Page 17 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

themselves, their social environment, and their history, and influences how they view their future opportunities (Norton & Toohey, 2011, p. 415).
I believe that focusing solely on language skills (the perspective of applied linguistics) is currently losing its prominence among schools and teachers in favour of supporting education in linguistically diverse educational contexts. Hence, in my opinion, regular collaboration of research teams from different fields and disciplines and cross-curricular teaching teams (including teacher researchers in action) would have a transformative effect on language education and translingualism.
1.1 Language education
For many years now, foreign language education has focused on achieving the highest possible level of language proficiency, and thus the teaching process can be characterised by complete monolingualism, a kind of "immersion in the target language". Such immersion is certainly conducive to learning9, but there are also situations during the learning process, for example, when it is necessary to reduce learners' anxiety, when it is advisable, to use the learners' mother tongue to motivate them to be active learners, to save time explaining the meaning of vocabulary, and to manage the class10. For example, in the case of pupils in younger grades of primary school in Poland, the so-called Polish hand can be used to support learning and reduce anxiety. A pupil who does not understand what is happening at the moment or who needs help, but whose vocabulary is so poor that he/she cannot ask a question in the foreign language, can go up to the blackboard, touch the Polish hand, and address the teacher in the native language.
In contrast, the mother tongue of migrant learners in Poland does not usually feature in a school day or language classes. When talking about the purposeful and rational inclusion of learners' mother tongue in language education, we cannot forget about migrant learners whose mother tongue is not the majority language. Including the mother tongue in foreign language teaching could contribute to a higher quality of language education and more effective language learning in situations where its use occurs at times justified by the needs of the learners (Atkinson, 1993; Weschler, 1997; Nation, 2003; Norman, 2008). In the case of adult students, the use of the mother tongue could provide a kind of bridge to help them overcome problems with vocabulary, sentence structure, and confidence in using the second language. During interaction tasks, students can, for example, discuss certain elements of the task in their first language, comparing and contrasting their utterances in order to better understand the use of the second language. In such a situation, the first language becomes a means of exerting control over the interaction and supports learners' productive skills (Williams, 2010, p. 24), as language serves not only as a communication tool, but also as a psychological tool to support the development of a person's cognitive processes11.
The effectiveness of language learning could also be increased if we cared not only about the form and methods of language teaching, but also about the ways of learning a foreign language and the number of hours allocated to foreign languages in order to learn a foreign language effectively. There are many different groups of students attending language classes in Poland; too numerous to count. In such
9 Turnbull & Arnett, 2002; Levine, 2003; Nation, 2003; Scott & de la Fuente, 2008; Littlewood & Yu, 2009. 10 Ellis, 2008; Turnbull, 2001.
11 Harun et al., 2014.
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