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Traditional didactic approaches to multiple language learning have mainly focused on the differences and similarities between languages. However, in the language learning classroom, the willingness to activate prior language knowledge has been generally overlooked, despite being a fundamental part of the actual process of language learning Accordingly, the author suggests that the traditional contrastive method should be complemented by a psycholinguistic approach with the aim of exploiting the interlinguistic strategies used in language teaching and learning. An alternative methodological approach that looks at the whole linguistic repertoire of students is needed in order to exploit the benefits of multilingual education, going beyond linguistic similarities and differences. Following a detailed analysis of the relevant literature in the field, which identifies metalinguistic awareness as the most important factor enhancing bilinguals’ outcomes in additional language learning, the present chapter deals with its implications for a multilingual didactic approach. In particular, students must be stimulated and assisted in the process of conscious reflection and manipulation of language, learning strategies, and linguistic skills developed in previous linguistic systems to observe a positive and significant outcome in third (or additional) language acquisition (TLA). School curricula and teaching practices could benefit from placing the multilingual learners and their entire linguistic repertoire at the center of the learning process, rather than focusing exclusively on the target language.

Purpose – This chapter presents an analysis of a researcher-led follow-up activity during an early childhood reading lesson that was aligned with a gradual release of responsibility (GRR) model. Particularly, the authors seek to understand how students used their language(s) in this lesson, how they described particular linguistic decisions, and how language could be further conceptualized in such events.

Design/Methodology/Approach – The authors develop a telling case (Mitchell, 1984) from the guided instruction portion of a lesson to make salient theoretical connections between metacognitive strategies taught in early literacy and metalinguistic knowledge theorized from the field of linguistic anthropology. The lesson was video recorded for interactional analysis. The video recording was also used to stimulate recall and allow students to reflect on their own language use.

Findings –Through the telling case, the authors use language socialization as a lens to understand the way students represent story retell with physical objects. Though some students do not use the school-based conventionalized form of retelling, they do engage in retelling by using a variety of other forms. The authors highlight through the case that the metacognitive strategy of story retell is distinct from the abstract linear, left-to-right representation of sequencing of events.

Research Limitations/Implications – This study suggests that further attention is needed to theorize the relationship between reading strategies and forms of representation in multilingual preschool contexts. In particular, the very notions of literacy and language need to be nuanced through conversations among multiple disciplines.

Practical Implications – Practitioners are encouraged to attend to the differences between metacognitive strategies that are useful for reading comprehension and the expected styles of representation. Teachers can consider leveraging the communicative repertoires of emergent bilingual students as they accomplish early literacy activities, thereby, potentially offering further scaffolds for learning reading strategies.

Originality/Value of Paper – This chapter brings nuance to the GRR model by demonstrating that there is a difference between the GRR of metacognitive strategies in reading instruction and the way they are represented through diverse semiotic repertoires.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the combination of Delphi and focus group techniques and on the utilization of qualitative content analysis in this context. Moreover, it illustrates the potential of this hybridized methodology for gathering information from experts on multilingual practices in the primary school context in Germany in order to conceptualize a teacher training.

Based on a structured guideline, two group discussions with experts from the scientific community, schools and educational institutions (n=13; n=12) focused on language diversity in the school context, multilingualism, the heritage languages of children as well as on the role of language reflection and metalinguistic awareness in (second) language acquisition and development in primary school. Both group discussions were qualitatively analyzed, and inductive categories were framed.

The main aspects derived from the data were: teaching actors, their language awareness, their knowledge about multilingualism and attitudes toward it, characteristics of the materials and methods used in language lessons as well as students’ own experiences with both heritage and second language(s).

Following these domains derived from the analyses of the data, the authors developed a teacher training, systematically considering multilingual teaching practices and implications resulting from the modified Delphi-study.

Due to the fact that knowledge and experience of experts from research and school context had been taken into account, the teacher training measure achieved higher acceptance and efficacy.

In the context of American institutions of higher education, the practical implementation of strategies associated with the development of L3+ or multilingual education often remain difficult to implement. Furthermore, students who reach the university level with pre-acquired bi/multilingual and bi/multicultural skills may perceive their competencies as trivialized and undervalued due to the lack of linguistically relevant opportunities available to them.

By contrast, the recent implementation of a multilingual course titled “Intercomprehension of the Romance languages: a pathway to Multilingualism,” at California State University, Long Beach (2014–2018) and St. Lawrence University (2018) offers bi/multilingual students the tools to develop skills geared toward language learning in a continuous effort to appraise, nurture, and upraise the ever-growing linguistic diversity present among students and faculty members in universities across the United States. This course and its iterations specifically benefit students’ pre-existing bi/multilingual competencies while offering them opportunities to reinforce and expand their multilingual repertoire. Students learn how to read in 5+ Romance languages, reinforce their knowledge of English, as well as of their Romance language, all while strengthening their metalinguistic awareness by learning how to navigate a larger repertoire of either foreign or unknown related languages.

In addition to discussing the pedagogical and theoretical framework of the course, the authors propose to explore how this innovative approach favors the development of multilingualism among students in North-American universities by examining course demographic data collected from several of these courses and key results relating certain aspects of students’ initial contact with new languages through intercomprehension.

In consideration of the needs of the growing numbers of Spanish-speaking emergent bilingual students in U.S. classrooms who are learning English as a new language, this study explores the teachers’ understanding of instructional practice using a specific pedagogical framework designed for emergent bilingual classroom contexts called Preview/View/Review (P/V/R). A constructivist and a translanguaging lens informed the theoretical framework for this study. One set of qualitative data from interviews was collected from a random sample of teachers who participated in a Master’s program in bilingual education in a border university in South Texas. Interview questions focused on the teachers’ reflections on the planning for and the implementation of the pedagogical structure P/V/R in their dual language contexts. Three findings arose from the data: (a) participants demonstrated an understanding of planning for and implementation of the P/V/R structure as a scaffold to build background knowledge of new concepts in the different disciplines; (b) the P/V/R structure has the potential to facilitate cross-linguistic transfer and the potential to be implemented as a form of translanguaging pedagogy; and (c) the implementation of a well-planned P/V/R structure enhances students’ engagement with the learning in two languages. One identifiable limitation of the study is the small size of the sample. In addition, classroom observations of the implementation of the structure are needed to mitigate the possible over-reporting of P/V/R as a good practice on the part of the teachers. Insights from this study inform teacher educators in teacher preparation programs who are preparing teachers for working with emergent bilingual learners and the professional development of all teachers, including those who teach in bilingual school contexts.

This chapter discusses the findings of a qualitative study conducted on the US–Mexico border to investigate preservice bilingual teachers’ understandings of the effective practices needed to teach content in bilingual classrooms. Specifically, participants’ understandings of teaching language through content to emergent bilinguals and the role of academic language in a content methods course taught in Spanish for preservice bilingual teachers were explored. The results of the study show that preservice bilingual teachers struggled to internalize how to develop language objectives that embed the four language domains as well as the three levels of academic language into their content lessons. Although participants emphasized vocabulary development, they integrated multiple scaffolding strategies to support emergent bilinguals. Moreover, although preservice bilingual teachers struggled with standard Spanish, they used translanguaging to navigate the discourse of education in their content lessons. The use of academic Spanish was also evident in participants’ planning of instruction. The authors contend that bilingual teacher preparation would benefit from the implementation of a dynamic bilingual curriculum that: (a) incorporates sustained opportunities across coursework for preservice bilingual teachers to strengthen their understanding of content teaching and academic language development for emergent bilinguals; (b) values preservice bilingual teachers’ language varieties, develops metalinguistic awareness, and fosters the ability to navigate between language registers for teaching and learning; and (c) values translanguaging as a pedagogical strategy that provides access to content and language development.

Literacy demands have changed over the years and for success in society it is necessary to handle a wide range of texts and written information. The school has been criticized for not giving their pupils the necessary abilities to handle the kind of information they are faced with in society. One important dimension of literacy is reading comprehension, but even though much written information has the form of tables, drawings, graphs, etc. such presentations are most often accompanied by written text. This chapter focuses the comprehension of different kinds of written information, and data from different tasks are evaluated in light of the simple view of reading. A total of 132 grade 6 readers were given four reading comprehension tasks concurrently with a decoding task and a listening comprehension task. It was found that the sum of decoding and listening comprehension accounted for a larger part of the variance in all the reading comprehension tasks than the product of decoding and listening comprehension. The pupils' results on a naming task and morphological tasks from preschool accounted for significant parts of the variance in the comprehension of both plain text and text combined with tables and graphs over and above the concurrent decoding and listening comprehension results. Speed of orthographic identification in 2nd grade accounted for an additional, significant part of the variance in the plain text reading tasks. These results show that processing speed and linguistic knowledge, such as morphological knowledge, are important contributors to the comprehension of different kinds of written information. Even if speed of orthographic identification is especially important for comprehending plain texts, a broad linguistic and cognitive perspective seems to be important when preparing pupils to comprehend different kinds of written material.

All humans have an innate ability to learn multiple languages and with ­increasing mobility across linguistic boundaries, people are more than ever embracing multilingualism. This chapter examines international students’ perceptions of their third language (L3) learning experience in their second language (L2) English context. Challenges and strategies of L3 learning are explored as data from a survey and interviews were analyzed. Twenty-eight (n = 28) international students were asked to answer Likert-scale and ­open-­ended questions regarding their L3 learning experience. Select ­participants were also interviewed. The quantitative and qualitative results show that learning an L3 not only offered international students an opportunity to strengthen their understanding of the relationship between language and culture, but also allowed them to position themselves as multilinguals within the globalized world context. Furthermore, the data reveal that technology is an integral part of international students’ L3 learning process, but that additional support is needed. This chapter also discusses ideas including technology-e­nhanced language learning to assist international students in their L3 learning experience in higher education.