Chapter 1: Higher Education and the Multilingual Classroom: How Applied Linguistics Research Can Help Design Effective Teaching Strategies

Multilingualism in the classroom and higher education is by no means a new phenomenon. Many developing nations such as India, China, Indonesia, and Nigeria, to mention only a few, have dealt with the coexistence of several languages within their societies and education systems since the borders carved out by European colonial powers between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries rarely coincided with ethnolinguistic frontiers. Thus, many recently independent nations in Africa and Asia are multilingual, and indeed many of their citizens acquire two or more languages as children (see many examples in Wright, 2016). In addition, many developed nations have also been dealing with an increasingly multilingual student population over the past half-century or so, not only because of the greater recognition of national minorities such as the Catalan and Basque populations in Spain and French-speakers in Canada, for example, but also, and perhaps mostly, because of the waves of immigration following the decolonization of Africa and South and South-East Asia. Since the early 1960s, and in some cases earlier, many European countries have seen citizens from their former colonies resettle in France (e.g., Arabic speakers), in the United Kingdom (e.g., speakers of Hindi, Urdu, and other languages of the Indian subcontinent), in Belgium, etc. These demographic and linguistic changes are accelerating in the twenty-first century with the flow of migrants to Europe, and other Western nations like the United States and Canada, from war-torn regions in the Middle East and Africa.