A Guide for GFL Teachers
Navigating the Labyrinth of Multilingual Learning

How does multilingualism affect how we communicate with one another and how we teach foreign languages? What are the social, political and economic aspects of multilingualism interacting at local, regional and international levels? And how can teachers of German as a foreign or second language systematically orient their teaching towards cognitive and culturally sensitive aspects of language acquisition and management? These are the main questions addressed in Mehrsprachenlernen in gesellschaftlichen und institutionellen Kontexten. Deutsch als Zweit- und Fremdsprache im Fokus der Mehrsprachendebatte (Multilingual Learning in Social and Institutional Contexts: German as a Second Foreign Language in the Multilingualism Debate). Published in August 2024, the book is edited by three experts on multilingualism: Joachim Schlabach, Constanze Bradlaw and Britta Hufeisen.

It’s part of the Kompendium DaF/DaZ series, which aims to reinforce, update and professionalise training for foreign language teachers. Previous instalments of the series also explore cognitive, historical and language-policy aspects of multilingualism or address other subjects, such as media studies, applied cultural studies and classroom management. The editor of the series is Jörg-Matthias Roche, a professor of German as a foreign language at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. In his foreword to this instalment, he stresses the importance of foreign language instruction in our day: “Teaching and learning languages is [...] actually one of the most important political tools in this age of globalisation and internationalisation, so it needs to reach hearts and minds.”

An exciting range of topics

Over the course of more than 300 pages, the authors give plenty of past and present examples, drawn from all sorts of different regions and contexts, showing how language serves as a political tool and the role multilingualism plays in education, administration and (new) media, things taken for granted in society and public debates, language conflicts and proxy wars. In seven chapters, the book delves into a wide range of topics, including the relationship between native languages and foreign target languages, the cultural specificity of text types, intercultural image understanding, multilingualism at school, the European “intercomprehension” approach called EuroComGerm, and designing Gesamtsprachencurricula (“holistic language curricula”).
  In an article entitled “Inside the L3 Classroom: Learner Reflections on University-level Foreign Language Classes for Bilinguals in the United States”, linguist Will Travers writes that language teachers in the US have been harnessing their multilingual learners’ potential to teach foreign languages more efficiently for nearly two hundred years. In our day, many US universities offer special courses for students who already know English and Spanish and want to learn other Romance languages, such as Portuguese, Catalan, Italian or French. This development, writes Travers, can be largely attributed to the individual efforts of Pietro Bachi, an early 19th-century Sicilian-American Harvard professor, as well as to the USA’s geopolitical situation after World War II: In order to facilitate postwar involvement in world affairs, the US government went to great lengths to promote language learning. To this end, Hispanists suggested making use of the Spanish language skills many students already possessed to help them learn Portuguese. Based on examples like this one, the author shows how L3 learners can benefit from courses specially designed for bilinguals. He cites the example of the imperfect tense, which exists in both French and Spanish, but not in English, to explain the “Cumulative-Enhancement Model”, which describes how language acquisition is facilitated by “positive transfer”.

Clear-cut structure and vivid presentation

Each chapter is very clearly structured – as is the book as a whole – with clearly written introductions and concisely worded educational objectives that are helpful for teaching purposes, for example, at university or in teacher training programmes, as well as for individual readers. Furthermore, the authors add questions and exercises to encourage readers to reflect on the content and apply it to their own work. In the chapter on university L3 teaching, Will Travers suggests that readers think about their own experiences of learning a second foreign language:

What about it was different from learning your first foreign language? Apart from the fact that you were younger and consequently less cognitively efficient, how did your previous language-learning experiences affect your approach to learning your second (third, fourth, etc.) language? Are certain areas of language learning, such as structures, vocabulary or expressions, more important to you than others? Do you have more confidence now in your ability to compose sentences correctly or pronounce them correctly? Are you more motivated in class now and perhaps less anxious? And last but not least, how can you, as a language teacher, enable your students to make the most of their own prior experiences?

He also asks: What is the typical language profile of the foreign language learners you teach? Are these learners usually proficient in English or other languages? Are they likely to be foreigners studying abroad? What is the course sequence for the various languages at your educational institution? Consider whether a streamlined course for beginners might (a) enable more learners to reach the next level or (b) help to win over new learners. If so, work up an outline for such a course.

In other chapters of the book, the authors encourage readers to look into other aspects of a particular topic on their own or draw general conclusions from case studies.

The book’s illustrations are also well-conceived and creative. For example, a word cloud is used to illustrate teen slang expressions and photographs of multilingual traffic signs to show visible manifestations of multilingualism. What’s more, the authors refer readers to outside sources such as a gender-sensitive Bible or a YouTube video about a literacy project for little kids, which may be a way of reaching not just readers’ minds, but also their hearts. The writing is also clear and vivid. The book is written for both experienced teachers and newcomers to the profession, providing explanatory glosses on basic linguistic terms and historical references. Contemporary contexts and examples are provided to help readers navigate current-day political debates and everyday discussions about multilingualism and turn them to good account in their own teaching efforts.