Teaching and Learning Multiple Varieties of a Foreign Language for Sustainable Multilingual Education

Hao Xu and Zhibin Shan
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Hao Xu: National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing 100089, China
Zhibin Shan: Faculty of French and Francophone Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing 100089, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 14, 1-9

Abstract: In multilingual education for sustainable personal development, compared with that of multiple languages, the teaching and learning of multiple varieties of a language has been underexplored as a special and important form of multilingualism. In this article, we examine the linguistic, psychological, and social characteristics of multiple variety learning, as compared with multiple language learning. Linguistically, acquisition of language varieties is a process of assimilating variants from a new variety into an earlier variety, which serves as a prototype system. Such assimilation is a psychological project of form-meaning interface development, which may follow the patterns of structural multiplication, conceptual involution, conceptual evolution, or/and conceptual transfer. When multiple language varieties are actually used in social contexts, multilingual individuals’ selected language practices may be supported by their combined linguistic resources from multiple varieties rather than depend on a single variety despite its dominance in a given situation. These characteristics carry pedagogical implications for sustainable multilingual education, particularly for the teaching and learning of foreign languages that have multiple varieties.

Keywords: multiple language varieties; multilingual literacies; multilingual education; sustainable development; multi-competences; form-meaning interface; the Dominant Language Constellations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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