Teaching Practices for First Language and Multilingualism: Mapping Teachers’ Views in European Schools

Abstract

The socio-economic and political changes in recent decades have created new needs in the field of education. The E.U. institutions have realized this situation and the challenges of the coexistence of foreign language pupils in schools and formed a broader framework for their individual policies. In this paper, we present some of the results of a postgraduate study at the University of Western Macedonia. The aim of the research was to investigate the "discourse" of the official documents on mother tongue and multilingualism and to examine to what extent and in what ways the European Union language policy is applied in "praxis" in the case of European Schools. Could such a model be applied on a larger scale in modern multicultural societies?