Can language classrooms take the multilingual turn?

Abstract

For the past three decades, momentum has gathered in favour of a multilingual turn in second language acquisition research and teaching. Multicompetence has been proposed to replace nativeness and monolingualism to measure L2 learners’ success. This proposed shift has not made its way into L2 teaching settings. The language presented to L2 learners is a set of monolingual, standard norms often removed from actual target language practices, implying that these linguistic features are adequate for all situations. We propose that the multilingual shift has not taken place in practice because language features associated with monolingual nativeness are necessary in many of the communicative situations L2 users encounter. Adapting the concepts of communicative distance and immediacy in order to integrate multilingual communications, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate how these situations and their oral or written realisations are located on a pluridimensional conceptional continuum. We illustrate how monolingual standard norms and code-meshing practices represent the model’s most distant and immediate communicative ends, respectively. We argue that traditional mono/multilingual and native/non-native oppositions can be reframed in order to become legitimate models for L2 classrooms.