Plurilingual Education: Policies – Practices – Language Development ed. by Patrick Grommes and Adelheid Hu (review)

Patrick Grommes and Adelheid Hu’s Plurilingual Education: Policies – Practices – Language Development probes the concept of plurilingualism, one of the most important constructs to emerge from the contemporary phenomena of migration and globalization. Inspired by a 2010–2011 lecture series on “Plurilingualism: Acquisition – Teaching – Communication” at the University of Hamburg, the authors not only cover the topics discussed by the presenters but take their reflections one step further by broadening the original geographical and conceptual boundaries. The result is a solid overview of the core areas of plurilingual education: policies, practices, and language development.

In an upfront statement on the tenets of their view, the authors embrace the Council of Europe definition of plurilingualism and enlarge that perspective by stressing the interrelatedness of the individual, social, and political dimensions. They point to the interdependence of the individual and social dimensions by underscoring the major role of policies in fostering or hindering plurilingual development and highlight the political dimension of languages in terms of prestige and economic status.

The editors’ choices prove very effective in raising readers’ awareness of the implications of every intervention for the linguistic ecosystem. The first section of the book deals with the conceptualization of plurilingualism, theoretical notions about its multifaceted nature, and measures and tools for different geographical contexts. This section offers an effective conceptual basis for the diverse nature of plurilingual practices and presents the strengths and limitations of policies and stakeholders’ choices with respect to existing plurilingualism or lack thereof. The second section highlights the tension between top-down approaches to language diversity and bottom-up heuristic practices and representations of plurilinguals, casting new light on the complex and kaleidoscopic nature of plurilingualism. The final section flows naturally from the previous ones, probing the inextricable link between L1 and L2 (and subsequent languages) where first-language competence and literacy are springboards for successful language acquisition.

Daniel Coste opens the discussion with the “paradigm of plurality,” stressing how different forms of socialization relate to aspects of a complex process of social entities interacting with each other. The concept of plurilingual competence brings to the fore the dynamic vision of partial competencies comprising individuals’ linguistic capital and counters the notion of linguistic homogeneity, including the language of schooling, nourished as it is by the multiple forms of discourse inherent in the different subjects.

David Little discusses the challenge of moving from the ideal of plurilingual intercultural education to the reality of curriculum design and language policies, by introducing the Language Education Policy Profile (LEPP), a service offered by the Council of Europe to member states and regions or cities within these states.

Martina Möllering’s contribution is a detailed and comprehensive review of Australian language policy in language education and, in particular, the draft of a national language curriculum in 2011. She points to the potential of the most recent draft, warning about the vital need for targeted teacher training.

Innovation is also central in Sabine Ehrhart’s chapter. Her analysis adopts different scales for analyzing classroom ecologies based on two case studies of settings, Luxembourg and New Caledonia, that feature considerable diversity in geographically distant locales.

The second section of the book probes the idiosyncratic realities of multilingual practices, exposing the layers of complexity from conceptualization to application. The first contribution by Georges Lüdi reports on a five-year European Union–funded international project studying the conditions under which Europe’s linguistic diversity can spur knowledge development and economic growth. The author shows how individuals can effectively “language,” even in extreme exolingual situations, and conceptualizes language use as one possible idiosyncratic solution on a continuum from a monolingualendolingual to a multilingual-exolingual mode, depending on the speaker’s competence and ‘habitus.’ This casts light on the potential for individual and social multilingualism, where linguistic and cultural resources facilitate innovation and creativity.

The notion of language repertoire is central to the contribution by Sofia Stratilaki, who covers plurilingual and pluricultural competence as a...