Abstract

The majority of people around the world live in multilingual societies, and so it follows that plurilingualism should be considered normal. This book proposes a flexible and adaptive framework for designing and implementing language learning environments and tasks, which will be useful for practitioners working in classrooms where many languages are already spoken. The authors begin by presenting a state-of-the-art review of current research on language learning, language teaching and multilingual language acquisition. This is followed by a qualitative review of 37 multilingual research projects, which are treated as case studies to inform the practical guidance that constitutes the remainder of the book. The information and practical framework contained within this book will be of interest to both researchers, teachers and teacher educators.

Marie-Françoise Narcy-Combes is Professor Emeritus at the Université de Nantes, France.

Jean-Paul Narcy-Combes is Professor Emeritus at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France.

Julie McAllister is Senior Lecturer at the Université de Nantes, France.

Malory Leclère is Senior Lecturer at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France.

Grégory Miras is Senior Lecturer at the Université de Rouen, France.

This book focuses on how recent research findings on language learning have been implemented in classrooms. As French academics with strong connections to the North African, European and Anglophone spheres, the authors offer a fresh and dynamic take on issues associated with multilingualism and language teaching around the world.

This book is an essential resource for researchers and students concerned with the design, empirical investigation and evaluation of language learning environments in multilingual contexts. It provides a wide-ranging and admirably compact overview of theoretical issues, summarizes and comments illuminatingly on 37 published case studies, and explores the practicalities of programme design. An indispensable reference tool and handbook.