Abstract:

There are many studies dedicated to the benefits of multilingualism stating that global communication begins at home and continues at school. Therefore, multilingualism in schools is competing with multilingualism at home due to the differences between studying and living a language. On the one side, studying a language aims at learning the literary, formal aspects, with emphasis on correctness and accuracy, while living a language aims at “getting a meaning”, considering the fact that spoken language only addresses the functional aspect of communication. Accordingly, the process of teaching and learning a second/third language in schools (official context) is challenged with spoken language even with badly spoken language in bilingual families when parents try to speak the other parent’s language not succeeding in being performant in pronunciation or grammar. Our study aims to provide and analyse favourable/unfavourable contexts encountered in language teaching in multilingual context under the pressure of regional and popular variants of the languages known and used by students. The study is based on our experience accumulated during the development of three educational projects funded by the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs which were conducted in areas with multilingual potential in the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine.

Keywords:

Multilingualism, communication, language acquisition, bilingualism, multiculturalism.