The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities and Challenges

Starting from the key idea that learners and teachers bring diverse linguistic knowledge and resources to education, this book establishes and explores the concept of the ‘multilingual turn’ in languages education and the potential benefits for individuals and societies. It takes account of recent research, policy and practice in the fields of bilingual and multilingual education as well as foreign and second language education. The chapters integrate theory and practice, bringing together researchers and practitioners from five continents to illustrate the effects of the multilingual turn in society and evaluate the opportunities and challenges of implementing multilingual curricula and activities in a variety of classrooms. Based on the examples featured, the editors invite students, teachers, teacher educators and researchers to reflect on their own work and to evaluate the relevance and applicability of the multilingual turn in their own contexts.

Jean Conteh worked in multilingual contexts for her whole career, first as a primary teacher and teacher educator in different countries and then as an academic. She was a Senior Lectureship at the University of Leeds from 2007 to 2018, where she developed and taught a successful part-time Master’s course for teachers. She has published many books, chapters and articles for different audiences, including The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education, (Multilingual Matters, 2014) and The EAL Teaching Book (third edition, Sage, 2019). Her edited book, Researching Education for Social justice in Multilingual Settings (Bloomsbury, 2017) was written in collaboration with her former PhD students.

Gabriela Meier is a Senior Lecturer in Language Education at the Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter, UK. Having lived, worked and studied in different linguistic regions in Europe, she speaks four languages, and has always had a keen interest in languages, social cohesion and social justice. She gained her PhD in 2009, based on a study of Europa-Schule Berlin. Since then, her research led to a range of publications in the field of bilingual and multilingual education, above all from a social cohesion and critical perspective. She works as a teacher educator at Masters level and supervises many doctoral projects in this field.