International Colloquium 

University Paul Valery Montpellier 3

Montpellier, from 7 to 10 June 2023

Plurensa-2023 : Multilingualism/plurilingualism, teaching and learning, complexity and integrity: epistemological, pedagogical and political perspectives

Since the first definitions of plurilingualism in Galisson and Coste (1976: 69), multilingualism has referred to human beings living in "(...) regions, countries where two or more languages are used simultaneously". Cuq (2003: 195) refines the definition a few years later by stressing that plurilingualism is "the ability of an individual to use several linguistic varieties with good results". Plurilingualism, which is a historical notion in the field of language education (see Moore, D. & Gajo, L. (éds.) (2009) regarding its elaboration and development) is therefore inherent to human beings and is a primary concern for the teaching-learning issues of our world today. However, it appears dificult to have it  recognized as a reality and a valuable resource both politically (Gogolin 2021) and pedagogically (Auger 2020, Auger and Le Pichon-Vorstman 2021, Cummins 2021, Van Avermaet et al. 2018), although its early stages already appeared in some works of 16th century humanism  (e.g. Jacques Bourgoing[1] and his unfinished dictionary) and the pedagogy of languages and cultures is used in very different contexts (ordinary classes, teaching a subject through a foreign language, Gajo 2009, classes for immigrant pupils, Garcia and Wei 2014) and in different regions of the world. ), to describe and formulate concrete proposals for the training of teachers (Galligani and Vlad 2020, Oger, Maravelaki et al. (2022)) and students (Cenoze and Jeorge 2021, Piccardo et al. 2021).

How to account for and take into account this complexity (Morin 1982: 124) "which is neither reduced to science nor to philosophy, but which allows their intercommunication by operating dialogical loops" that characterises teaching-learning situations in which multilingualism is often silent and thus  aim at fostering integrity in Research and actions (Bargadaà, Peixoto 2021) that addresses  as closely as possible  the issues of teaching and learning in multilingual classrooms, from an epistemological, linguistic, pedagogy and political point of view?