Plurilingual approaches to ESL teaching and learning – what, why and how?

10 January 2023

by Sunny Man Chu Lau

Sunny Man Chu Lau, Full Professor in the School of Education at Bishop’s University, Québec, is Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Integrated Plurilingual Teaching and Learning. Through this talk, she explained what plurilingualism means and its implications for teaching and learning. Multilingual students come with a wealth of linguistic and cultural resources. Yet traditional ESL classrooms often default to “English only” as the best teaching practice. While there is merit to monolingual practice and target language models, students’ language competences developed inside, and outside school can be more fully leveraged to support higher-order complex language learning and concept development. This webinar answered various queries asked by in- and pre-service teachers and educators as to how we can utilize students’ plurilingual competences for in-depth learning while promoting target language development and overall metalinguistic awareness and skills.