The Multilingual Turn and International Schools - Part One

In this first article in a series about multilingualism in international schools, Jacob Huckle explores some of the ways in which schools can engage more deeply with the multilingual turn through changes to the curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment

The words “multilingual” and “multilingualism” seem to be spreading rapidly in international schools. You might have seen school websites explaining the benefits of multilingualism, or noticed schools celebrating multilingualism through events such as International Mother Language Day. Or you might have come across the term in curriculum documents, such as those from the International Baccalaureate, which recognise multilingualism as a fact, right, and resource (1), or those from Cambridge International Examinations, which outline ways in which ‘every school can support multilingualism’ (2). It seems that the old days in which international schooling was seen as synonymous with “English Only” education are coming to an end. It seems that the ‘multilingual turn’ might have reached us in our international schools. 

What is the multilingual turn and what does it mean for international schooling? 

The term ‘multilingual turn’ is used to signal a paradigm shift that demands a total re-thinking of language and education. In essence, this paradigm shift comes from the understanding that languages do not exist as separate, bounded systems, but instead what we think of and label as separate ‘languages’ are actually intertwined as a single language repertoire in the mind of a user. When using language, a multilingual selects appropriate words or phrases from this repertoire to meet communicative needs. Like a spinning top, whose patterns merge and blend together as it spins, the boundaries between ‘languages’ disappear in the mind of a multilingual (3).

Bilingual education expert Jim Cummins wrote a while ago that languages do not exist ‘as two [or more] solitudes that should be kept rigidly separate’ (4). But what does this mean for schools, in which we often treat languages as separate things that can be slotted into timetable grids or turned off or on when students move from classroom to classroom. I wonder, with Ofelia García – one of the leading voices in multilingual education and translanguaging – what education would ‘look like if we no longer posited the existence of separate languages?’ (5)

Celebrating multilingualism in our schools through events or activities is important, just as we celebrate multiculturalism through festivals and international fairs, but that’s just one part of the picture. To take the multilingual turn seriously in our international schools, I think we need to go deeper and start re-thinking the way we do curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment.  

Given the highly mobile nature of many international school communities and the impacts of globalization more generally, our students often have complex multilingual profiles, with experience of various languages in the places they have lived, or different languages learned in schools they’ve attended, or varying levels of exposure to the languages spoken by their parents or extended families. The relationship between their identities and these languages will be unique and complicated. For many of our students, questions like “What’s your first language or mother tongue?” are just as difficult to answer as “Where are you from?” In light of this multilingual reality, a curriculum built around concepts such as “second language”, “first language”, or “mother tongue” seem too simplistic. We need to find ways in which our schools can build curricular programmes that meet students where they are and enable them to develop and enrich their multilingual profiles in all their glorious complexity.  

Once we reject the idea that languages should or even can be kept separate, we then open our classroom doors to translanguaging pedagogies that enable students to use all of their languages to help them as they learn. When students have a wealth of knowledge and understanding in their other languages, we need to tap into those rich resources. A commitment to translanguaging should be at the forefront of our school language policies and this should be backed up by professional development for teachers so they are confident and able to design activities, lessons, and units that embed opportunities for students to translanguage. (I’ll explore translanguaging more on this in a future blog!) 

As we’re all aware, assessment drives a lot of what happens in our education systems and in most schools, even those that might have embraced multilingual curriculum and pedagogies, assessments are still monolingual. But, are we able to assess what our students can truly do in our subject areas if we are only allowing them to use one small part of their language repertoire in those assessments? What if we instead embraced the challenge of trying to create opportunities for students to use their other languages as part of the assessment processes? It’s not an easy task, for sure, given the real constraints of our assessment structures, but we could start with small steps such as allowing students to draft assignments in any language they choose before re-drafting in English or creating project work in other languages which is then commented upon using English. These small steps could help us start imagining more radical shifts in assessment practices.  

As I have explored in this blog – and will continue to explore in this blog series – multilingualism is more than just a buzzword. If we are to take the multilingual turn seriously, we need to imagine new possibilities and be open to the transformation of our international schools.  

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1. IB (2011) Language and learning in IB programmes, Cardiff: International Baccalaureate.
2. Cambridge International Examinations (2014) Getting started: supporting bilingual learners: Cambridge programmes for multilingual contexts, Cambridge
3. The image of the spinning top is from Translanguaging in Education, https://www.translanguagingeducation.org/two-states-of-tl-top 
4. Cummins J. (2008) Teaching for Transfer: Challenging the Two Solitudes Assumption in Bilingual Education. In: Hornberger N.H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30424-3_116
5. García O (2007) Foreword. In: Makoni S and Pennycook A (eds) Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.