The Transfer of Primary and Secondary School Bilingual Teaching Practices to the Multilingual College Classroom

Abstract

This short-form article discusses how college students can learn languages in the same way that K-12 students do and points out how teaching practices employed in K-12 classrooms that aid in bringing students from monolingualism to bilingualism can also be useful for college students as they become trilingual. Referring to theories presented at the 2019 National Association of Bilingual Education conference, and based on theories and practices of multilingual education at the college and university level, this article offers three necessary components in both the bilingual education of young students and the trilingual education of adult students: a firm academic grasp of the spoken and written first language and subsequent language(s), the instructor-guided comparative and contrastive analysis of the multiple languages, and the application of the conclusions drawn during the comparative and contrastive analysis in the independent production of the target language. Emphasis is placed on valuing -rather than debasing- students' prior linguistic knowledge and on approaching mastery of first and subsequent languages as an advantage that aids in the acquisition of the new language, rather than as an obstacle to be overcome.