Towards multilingual education: Basque educational research from an international perspective

摘要

The twenty-first century has seen a growing need for individuals and societies to be multilingual, and we have witnessed a number of bilingual and multilingual communities across the world developing successful models for the delivery of education through the medium of two or more languages. In particular, this has become a common feature of nation states and stateless nations, where smaller or lesser used languages flourish alongside more powerful national or international languages. In European contexts, education systems in countries such as Wales and the Basque Country serve as important reference points for other communities where minority languages are used as media of instruction, and the expertise of practitioners and researchers in such contexts are internationally recognised. It is, therefore, a welcome addition to the bilingual and multilingual education literature when such a respected researcher as Jasone Cenoz publishes a comprehensive and contemporary review of emerging new strands of research on multilingual education in the Basque Country from an international perspective. In the multilingual environment of the twenty-first century, where we encounter an ever-increasing need for language communities to exchange practices and experiences, Cenoz's study makes a valuable contribution to the growing interest in multilingualism as we strive to gain a better understanding of multilingual competence.