Resumen de The diversity of multilingualism in education
Miren Jasone Cenoz Iragui, Durk Gorter
This article analyzes diversity as related to different types of multilingual education. Diversity in education is linked to different factors that can be classified as linguistic (language distance, different scripts, etc.), sociolinguistic status (minority, official, international, immigrant, etc.) and educational (school subjects, medium of instruction, age of introduction, methodologies). Language practices can be an important part of the make-up of language diversity among multilingual speakers at a micro level. The paper discusses the Continua of Multilingual Education as a tool to classify and compare different types of multilingual schools all over the world as a more efficient way to deal with diversity in multilingual education than traditional typologies. The advantages of the new tool can be shown by applying it to the case of multilingual education in the Basque Country in Spain, where Basque, Spanish, English and sometimes French, are the languages used by different actors in the education system. The paper also deals with diversity as linked to sustainable development and focuses on the advantages of multilingual education.
