Laura Portolés

Given the limited number of studies investigating pragmatics and multilingualism in primary education, the present study analyses the influence of multilingual instruction, referring to pedagogical translanguaging, on multilingual young learners’ pragmatic awareness, paying particular attention to the sociopragmatic dimension of the speech act of requesting. The sample consisted of 28 primary school students from a multilingual school in the province of Castelló (Valencian Community), where three languages (Catalan, Spanish, and English) are used as languages of instruction.

As multilingualism continues to gain importance in modern-day society, the pedagogical translanguaging approach has emerged as a means of facilitating fluid multilingual communication. Given the monolingual practices commonly observed in the CLIL classroom, this study aimed to explore primary school teachers’ beliefs regarding the use of translanguaging and the role of the L1. The data were collected via an online questionnaire including both Likert-scale and open-ended questions, which was distributed to 45 in-service CLIL content teachers in Andalusia (Spain).

This study aims to contribute to the research literature on politeness in language teachers’ requestive behaviour. More specifically, it adopts a multilingual approach to explore teachers’ politeness strategies in the English for Young Learners (EYL) classroom, an underresearched instructional setting where regulative discourse tends to predominate. Participants are two pre-school teachers and two intact groups of 4/5-year-old children.

Empirical research on L3 teachers' beliefs has gained momentum in the last decade since teacher cognition is paramount for understanding teaching practices in multilingual settings. Yet, many of these works deal with experienced language practitioners (e.g. [Otwinowska, A. (2017). English teachers' language awareness: Away with the monolingual bias? Language Awareness, 26 (4), 304–324]) and focus on the impact of instruction about multilingual pedagogies (e.g. [Gorter, D., & Arocena, E. (2020). Teachers' beliefs about multilingualism in a course on translanguaging.

The study of teachers’ attitudes towards languages has received some attention, as multilingualism has become one of the main educational targets for European school systems (Cenoz 2019; Liyanage & Tao 2020). Several authors (Lasagabaster 2017; Safont 2007) have claimed that language attitudes may play a crucial role in multilingual education.

Cross-linguistic influence and the fluent alternation of several languages have been the focus of interest of recent research (García, 2009; Muñoz, 2007; Safont, 2001). The present study analyzes cross-linguistic influence and language switches in the oral production of English by 25 Catalan-Spanish bilingual children in a Spanish primary school. With that aim, we first identify the most common types of code-switch and their function in an EFL classroom by using Williams and Hammarberg’s (1998) categorization of code-switches.

Aquest article tracta sobre les tendències educatives actuals i els nous reptes que l’educació multilingüe planteja. Es presenta la situació lingüística actual a la gran majoria de centres educatius on diverses llengües coexisteixen dins i fora de l’aula. S’expliquen les diferents tendències educatives lligades al foment del multilingüisme, com ara la importància del manteniment de les llengües pròpies de l’alumnat,la incorporació de l’anglés a una edat primerenca i els nous enfocaments metodològics en l’ensenyament de llengües, com són els programes CLIL i EMI.