Teaching and Learning Multiple Varieties of a Foreign Language for Sustainable Multilingual Education

Hao Xu,Zhibin Shan

doi:10.3390/su13148004

Abstract

In multilingual education for sustainable personal development, compared with that of multiple languages, the teaching and learning of multiple varieties of a language has been underexplored as a special and important form of multilingualism. In this article, we examine the linguistic, psychological, and social characteristics of multiple variety learning, as compared with multiple language learning. Linguistically, acquisition of language varieties is a process of assimilating variants from a new variety into an earlier variety, which serves as a prototype system. Such assimilation is a psychological project of form-meaning interface development, which may follow the patterns of structural multiplication, conceptual involution, conceptual evolution, or/and conceptual transfer. When multiple language varieties are actually used in social contexts, multilingual individuals’ selected language practices may be supported by their combined linguistic resources from multiple varieties rather than depend on a single variety despite its dominance in a given situation. These characteristics carry pedagogical implications for sustainable multilingual education, particularly for the teaching and learning of foreign languages that have multiple varieties.

Highlights

As a social phenomenon, multilingualism has attracted long-lasting attention from both sociolinguists and language teaching researchers and practitioners [1,2,3]
North American context, efforts have been made by schools and universities to help students, especially those whose L1 is not English, become multilingual by developing their academic English literacy for academic success [13]; in Greater China, educational policies pertaining to foreign languages are characterised by the predominance of English and a recent reinvigorated investment in teaching and learning languages other than English, an essential step to achieve multilingual literacies [14]
Before a multilingual individual conducts selected language practices to engage in daily interactions, to position themselves and be positioned by others [48], or to develop their trajectory of multiple language use [44], they first need a proper linguistic repertoire and the propelling willingness to use this repertoire. These two prerequisites seem to have been neglected by researchers who have taken the Dominant Language Constellations (DLC) approach to primarily investigate the learning and use of multiple languages rather than of multiple varieties

Summary

Introduction

Multilingualism has attracted long-lasting attention from both sociolinguists and language teaching researchers and practitioners [1,2,3]. North American context, efforts have been made by schools and universities to help students, especially those whose L1 is not English, become multilingual by developing their academic English literacy for academic success [13]; in Greater China, educational policies pertaining to foreign languages are characterised by the predominance of English and a recent reinvigorated investment in teaching and learning languages other than English, an essential step to achieve multilingual literacies [14] These endeavours, may have only partly addressed the need of multilingual literacies for sustainable development, as such literacies seem to be confined to those of multiple languages. This article will take combined perspectives that are compatible with second or foreign language learning to examine the teaching and learning of multiple varieties of a language as compared with that of multiple languages from linguistic, psychological, and social perspectives

Multiple Varieties Acquired as Systems of Variants

Interface Development in Learning Multiple Varieties

Selected Language Practices of Multiple Varieties

Conclusions