Context-specific multilingual instruction: evolution of an instructional design

Abstract

ABSTRACT Target language instruction in multilingual settings cannot ignore the linguistic diversity of both the learners and the society. Rather than ignoring the individual and societal multilingualism, leveraging them as resources in learning the target language can be beneficial. Developing such multilingual instruction is an organic, iterative process that has to be planned and executed through a close collaboration of local stakeholders. In this paper, I trace the evolution of a multilingual instructional sequence that was designed by a practitioner-researcher collaborative team in an Indian German-as-foreign-language institute. The team first studied multilingual projects in other foreign language learning contexts and, with the help of these, identified a set of core components that formed part of the multilingual instruction on-site. Then, an instructional sequence focused on teaching chosen target grammatical aspects was designed and implemented iteratively in an adult, beginner level course. Every iteration was assessed from three vantage points – teachers' perspectives, feedback from learners and learners' language performance. Teachers' perspectives were gathered during weekly meetings and journal entries. Learners' feedback was from weekly reflection journals. Learners' language performance of the target grammatical aspects was assessed through obligatory occasion analysis of form-focused and meaning-focused tasks. At the end of each iteration, feedback from these three sources was triangulated to inform the redesign of the instructional sequence. The process of how the sequence evolved over three iterations through this feedback loop is elaborated here. This process can serve as a blueprint for other researchers and practitioners who wish to develop context-specific multilingual instruction.