educational contexts suggest that today’s (in-coming) teachers of English are aware of the linguistic and cultural diversity of their classrooms, acknowledging the learning potential this constellation offers. However, they often feel insecure about how to teach English in a linguistically inclusive and effective way (cf. Busse et al. 2020; Cutrim Schmid and Schmidt 2017; Jakisch 2015; Komusin 2017). This paper presents a best practice example in pre-service English teacher preparation that aims to address these teachers’ needs.

Utilizing FREPA in Pre-Service English Teacher Training

The English Department of the University of Münster has been offering a seminar titled “Multilingualism in Schools: L3 English Acquisition” since 2014. Students enrolled in teacher training for either primary or secondary school levels are obliged to take this seminar as part of their German as a second language module (Deutsch als Zweitsprache—DaZ Modul). The first half of the 14-week seminar covers key aspects of L3 acquisition, while the second half focusses on how to implement pluralistic approaches in the English classroom. At the end of the seminar, students reflect their learning process and their developing skills as foreign language teachers, using sections of the European Portfolio for Student Teachers of Languages (EPOSTL, Newby et al. 2007)1.

Specifically, during the initial phase of the seminar (8 weeks), student teachers reflect on how prior language knowledge features in the learning of additional languages (Cenoz 2003), on their own multilingualism and their attitudes towards pluralistic pedagogies (De Angelis 2011), and whether knowing and using multiple languages has any beneficial effects on non-verbal cognition (Poarch and Bialystok 2017; Poarch and Van Hell 2018). Furthermore, student teachers become familiar with the concepts of metalinguistic and cross-linguistic awareness, which have been shown to be of key relevance in L2/L3/Ln learning (Hofer 2015) and can be effectively fostered in the primary (Busse et al. 2020; Hopp et al. 2020) and secondary (Čajko 2014) classrooms. Against the backdrop of such concepts, the seminar goes on to offer the student teachers a guideline and a tool on how to transfer the theoretical knowledge gained into practical application by utilizing the Framework of Reference for Pluralistic Approaches to Languages and Cultures (FREPA, Candelier et al. 2012).

The FREPA operationalises language learners’ competences and resources using specific descriptors for a range of educational levels. It makes a principled distinction between the concepts in that competences are viewed in the framework as linking to complex tasks that are situation-bound, while resources represent a mix of knowledge, attitudes, and skills that are at least partially de-contextualised. Competences call upon these internal resources (as well as external resources such as dictionaries) and can be taught as a result of appropriate learning activities. In other words, the FREPA postulates that teaching contributes to the development of competences through the resources which they activate. Accordingly, the FREPA project offers teaching materials with distinct learning objectives regarding knowledge (e.g., about the evolution of languages, cultural and social diversity), attitudes (e.g., language learning motivations, values, and identities), and skills (e.g., metalinguistic observation and reflection). These learning objectives (descriptors) were also used in the present paper as an analytical tool to evaluate the developed teaching activities in terms of their potential to activate pupils’ various resources. Relatedly, this study’s research question asks about the extent to which the two best practice example activities presented below fulfil FREPA’s key learning objectives.

The framework recognizes all linguistic repertoires, both within and outside of the educational environment, including regional, migrant, and heritage languages as well as those taught within the school curriculum; it provides teachers with a better understanding of the options in the pursuit of their plurilingual educative goals. The FREPA can thus be viewed as an important instrument for the implementation of language education policies that strive to develop plurilingual and pluricultural competence of all learners.

In line with these educative goals, the following section presents two example activities developed by student teachers together with the aims of the activities and corresponding lesson plans. The effectiveness of the teaching activities is then evaluated against a set of FREPA descriptors regarding target English learners’ knowledge, attitudes, and skills (Candelier et al. 2012).

2. Materials and Methods

Motivated by the aims and concepts of the FREPA framework, the student teachers in the L3 English seminar collaboratively design their own teaching activities that draw on the languages of a specific learner group. These often include French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Czech, Dutch, and Turkish next to German and English; however, they are also encouraged to consider regional dialects and/or languages that no one in their group may be familiar with. It is required that their learning activity is plurilingual in nature (not juxtaposing but rather interrelating multiple languages), well-resourced (integrated within the curriculum for the intended learner group), instructive (effective in delivery), and engaging for the intended multilingual group (based on exploration and encounter rather than direct instruction). Each team-teaching activity to their student peers, pretending to be their target learner group, is planned for 20 to 30 min in length to allow for self-reflection, peer, and instructor feedback after teaching.

Two example activities developed by the student teachers on the training seminar—one from a primary and the other from a secondary school level context—are presented. These were selected for evaluation considering: (1) the attained consent from teacher trainees to use their work in a research publication; (2) the diversity of educational levels and linguistic domains illustrated; and (3) fulfilment, at least to some degree, of the first two requirements for the development of the teaching material outlined above, which means evidencing a pluralistic approach to teaching English and having relevance to the curricular goals for the target learner group.

2.1. Example Activity 1: Children of the World, Special Days

The main aim of this vocabulary learning activity, targeting primary school pupils, is to provide the prospective learners with an opportunity to discover similarities and differences between words in different languages, exemplified on the lexical field of birthday celebrations (see

Table 1. Lesson plan for multilingual birthday celebrations.

Time	Aims	Procedure	Interaction	Media/Material
2 min	Introduce the lesson	Welcome and introduction	Teacher (T)
3 min	Start with a familiar point	Task 1: listening to the song “Happy Birthday” in different languages	Individual work	Audio/Video, Speaker, work sheet to write down the languages
5 min	Probe awareness about diverse languages and sensitivity towards similarities and differences among them	Discussion (in German) about the languages students (Ss) discovered. How did they recognize a language? Do they know the song in another language?	Plenary
5 min	Make Ss’ languages visible	Task 2: T pins the phrase “Happy Birthday” and an equivalent in another foreign language he/she knows. Ss offer the phrase in other languages they know. T has prepared cards with phrases that the children are likely to contribute and some extra empty cards for Ss’ additional phrases	Plenary	Board, prepared cards, empty cards, magnets
10 min	Be “language detectives” and discover lexical equivalents	Envelope Game—T prepares pictures and birthday-related words in English and 5 different languages in an envelope. Ss match the words with the pictures and guess the language.	Group work	Envelopes with cards with words, work sheet
5 min	Talk and reflect about differences and similarities between languages, discuss strategies for the task (in German)	Which words are similar? Which words are different? How did you go about the task?	Plenary
	Follow up: discussion of birthday celebrations across the world

below for a detailed lesson plan and Appendix A for related handouts). Acting as language detectives when listening to the Happy Birthday song and matching birthday-related words in different languages, primary school pupils learn to search for lexical connections between their own languages and those of their peers (that is, foster their cross-linguistic lexical awareness), talk about languages (enhancing their metalinguistic awareness), and reflect on different linguistic and cultural practices related to birthday celebrations, as lived in their own familial and cultural contexts (intercultural awareness).

2.2. Example Activity 2: Present Simple vs. Present Progressive Tenses

This grammar-oriented activity targets lower secondary school pupils. It aims to consolidate their understanding of the use of present simple and present progressive in English while inviting comparisons of the function and the form of the grammar in other languages (see

Table 2. Lesson plan for multilingual present tenses.

Time	Aim	Procedure	Interaction	Media/Material
2 min	Lead-in, establishing context, activating schemata	Jingle Bells song in different languages		YouTube
1 min	Learning aims for the session	Explaining work sheet and tasks	T	Work sheet
3 min	Revision of Simple Present	Task 1: Ss describe Santa Claus’ Christmas routine with the help of pictures	Individual work > pair check
3 min	Revision of Present Progressive	Task 2: Ss describe the picture “Christmas Eve in Springfield”	Individual work > pair check
5 min	Discussion of function and form of present tenses in English	Task 3: Ss share their results from Task 1 and 2	Plenary
7 min	Cross-linguistic observation and comparison	Tasks 4 and 5: Ss identify progressive forms in different languages	Group work
5 min	Distancing from one’s own grammar in relation to English grammar	Task 6: with the help of Task 4 + 5, Ss share their observations about other languages with/without present progressive, and compare to target English	Plenary

for a detailed lesson plan and Appendix A for a related worksheet). The pupils, thus, learn to compare a grammatical structure and its use in different languages (cross-linguistic grammatical awareness) and to use relevant terminology in the discussion of grammar (metalanguage).

3. Results

The two teaching activities designed and taught by the two teams of student teachers were evaluated in terms of the activities’ potential to activate pupils’ various resources, as defined by the FREPA descriptors regarding knowledge, attitudes, and skills (Candelier et al. 2012).

3.1. Example Activity 1: Children of the World, Special Days

This activity is firmly embedded within the English curricular requirements for the target learner group (cf., QUA-LiS NRW 2009) in addressing children’s lived (home) experiences and acknowledging the diverse linguistic and cultural manifestations of these. It further helps the primary school pupils to reflect on linguistically and culturally appropriate behaviour in a specific context.

Based on Candelier et al. (2012) the following resources are likely fostered in the young language learners when engaging in this learning activity:

Knowledge (pp. 27–30):

▪

K5.1: Knows that there are very many languages in the world

▪

K5.2: Knows that there are many different kinds of sounds used in languages

▪

K6: Knows that there are similarities and differences between languages/linguistic variations

▪

K7.2: Knows that one can build on the structural, discursive, pragmatic similarities between languages in order to learn languages

Attitudes (pp. 39–49):

▪

A2.3: Sensitivity to linguistic/cultural similarities

▪

A3.2.1: Being curious about (and wishing) to understand the similarities and differences between one’s own language/culture and the target language/culture

▪

A12.4: Disposition to reflect on the differences between languages/cultures and on the relative nature of one’s own linguistic/cultural system

▪

A14.3.1: Confidence in one’s capacities of observation/of analysis of little known or unknown languages

▪

A18.1: A positive attitude towards the learning of languages (and the speakers who speak them)

Skills (pp. 52–59):

▪

S2.3: Can make use of linguistic evidence to identify (recognise) words of different origin

▪

S3.3.1: Can establish similarity and difference between languages/cultures from observation/analysis/identification/recognition of some of their components

▪

S3.5: Can perceive global similarities between two/several languages

▪

S4: Can talk about/explain certain aspects of one’s own language/one’s culture/other languages/other cultures

▪

S5: Can use knowledge and skills already mastered in one language in activities of comprehension/production in another language

▪

S5.3.1: Can make interlingual transfers/transfers of recognition/transfers of production from a known language to an unfamiliar one

▪

S7.4: Can profit from transfers made successfully/unsuccessfully between a known language and another language in order to acquire features of that other language

This activity thus activates a range of relevant resources in the young learners, and sensitively combines both linguistic and cultural aspects of foreign language learning. It promotes both listening and speaking skills in the learners, which is a pedagogically sound decision considering the intended primary classroom context. It is notable, however, that the systematic cross-linguistic and metalinguistic work concerning the observation of similarities and differences between lexical items related to birthday celebrations is limited to five specific languages, which happen to comprise of Modern European languages that the teachers themselves reported being familiar with.

3.2. Example Activity 2: Present Simple vs. Present Progressive Tenses

This activity revolves around a typical item of English grammar that has been shown to be challenging for L2 learners whose L1 does not make a distinction between perfective and imperfective aspects (e.g., Roberts and Liszka 2013). To facilitate cognitive links to prior grammatical knowledge of the pupils and thus the acquisition of this grammar, the activity promises to activate the following resources in the lower secondary school pupils (Candelier et al. 2012):

Knowledge (pp. 29–30):

▪

K6.7: Knows that words can be constructed differently in different languages

▪

K6.8: Knows that the organization of an utterance may vary from one language to another

▪

K7.2: Knows that one can build on the (structural, discursive, pragmatic) similarities between languages in order to learn languages

Attitudes (pp. 39–45):

▪

A2.4: Being sensitive both to differences and to similarities between different languages

▪

A2.6: Sensitivity to the relativity of linguistic uses

▪

A4.1: Mastery of one’s resistances/reticence towards what is linguistically different

▪

A7.5: Motivation to study/compare the functioning of different languages

▪

A11.1: Being disposed to distance oneself from one’s own language/look at one’s own language from the outside

Skills (pp. 51–55):

▪

S1.4: Can observe/analyse syntactic and/or morphological structures

▪

S2.2.2: Can identify/recognize a morpheme/a word in the written form of familiar and unfamiliar languages

▪

S2.4: Can identify/recognize grammatical categories/functions/markers

▪

S2.5: Can identify languages on the basis of identification of linguistic forms

▪

S3.8: Can compare grammatical functions of different languages

As above, in the case of this activity, a range of key resources are to be activated in view of fostering the learners’ plurilingual competence. It is worth noting that Turkish, a typologically distant language and a frequent home language in the specific curricular context, was invited in the cross-linguistic comparison task. German, as the majority language and language of instruction, and arguably an interesting case for comparison regarding imperfective aspect, was nevertheless omitted from the planned comparison. It also remained unclear why the cross-linguistic work was planned for a learning activity that served as a consolidation exercise rather than in the input phase.

Furthermore, the student teachers justified the choice of the teaching material by suggesting that Santa Claus and Christmas Eve tap a familiar topic that is positively associated in the mind of their pupils. As such it was meant to alleviate some pupils’ anxieties about an item of grammar that can be otherwise felt as distant to them and/ or processed independently from their background grammatical knowledge. While the anxiety-reducing consideration on the part of the teachers is to be applauded, the teachers apparently missed on appreciating that their learners may come from more diverse cultural backgrounds than they themselves do, and that the teaching material may, thus, potentially exclude some students. The teachers’ designed material, therefore, did not seem to systematically support affective and cognitive linking to the pupils’ background cultures and languages (including German) to a full potential.

4. Discussion

As illustrated in the example activities designed by the student teachers in the introduced teacher training programme, relatively small yet fundamental changes to the lesson planning of English teachers can be made to assure that pupils can build on their many linguistic resources for a more personally significant and effective language learning experience. With the help of FREPA descriptors, teachers are empowered to set specific learning goals for their target English lessons, to analyse and develop linguistically and culturally appropriate teaching materials, and to devise new plurilingual and pluricultural tasks. The teachers in this study appeared well-guided by the FREPA descriptors in this regard and showed great creativity in developing suitable teaching material for their respective school form only after eight weeks of input providing theoretical grounding and eight weeks of practical teaching support.

What clearly transpired from the nature of the developed teaching material is that student teachers at this stage of their professional career can be rather challenged in thinking beyond their own foreign language learning (and indeed cultural learning) experiences. Evidence for this assessment is the selection of languages for comparison in the first example activity and the main motivation for the design/choice of the topic in the second example activity. Indeed, in a small-scale follow-up study with six of the seminar participants, Komusin (2017) found that, at the end of the seminar, the student teachers still struggled with the idea of incorporating additional languages in the English language classroom. A particular challenge was what they referred to as incorporating “other languages”, exemplified by Turkish and Russian languages, both of which may be perceived as less prestigious in German society (cf. Busse et al. 2020). Given that most of the seminar participants had non-migrant backgrounds, the student teachers did not seem to yet have a clear vision of how to integrate truly all pupils’ language repertoires into their day-to-day future teaching. Consequently, they actually questioned the feasibility of such a practice.

Future teachers should not feel insecure about devoting lesson time to multilingual tasks in their teaching of a foreign language. Recent findings from research projects including intervention studies that devoted up to 20% of the total of lesson time on multilingual activities show that this is time well spent, which does not impair target language development but rather boosts the learners’ vocabulary and specific items of grammar learning, as well as language learning strategies (Busse et al. 2020; Hopp and Thoma 2021). Importantly, these studies also indicate that pluralistic teaching approaches benefit students irrespective of their linguistic backgrounds, that is whether they come from majority or minority language backgrounds. They are, therefore, to be acknowledged as a viable inclusive strategy in teaching foreign languages to promote the development of foreign language skills across language domains and learner groups.

In any case, the results from the present study suggest that suitable pre-service teacher training can help student teachers to begin to appreciate the nature of pluralistic teaching approaches and to build on their own positive language learning experiences (cf. Lorenz et al. 2021) in developing suitable teaching materials. Greater practical teaching experience in actual language classroom and accumulated rewarding encounters with diverse languages positioned next to the target English, which may have so far eluded most foreign language teachers’ experiences, may aid teachers’ willingness to regularly integrate also minority languages and cultures present in their classroom. Long-term in-service teacher training programmes will be fundamental in supporting such an aspiration for further professional development of foreign language teachers (for an example from the Finnish educational context, see Christison et al. 2021).

Relatedly, language teachers may like to be reminded of the bi-directional nature of the teaching and learning process. Even though well-trained and/or experienced teachers may be appreciative of pluralistic approaches themselves and implement these systematically in their multilingual English classroom, it is also the pupils who bring expectations regarding instruction into the classroom interaction. Although the affective and cognitive aspects of language learning are likely improved in classrooms that implement pluralistic approaches, language learners may initially be unaccustomed to the novel pedagogy and experience a degree of reticence. In a case study with a secondary school English teacher who was a graduate of the academic programme described in this study, Kopečková and Poarch (2022) found that teachers may initially receive a rather questioning rapport from both their multilingual pupils and other stakeholders in the school setting. This finding is also in line with those from a recent large-scale research project conducted in primary schools in German-speaking Switzerland, which showed that multilingual pupils may not always feel at ease when positioned into the role of language experts, especially when engaged in multilingual activities that appear random, without clear learning objectives and/or stereotypical in nature (Peyer et al. 2020).

It is hoped that the first research-based, practically oriented publications on how to effectively plan for and deliver linguistically and culturally inclusive English lessons (Busse et al. 2020; Christison et al. 2021; Krulatz et al. 2018, 2022; Peyer et al. 2019) will empower foreign language teachers in their specific teaching and professional contexts.

5. Conclusions

The present paper presented the theoretical background and practical examples of teaching English as an L3 using pluralistic approaches. It described how prior linguistic knowledge can be included in the English language learning classroom and how this may help foster the development of plurilingual competence in primary and secondary school pupils.

We acknowledge that the teacher training seminar presented in this paper has a clear linguistic and cognitive focus and does not explicitly integrate intercultural, or other relevant aspects often found in multilingual didactics. Nevertheless, acknowledging and integrating dimensions of plurilingual competence presented here and envisaged in the FREPA should be considered a worthwhile tool for both foreign language teachers and learners.

For student teachers, it will further be important to experience how exactly such multilingual activities work in real-life classroom situations. Apart from reflecting their own developing competences revolving around lesson planning, lesson conduct, learner interaction, and assessment of learning, they will also have to be aware of the potentially broad linguistic and cultural experiences that will be present in their future classrooms. They will also need to be trained on how to find ways to effectively communicate their pluralistic teaching approach to their own pupils.

In light of the increasingly heterogeneous linguistic backgrounds of pupils in the foreign language classroom, (continuous) teacher training programmes should place more effort on catering to the resulting needs of future and present language teachers. Such needs could be met by offering good practice examples of learning activities that are closely tied to the realities of individual learner groups and teachers, as well as regular opportunities for teacher peer observation and peer feedback.