Page 32 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS
cultural diversity between countries, nations, regions, classes, or social groups and genders on the other. As Bandura (2007) argues, a teacher immersed in the discourse of intercultural education abandons the traditional role of an infallible expert and organiser of students' work and becomes a facilitator, mediator, researcher, and innovator, which is necessary because intercultural competence in language teaching involves taking into account another person's perspective and not treating oneself and one's own point of view as the most important and dominant (Nawracka, 2016, p. 79).
The diversity-focused pedagogical approach emerging from intercultural education rejects the view that homogeneity is the norm, in favour of heterogeneity (diversity) in schools being considered the norm, as (especially) children fit poorly into one-dimensional, predetermined patterns of interpretation and action (Hüpping, Büker, 2014, pp. 1 and 7). In the German-language glottodidactic literature, one encounters a great sensitivity to the language used in the context of cultural education, for example, instead of the term "contact" (intercultural) the word "encounter" (German: Begegnung) is used; "awareness" is replaced by "sensibilisation" (German: Sensibilisierung) and "intercultural training" is replaced by "cultural-contrastive” (German: kulturkontrastivesVorgehen) (Chromiec, 2006, p. 42). If we realise that the language we use influences the way we think, is the main form of social consciousness, and permeates all fields of social relations (Kłoskowska, 1964) and look again at the conceptual set described above, we might see how it can lead to new phenomena and processes in the context of intercultural encounters and dialogue.
1.5 Plurilingual education
The issue of plurilingual education is covered by philologists, mainly English speakers, in the context of reflecting on the methodological side of foreign language education (Kotarba-Kańczugowska, 2015, p. 15). I agree with Kotarba-Kańczugowska that the education of plurilingual competence should take place in a pedagogical context and not be limited to the sociolinguistic perspective of foreign language education. Therefore, when discussing the issue of plurilingualism, I will focus on the pedagogical perspective, in which the aim of integrated language and culture education should be to change the monocultural consciousness. Languages should become a tool for communication, for conveying meanings in the educational space. The definition of multilingualism says that it is the ability of an individual to use more than one language in social communication for different purposes, regardless of the level of mastery of these languages (Beacco, 2005, p. 19).
Bilingual and multilingual education is de facto monolingual and monocultural education, where mother tongue and foreign languages and different cultures exist side by side. We respect the differences of others (which is particularly easy to do when we are talking about education and prestigious languages), but we do not interact with them, do not enter into a dialogue. Officially, plurilingualism is declared in Europe, as can be seen from the numerous documents issued by the Council of the European Union on languages and language learning, for example:
• Conclusions of the Barcelona European Council (2002), which called for action "to improve the mastery of basic skills, in particular by teaching at least two foreign languages from an early age", and for the establishment of a linguistic competence indicator.
• Conclusions of the European Council (19 May 2006), which set out the principles for a European Indicator of Language Competence.
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