Teaching in Multilingual Contexts

Language teaching strategies have to be reconsidered in the multilingual context of countries like India. We use a number of approaches, methods, tasks and techniques imported from other monolingual countries with or without modifications. However, they do not satisfy the needs of multilingual learners. We need to develop indigenous strategies that tap the enormous resources of multilingual learners and teachers.

It should be possible to effectively use more than one language in our classes. Using the mother tongue in the Second language (SL) classes has been looked down upon for a long time mainly due to the misuse of what is termed as the Grammar Translation method. Many teachers resort to translation in all their lessons resulting in an indiscriminate use of L1 for a rather mechanical practice and reducing the chances of genuine communication in either the Target language or the mother tongue. No wonder many of the learners, poor victims of the system, come out like zombies incapable of using (any) language to think clearly. To avoid such situations, SL experts have subscribed to the view that mother tongue should be banished from the English classroom. Though it has some advantages, the loss is more, as we are not able to use the rich resources of bilingual and multilingual learners and teachers.
 
This might app ear as putting the clock back or going back in time when we should be going forward. But as Alan Maley(2001) rightly points out in his article 'A matter of time' included in the January issue of English Teaching Professional
 
As a profession, we like to think of ourselves as 'cutting edge', 'state of the art', with all the connotations of excitement in a future driven enterprise which that entails. We live in a capsule of the present moment, with no time for a backward glance. …When we do look at our past, it becomes clear that many of the current ideas which we think of as being so innovative have, in fact, been around for a long time. We have very often re-invented or re-discovered them rather than created them out of nothing in the present instant.
 
To support his point of view he has produced a number of quotations from Billows (1961) which voice some of our concern today about teachers spoon-feeding the learners. In his book, 'The Techniques of Language Teaching', Billows says,
 
"One of the satisfactions of language learning lies in the slow clearing of the fog…the gradual emergence of pattern where formerly there seemed to be none. If the teacher tries to by-pass this process and serve up to his pupil a systematisation not worked for and not developed out of the learner's experience and its organisation, he deprives him of this satisfaction…"

• Multilingual Resources
• Sample Multilingual Activity Type 1
• Sample Multilingual Activity 2
• Sample Multilingual Activity 3
• More Multilingual Tasks to Ponder