This book brings together research on multilingualism, identity and intercultural understanding from a range of locations across the globe to explore the intersection of these key ideas in education. It addresses the need to better understand how multilingual, identity, and intercultural approaches intersect for multilingual learners in complex and varied settings. Through global examples, it explores how identities and multilingualism are situated within, and surrounding intercultural experiences. This book examines the different theoretical interpretations as encountered and used in different contexts. By doing so, it helps readers better understand how teachers approach multilingualism and diversity in a range of contexts.

With the impact of accelerated globalization, digital technologies, mobility, and migration, the fields of Applied Linguistics, Language, and Intercultural Education have been shifting. One shift in need of further exploration is that of systematic and coherent reflexivity in researching language and culture. This unique and timely book thus examines the significance of reflexivity as an integral process, particularly when researching the multifaceted notions of multilingualism and interculturality in education. It also contributes to current critical approaches to representations of languages and cultures in identity politics. As such, the authors offer innovative ways of engaging with reflexivity in teaching, learning, and research through multimodal and complex ways. The chapters span a diverse range of educational settings in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America.

This book provides a contemporary and critical examination of the theoretical and pedagogical impact of Michael Byram’s pioneering work on intercultural communicative competence and intercultural citizenship within the field of language education and beyond. The chapters address important theoretical and empirical work on the teaching, learning, and assessment of intercultural learning, and highlight how individual language educators and communities of practice enact intercultural learning in locally appropriate ways. The book offers comprehensive, up-to-date and accessible knowledge for researchers, teachers, teacher-trainers and students.

This volume focuses on a range of topics and studies that address the notion of plurilingualism and multilingual identity in computer-mediated language learning spaces. Interest in digital multilingual identity in the fields of applied linguistics and language education has been growing exponentially in recent years, encompassing new variables and realities of life, such as translanguaging, heightened multilingualism, linguistic superdiversity, multimodal computer-mediated communication, and even social justice and forensics. New theoretical assumptions and recent global challenges urge researchers to problematize the traditional notion of virtual identity in the face of increased virtual connectedness and the hybridization of transcultural and translingual practices and intersecting physical movements of people. Singling out identity research within the field of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) is particularly critical in the era of hyperlingualism, a form of multilingualism characterized by the increased participatory nature of digital communication and the provision of multiple languages in their own bounded spaces and places of use on the web and in other digital contexts. This volume contributes to this fast-growing body of interdisciplinary research, featuring conceptual papers and research studies of identity performance and multilingual communication in highly complexified digitally mediated social platforms. Although researchers have recently begun to explore some aspects of identity and plurilingualism in digital spaces, this volume seeks to (a) contextualize digital multilingual communication as it pertains to FL learning and teaching via a historical and conceptual overview of the multilingual movement in technologically mediated SLA along with in-depth explorations of how multilingual practices and digital affordances affect language learner identities beyond the classroom context, (b) fill the research void by exploring critical aspects of identity and multilingual digital communication across a range of educational and non-institutional contexts where language learners actively participate in translingual and plurilingual practices, and (c) illustrate new ways of evaluating and adapting CALL materials and teaching practices to accommodate multilingual subjects, and reflect the increasingly hyperlingual nature of digital communication.

This book represents the proceedings of an international seminar held at the University of La Reunion in November 2014, the outcome of a pluridisciplinary project bringing together a number of research centres, including the Federation of Research Centers Observatoire Scientifique de Océan Indien, CALTS Hyderabad, and AUSTRALEX Adelaide. Offering a reflection on scholarship and plural identity constructions, with a specific focus on the Indian Ocean area, the book provides an in-depth discussion of the concepts of “heritage and exchanges” in Indian Ocean countries. The volume is divided into two parts, with the first section, focusing on the concept of heritage, examining intercultural and multilingual legacies which influence the construction and evolution of identity at the level of the individual. The second section deals with the notion and dynamics of exchange, regarding both educational policies in multilingual and intercultural contexts and multilingual and intercultural language learning processes. The heritage and exchanges explored throughout the volume attest to cultural and linguistic pluralities which are part of languages and cultures in contact, but which also reveal a plural yet partitioned world, influenced by subjective representations. This volume is particularly unique given its intense focus on a relatively unexplored geographical area, the Indian Ocean, home to several English and French speaking countries and endowed with a diverse educational and cultural colonial legacy. Furthermore, as a result of its interdisciplinary nature and topics, this bilingual book will appeal to a wide and international readership interested in questions pertaining to multilingualism and interculturalism in learning, teaching and training contexts, and will represent an invaluable source of information for academics, students, and educationalists wishing to specialize in the theory and practice of education.

This book offers cutting-edge research on multilingual identity by scholars from different disciplines on a range of languages and contexts.

Through case studies on multicultural and multilingual education in contemporary Europe, this book aims to identify common problems with different approaches and solutions. The editors propose measures useful in policy formulation.