Supporting Multilingualism in the Classroom: Teachers Generating Knowledge through Innovative Practice

During the past two decades, there has been a significant shift in orientation among applied linguists from endorsement of largely monolingual approaches to English language teaching towards multilingual approaches that position learners’ home languages as legitimate cognitive tools and as resources for learning. The webinar will discuss the evolution of this perspective, its theoretical and empirical rationale, and future directions. A central theme in the presentation is that the legitimacy of multilingual approaches has been established by teacher-initiated instructional innovations in which teachers have assumed the role of knowledge-generators rather than simply transmitters of curriculum content.