Multilingualism as a Resource in Foreign Language Teaching

Multilingualism is an important element in the language policy of the European Union (EU). The European Commission encourages the EU citizens to be multilingual and promotes learning of at least two foreign languages in addition to the mother tongue. In this context, foreign language teaching and learning are of great importance nowadays. The didactics of multilingualism is a relatively new term in the European and worldwide foreign language didactics. It aims to encourage the learners’ interest in foreign language learning and distance from the traditional monolingual concept in foreign language teaching. This paper stresses the promotion of individual multilingualism in foreign language teaching. It presents the main principles of intercomprehension and the EuroCom projects which concentrate on the similarities among related languages and aim to promote receptive multilingualism. In addition, the methods of “seven sieves” of the EuroComGerm project and DaFnE (Deutsch als Fremdsprache nach Englisch) are presented as learning strategies based on the contrastive comparison of Germanic languages in reading skills. The advantage of the methods is that multilingual learners discover the rules and strategies that can help them learn a foreign language. Different forms of exercises promoting multilingualism and the ones based on the principles of multilingualism didactics and tertiary didactics rarely find their way into textbooks. However, the multilingual resources should be used and adequately addressed in the teaching process. All similarities among languages, which make it easier for the learner to acquire another foreign language, are welcome aids in foreign language teaching. They not only provide orientation in a foreign-language environment but also are very helpful in learning a foreign language as a reminder. On the basis of examples, the paper explores the question of how the research on multilingualism didactics can be used effectively as a resource in foreign language teaching and how it can contribute to the promotion of multilingual competence