Emergent bilingualism in foreign lñanguage education

Abstract

For some time now, Foreign Language education (FLE) has been grappling with the dogma of what Howatt (1984) referred to as the ‘monolingual principle’: monolingual ideologies of language separation - dual monolingualism - in the classroom, coupled with (mythicized) monolingual native speakerdom personifying the goal of target language competence. This mindset sidesteps several key questions crucial to FL contexts, (aside from the biological impossibility of the process producing native speakers), not least the naturally occurring, indeed unavoidable, interaction between students’ languages and the cognitive and communicative consequences of this contact, tying in with what Cook (1992) has termed ‘multicompetence’; alongside the logical goal of FLE: the development of bilingualism in some form. By recognizing the multicompetence of emergent bilinguals, FLE could, and arguably should, incorporate bilingual approaches, techniques and strategies that develop and evaluate students’ holistic repertoires. In doing so it might better prepare them for life beyond the classroom.