Historical Perspectives on Multilingual Education

In a linguistic and cultural landscape that has become more diversified, it has become more and more challenging for politicians, policymakers, researchers, as well as teachers, to deal with the increasing complexity of current classrooms.
This book explores multilingualism from a historical and critical perspective. Drawing from three contexts - Canada, England and France - and beginning at a time of societal changes in the 1960-70s, the book offers an analysis and interpretation of when and why bilingualism was regarded as a problem in education, and the reasons for the turn towards multilingual education and its subsequent dominance of educational thinking in the English-speaking world. In so doing, the authors provide a unique critical stance at the multilingual turn that has since taken place. They examine language education policies and discourses as well as social representations around languages, their speakers, their practices and their identities. They conclude with their concern about multilingual education at a crossroads, particularly at this increasingly divisive political time, and what we might do to move forward in language education practice and policy.

Shawn M. Bullock is Reader in the History of Science, Technology and Education at the University of Cambridge, UK.