The article is focused on the conceptual foundations of foreign language teaching in the multilingual environment of modern European society. Today’s societies are increasingly shaped by multilingualism, that forms the starting point for language policy and language didactic efforts aimed at putting multilingual-oriented teaching concepts into practice. Special emphasis is placed on the analysis of trends in foreign language teaching in European countries directed towards the formation of a multilingual identity. Based on the analysis of the papers of famous foreign scholars, a number of new conceptual ideas on foreign language teaching have been identified and analyzed, which are integrated into the framework of the so-called didactics of multilingualism, which is the methodological paradigm of modern foreign language teaching. It has been shown that the starting point of this concept is the interpretation of multilingualism as a unique communicative competence of the individual, an integrated system of linguistic and socio-cultural knowledge and skills that expands and deepens with the development of each new language. The article highlights the main principles of multilingualism didactics, under which existing linguistic and communicative knowledge, skills and abilities, individual language learning needs and rational use of previous language learning experiences are taken into account. The aim of this paper is to review the integrated didactic approach, which focuses on reading comprehension, in particular on the reconstruction of reference chains. Based on the results of psycholinguistic studies on the reading comprehension process as well as on the (multilingual) mental lexicon, it will be shown how a multilingual task can promote a networking of entries in the mental lexicon as well as a transfer of reading competence and grammatical competence.