multilingualism, multiliteracy, EMI, multilingual pedagogies, language-in-education policy

Jeanine Treffers-Daller, University of Reading
Theodoros Marinis, University of Konstanz
Ianthi Tsimpli, University of Cambridge

In many countries around the world, migration movements from the countryside to large metropolitan areas, and from one country to another have resulted in an increase in bilingualism and multilingualism across a range of sectors. While these changes represent an enrichment for the receiving societies, they also bring challenges, in particular for educational policy makers, teachers and other stakeholders involved in teaching and learning. Teachers work in sometimes rapidly changing circumstances, with fluctuating Language-in-Education policies, and often with little support for the development of multilingual pedagogies. In many multilingual contexts, policy makers promote the use of English as the medium of instruction in schools as the solution to the challenges faced by teachers and learners, despite the obvious neo-imperialistic aspects of choosing a global language and the negative consequences for linguistic diversity across the globe (Phillipson, 2008).
While parents often believe knowledge of English is essential for their children’s employment prospects, evidence from research into language and literacy development reveals that children learn best if they acquire the language and literacy skills when the medium of instruction corresponds to their home languages (Bunce, Phillipson, Rapatahana, &Tupas, 2016; Erling, Adinolfi & Hultgren, 2017; Panda & Mohanty, 2015; Tsimpli et al. 2019). There is therefore an urgent need to share converging evidence from individual projects across the world about the importance of maintaining and furthering children’s home languages in school.
In this special session we will bring together converging evidence about primary school children’s language and literacy development from Ghana, India and the Maldives, with a view to developing our understanding of the variables which impact learning outcomes in different multilingual environments. Problems and solutions in teaching and learning in the Global South often do not reach international audiences at conferences, as the field of multilingualism is still dominated by researchers from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies. There are however important lessons to be learned from African and Asian contexts, also for WEIRD societies, such as Germany and the UK, where large numbers of L2 learners populate classrooms. A key aim of the meeting is therefore to make available the research evidence regarding the importance of supporting children’s home languages in school and to disseminate evidence about multilingual pedagogies to stakeholders from different contexts across the world.
The research questions we will address are:

Presentations: