Multilingual Writing Support

This chapter will provide a research-based protocol for one-to-one writing conferencing that helps tutors and teachers to navigate the tension between standardizing multilingual students' language practices and honoring their rhetorically rich linguistic backgrounds through a series of activities in a ten-week writing center pedagogy course. This series of activities was specifically developed in an effort to respond to writing tutors who are always seeking strategies that effectively apply theoretical principles in practice. While this work focuses specifically on one-to-one writing tutoring, the topic of multilingual writing support is applicable to any English language learning context. By the end of this chapter, readers will have gained a practical strategy centered on using declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge to help preservice tutors and teachers develop metalinguistic awareness and foster critical consciousness through one-to-one conferencing.

Exploring Conversational Implicatures in the American Sitcom Seinfeld

Since learners must know how to use language in different contexts, sitcoms could help with pragmatic competence development because they display contextualized lifelike language. Could identifying conversational implicatures in a sitcom help develop metalinguistic awareness of implicatures? In addition, are there conversational implicatures in the sitcom Seinfeld that present the potential to help develop pragmatic competence? This article illustrates conversational implicatures through Seinfeld episodes and discusses how identifying implicatures could develop metapragmatic awareness. The method was a descriptive research of the qualitative type. Ten segments from the American sitcom Seinfeld were analyzed based on their conversational implicature occurrence. The implicatures present in the segments are discernible and may help develop pragmatic competence if explicitly taught to learners. Further studies could focus on quantitative research in EFL classrooms on the potential benefits of using sitcoms to develop metalinguistic awareness.

Pedagogical Translanguaging

Learning through the medium of a second or additional language is becoming very common in different parts of the world because of the increasing use of English as the language of instruction and the mobility of populations. This situation demands a specific approach that considers multilingualism as its core. Pedagogical translanguaging is a theoretical and instructional approach that aims at improving language and content competences in school contexts by using resources from the learner's whole linguistic repertoire. Pedagogical translanguaging is learner-centred and endorses the support and development of all the languages used by learners. It fosters the development of metalinguistic awareness by softening of boundaries between languages when learning languages and content. This Element looks at the way pedagogical translanguaging can be applied in language and content classes and how it can be valuable for the protection and promotion of minority languages. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

METALINGUISTIC AWARENESS OF RUSSIAN-HEBREW BILINGUAL PRESCHOOLERS (BASED ON THE DEFINITION TEST)

Our study of Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschoolers’ metalinguistic awareness is based on the results of the definition test with 56 children. The results uncover six strategies to generate a definition of concrete nouns in two languages. The preschoolers preferred to how an object functions while explaining the word meaning in both languages. References to the category by hypernyms, synonyms or co-hyponyms cover 10% of Russian definitions and 5% of those in Hebrew. The bilinguals often failed to define a noun in Hebrew. They could not find a relevant hypernym, overcoming the difficulty by generating descriptive definitions with a specific qualification of the object. Manipulating the L2 structure, they showed their metalinguistic awareness.

EMI and the Teaching of Cultural Studies in Higher Education: A Study Case.

This paper examines students’ perspectives on the challenges raised by their first encounter with EMI pedagogy in higher education. The research was conducted with a group of beginner students with no previous experience in monolingual instruction in English. The case studied is based on two English Cultural Studies subject courses of the English Studies Program at a Spanish university and taught in a learning environment of total linguistic immersion. By activating their metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness, students were encouraged to take ownership of the stages of their learning process and assess it critically. Set at the intersection of EFL, ESP, and EAP, the specificities of these courses comprising linguistic and non-linguistic contents shed light on the teaching procedures employed in English Departments training programs, whose goals are to turn undergraduates into expert linguists and philologists and maximise their communicative proficiency in academic English.

Developing crosslinguistic awareness through plurilingual consciousness-raising tasks

If maximal exposure were the key to success in language learning, then adult learners at the university level would be doomed to fail. Not only are they presumably too old to learn additional languages effectively, but target language (TL) input appears to be insufficient, especially when other languages are allowed in class. Nevertheless, learners were shown to build on knowledge of previously acquired languages, to rely on language learning experience and to develop metalinguistic awareness. This study explores the perceived usefulness of a plurilingual consciousness-raising task that aims at helping learners make and strengthen connections between the TL and other previously acquired languages. Two university-level language courses were targeted: Spanish in Quebec and French in Mexico. Two customized tasks were implemented and recorded in each course throughout the semester. Each task included an input-based (discovery) phase, a reflective (metalinguistic) phase during which participants were asked to make assumptions on underlying patterns and correspondences across languages, and a validation phase where they presented their assumptions until reaching a consensus as a group. While tasks were generally perceived as useful, analyses of post-task questionnaires also revealed mixed feelings regarding its inductive stance. However, the verbal data collected demonstrated that the collaborative and metalinguistic reflective nature of the task permitted learners to find correspondences between languages and to engage in knowledge construction. Moreover, the various reflections collected indicate that learners benefitted from the task as groups engaged in metalinguistic reflections, activated their plurilingual repertoire and were able to create accurate assumptions regarding the targeted structure.

Enhancing Productive Skills in Plurilingual Educational Settings through Metalinguistic Awareness and Instructional Dialogue

In those educational settings where several languages coexist, strategies such as metalinguistic awareness and instructional dialogue can easily be implemented, in that students are immediately able to observe the similarities and differences between languages. The present article examines metalinguistic awareness and instructional dialogue in detail, through an analysis of the findings of a number of studies. Some specific teaching implications are then exposed for the development of both these strategies. The characteristics of plurilingual educational settings, in which languages can and should be taught in an integrative manner, are addressed, looking particularly at regions and communities in Spain where two co-official languages coexist with one or two foreign languages. The benefits of using the same text in various languages as a teaching and learning resource is then showcased, particularly when students are familiar with it, as we will see in the case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Finally, the practical implementation of metalinguistic awareness and instructional dialogue is encouraged, essentially to enhance students’ productive skills.

Individual Multilingualism of Students and Their Commitment to Learning German: A Pilot Study of the Faculty of Philology at Vilnius University

The importance of promoting individual multilingualism is repeatedly emphasised worldwide in didactic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies. The prior knowledge of the learners and the networking of languages is pointed out in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. For this reason, the principles and methods of multilingual didactics play an important role in foreign language teaching due to their positive effects. Therefore, the question is increasingly being addressed how individual differences and progress of the learners regarding their linguistic backgrounds can be taken into account in language teaching.This article examines the question of whether and how Lithuanian university students see their multilingual repertoire as a resource for learning German. For this purpose, a survey was carried out among the Philology students of Vilnius University who study German as an optional course. The aim of this pilot study was to find out whether the students' previous knowledge of other languages helps them to learn German, or whether they see the influences of their mother tongue and other foreign languages as an obstacle that affects them negatively. The data obtained from the questionnaire presents the students' attitudes towards multilingualism, their multilingual skills and language awareness, as well as their language-related experience in acquiring German as a foreign language. The respondents' answers were processed using the method of the qualitative content analysis with a deductive-inductive approach. The results of the survey show that the majority of the students encountered the methods of multilingual didactics and see the multilingual competence as an important advantage for learning other foreign languages. Despite the language interference, the benefits of language skills outweigh the learning process. The students give examples based on their experience of how they use other languages for learning German and show well-developed metalinguistic awareness (e.g. language comparisons) and metacognitive skills (e.g. learning strategies).It is planned to continue this study by interviewing students from other faculties of Vilnius University (Medicine, Law, etc.) comparing their multilingual skills and metalinguistic awareness with the Philology students.

Individual Multilingualism of Students and Their Commitment to Learning German: A Pilot Study of the Faculty of Philology at Vilnius University

The importance of promoting individual multilingualism is repeatedly emphasised worldwide in didactic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies. The prior knowledge of the learners and the networking of languages is pointed out in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. For this reason, the principles and methods of multilingual didactics play an important role in foreign language teaching due to their positive effects. Therefore, the question is increasingly being addressed how individual differences and progress of the learners regarding their linguistic backgrounds can be taken into account in language teaching.This article examines the question of whether and how Lithuanian university students see their multilingual repertoire as a resource for learning German. For this purpose, a survey was carried out among the Philology students of Vilnius University who study German as an optional course. The aim of this pilot study was to find out whether the students' previous knowledge of other languages helps them to learn German, or whether they see the influences of their mother tongue and other foreign languages as an obstacle that affects them negatively. The data obtained from the questionnaire presents the students' attitudes towards multilingualism, their multilingual skills and language awareness, as well as their language-related experience in acquiring German as a foreign language. The respondents' answers were processed using the method of the qualitative content analysis with a deductive-inductive approach. The results of the survey show that the majority of the students encountered the methods of multilingual didactics and see the multilingual competence as an important advantage for learning other foreign languages. Despite the language interference, the benefits of language skills outweigh the learning process. The students give examples based on their experience of how they use other languages for learning German and show well-developed metalinguistic awareness (e.g. language comparisons) and metacognitive skills (e.g. learning strategies).It is planned to continue this study by interviewing students from other faculties of Vilnius University (Medicine, Law, etc.) comparing their multilingual skills and metalinguistic awareness with the Philology students.