The concept of “multilingual education”: European and educological discourse

Abstract

The article specifies the concept of multilingual education in European educological discourse based on its legislative framework and research results of European scholars. European experience of organizing multilingual education is attracting increasing interest due to the absence of its developed legislative provision and means of its implementation into the Ukrainian education system. The aim of this paper is to analyze the core of the concept of multilingual education, to define factors, influencing its quality and effectiveness, as well as tendencies of its further development in Benelux countries and Ukraine. The core of the concept comprises multilingualism and education as its main notions. It is generally accepted by European Commission that the notion “multilingualism” refers to the ability of a person to communicate in several languages, as well as co-existence of several language communities on one territory. The other component of the concept is “education”, which is regarded as an external influence on the process of learning of generalized objective social experience, norms and values. The article studies external and internal factors influencing multilingual education. External factors comprise the influence of globalization on society, a socially justified need for foreign languages acquisition, mobility of population, historical and cultural relations between countries. Internal factors comprise language and ethnic structure of the population, usage of official and state languages, and educational policy of a country. As a result of analysis of legislative framework, scientific discourse, and statistical data, we define multilingual education as a dynamic system, which is a complex of internal and external factors influencing the development of communicative competence in several foreign languages; as well as a process and a result of simultaneous acquisition of several foreign languages. Additionally, this research concludes that notions of bilingual and plurilingual education are recognized as varieties of multilingual education. Based on systematization of the European scientific discourse the following tendencies in the development of multilingual education were identified: increasing requirements to language proficiency, protecting regional and minority languages, diversification of multilingual education, and teacher training to implementation of multilingual education.