Abstract

This article deals with the current educational trends in multilingual education and the challenges they pose. It presents the current linguistic portrait in most of the educational centres where several languages coexist both inside and outside the classroom. Different educational trends related to the promotion of multilingualism are explained, such as the importance of the maintenance of first languages, the early introduction of English, and new language teaching approaches, like CLIL and EMI. We also describe an emerging new paradigm, known as translanguaging, which adopts a real multilingual perspective and includes recent research on the acquisition of additional languages and multilingual competence. Finally, some notes about multilingual didactics and future lines of research are proposed.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it deals with the terminological and pedagogical vagueness of Content and Language Integrated Learning. On the other hand, it assesses this teaching approach from a plurilingual perspective. With respect to the first aim, we will explain the difference between CLIL and CEIL, as the former embraces the latter. Regarding the second aim, we will discuss one of the issues recurrent in most debates concerning plurilingual education, namely, the feasibility of acquiring the target language at no cost to subject learning or to first language development. The inclusion of a number of pedagogies based on genre, language awareness or translanguaging will be presented as paramount to achieve all the didactic potential of quality CLIL.