Resumen de Introduction – French voices on plurilingualism and pluriculturalism: theory, significance and perspectives
While theoretical constructs and frames of reference advanced in French and English research share many points of communalities, Francophone research has contributed in original ways to issues of language learning and bilingual development in multilingual contexts. The Francophone contribution to contemporary thinking has, however, often been obscured by the fact that it has been published in French, or lost in translation when concepts are not interpreted the same way in English and French. At the intersection of educational sociolinguistics and sociodidactics (Dabène, 1994), this body of work is more narrowly defined in European Francophone research as ‘didactique du plurilinguisme et du pluriculturalisme’ (didactics of plurilingualism and pluriculturalism), a term difficult to translate adequately in English. The purpose of this special issue is to present readers with a range of papers that we believe to be significant and representative of French studies, and to provide a comprehensive examination of the historical and social construction of bi/plurilingualism and its impact on the development of theory, on language policies, and on professional practice in the field of language education. Collectively, the articles capture a variety of theoretical and methodological constructs to analyse multiple repertoires in relation to speakers’ agency in a variety of situations and social contexts.
