Multilingual didactics
Multilingual Approaches to Teaching German

What does the research say?

Until recently, languages other than the target language have generally been used only for special purposes, e.g. to explain points of grammar or complicated vocabulary. Current studies, however, point up the educational benefits of drawing on learners’ whole linguistic repertoire. Here are the arguments for a multilingual approach to language teaching:

It makes subject matter more accessible

Researchers have found that complex subject matter becomes more accessible when learners have an opportunity to read it in various languages. Comprehension improved when content was summarized and discussed because learners then didn’t have to just reproduce parts of a text, but had to delve into the subject matter itself.

It heightens meta-linguistic awareness and multilingual skills

A multilingual approach activates previously acquired learning strategies and skills and makes use of them for purposes of further acquisition. For example, if you’re studying English as your first foreign language, you’ll acquire vocabulary-learning strategies that will help in learning German as a third language.

Moreover, the German language has plenty of Anglicisms, like the word “Team”, and plenty of words that sound or look similar in German and English due to their shared Germanic origin, like the words Sohn/son. Words of this kind make it easier to learn German as a third language. Such similarities also encourage learners to compare languages and think about language in general, which in turn promotes meta-linguistic skills that facilitate further learning processes. In multilingual approaches, learners practise using their whole linguistic repertoire and switching or translating between languages according to the situation.

It increases learning motivation

The use of other, already familiar languages reduces frustration, facilitates class participation and shows that teachers value all languages and cultures equally, which in turn increases motivation.

These are the reasons why current multilingual approaches to language teaching reject any rigid restriction to the target language. These approaches differ from the contrastive approaches of the 1960s and ’70s, when more than one language was used in foreign language teaching, but only to compare and contrast the target and first languages. Contrastive strategies were workable for homogeneous classes with the same first language that were learning a foreign language, e.g. in schools.

Furthermore, contrastive approaches were based on clearly delimited first and second languages. The thinking was that their similarities give rise to a positive transfer effect, whereas differences cause errors due to interference (negative transfer). So, languages were treated as separate units for didactic purposes, and differences were used for contrast and emphasis.

However, empirical studies argue against the strict separation of languages. In so-called “cross-linguistic priming” experiments, for example, test subjects recognize a word faster when presented beforehand with a related word in a different, familiar language (e.g. the English word “dog” before coming across the German word for “cat”: “Katze” ).

So, activating a word in one language seems to automatically and unconsciously activate the corresponding word in the other language. Neurological studies confirm that individual languages are co-activated during language processing instead of being processed in separate regions of the brain. The EU’s language policy is also based on the assumption that each learner’s languages interact with one another.

Present-day models of multilingualism

The evidence against strict separation of languages forms the basis for several present-day models of multilingualism:

A dynamic model of multilingualism (Herdina/Jessner 2002) rejects fixed categories such as first, second and foreign language skills. In this approach, multilingualism is described instead as a dynamic, ever-changing process of language learning. Interaction between languages creates a dynamic system with characteristics that go beyond the combination of individual languages – and that include heightened linguistic awareness.

An integrative model of multilingualism (MacSwan 2017) considers everyone multilingual insofar as we all use different registers or styles of language depending on the situation. Multilinguals possess a complex linguistic repertoire that contains both language-specific and shared grammatical resources, which they use according to the situation. For example, you can learn one language with subject-object-verb (SOV) word order and another with subject-verb-object (SVO) order. The different orders are stored separately for each language and selectively retrieved to fit the language in which the speaker happens to be communicating.

Translanguaging approaches (Cummins 2021) regard languages as separate units, but posit that they interact in multilingual individuals. As in the dynamic model of multilingualism, these approaches are based on the assumption that the relationships between languages can change over time. But the dynamic model focuses on multilingualism as a natural, dynamic process. Whereas translanguaging approaches focus more on pedagogical practice, especially ways in which multilingual teaching can facilitate the transfer of knowledge across language barriers.

Unitary translanguaging models (Garcia et al. 2016) go even further: They argue that there is no real multilingualism involving individual (interacting) languages, just individuals who each have their own overall language repertoire, which forms a unit – their idiolect, i.e. their own personal language.
What all these approaches have in common is that they do not regard learners' languages separately. The use of all linguistic resources in the classroom promotes not only acquisition of the foreign target language, but also language skills and the ability to reflect about language.