Multilingualism at school: educational trends and new challenges

Abstract

This article deals with the current educational trends in multilingual education and the challenges they pose. It presents the current linguistic portrait in most of the educational centres where several languages coexist both inside and outside the classroom. Different educational trends related to the promotion of multilingualism are explained, such as the importance of the maintenance of first languages, the early introduction of English, and new language teaching approaches, like CLIL and EMI. We also describe an emerging new paradigm, known as translanguaging, which adopts a real multilingual perspective and includes recent research on the acquisition of additional languages and multilingual competence. Finally, some notes about multilingual didactics and future lines of research are proposed.