Rethinking Multilingualism: trajectories in policy, pedagogy and research in the UK

The shifting landscape of languages within the British Isles reflects the movementand change in population across both urban and rural areas. There arenow more than 300 languages spoken in Britain, but the challenge for educatorsis to open up space for multilingualism and active citizenship. Barton argues that dominant cultures with dominant languages such as English ‘tend to support monolingualism and to ignore or brush aside varieties, dialects, creoles and vernacular languages; they also play down fluidity andchange in languages and ignore overlap and similarities between languages’ (Barton 2007, 59). At an international level, classroom dynamics are shifting dramatically as people move across countries and borders, and Vertovec (2007) argues that we have entered the age of superdiversity