Educating Early Years and Primary English Language Teachers Multilingually

Abstract

In an increasingly multilingual world English language teachers need to develop an understanding of multilingualism in society and manage the plurilingual resources and identities of the children in their classrooms. In order to educate the teachers of the 21st century, they need an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to language education. Garcia (2013) calls for a three-strand approach which includes knowledge of the children and their families, knowledge of bi/multilingualism and knowledge of appropriate pedagogies for multilingualism. For this approach to be successful, it requires teachers to be immersed in a truly multilingual learning context, where they are encouraged to develop their own representations of multilingualism, explore their own language use and come into contact with educators who themselves educate multilingually. In this session I am going to describe my English+other languages policy in an English language teacher education programme and share some of the activities that aim to educate teachers multilingually.