Presented by Steve Marshall

Today, students and educators face many lingualisms: for example, bilingualism, multilingualism, metrolingualism (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015), and plurilingualism (Coste, Moore, & Zarate, 1997, 2009; Council of Europe, 2001), not to mention codeswitching, codemeshing, and translanguaging (Canagarajah, 2011; García, 2009; Li & Zhu, 2013). I review these differences in terminology, before focusing on plurilingualism, its defining features, and the goals of plurilingual pedagogy. I then present data from recent research I have carried out at a university in Western Canada that is characterized by multiculturalism and high levels of linguistic diversity. In the project, a research team assessed the effectiveness of plurilingual pedagogical approaches in a first-year academic writing course and in several contexts across the disciplines. I present the following data: interviews with students and their instructors; recordings of in-class interactions involving students mixing Chinese, Korean, and English as they work on collaborative tasks; and samples of students’ writing. In analyzing the data, I suggest that teachers in EAP and academic writing classes in English-medium higher education should break free from the English-Only mindset, embrace other languages and cultures, and encourage their students to actively use their other languages in the process of learning English.