Interlingual Education in the Classroom: An Action Guide to Overcoming Communication Conflicts

Abstract

Society’s linguistic and cultural diversity transfers, unavoidably, to schools. For this reason, teachers need to consider linguistic and cultural diversity as a learning tool, and children need to be trained to deal with interpersonal communication barriers that sometimes arise from linguistic and cultural diversity. This chapter addresses issues related to diversity in schools mainly from a communicative perspective, placing “interlingual” education (as correlated to “intercultural” education, vs. the use of multi- and pluri- terms) at the forefront of these issues. The first sections (2-4) of this chapter present the importance of developing intercultural and (the newly-coined concept) “interlingual education” at school, based on European policies on education and immigration. Section 5 focuses on how communication conflicts at school can be dealt with through oral mediation. And section 6 attempts to provide school teachers with an action guide to minimize these conflicts. This action guide addresses three basic issues: First, some generic measures regarding backgrounds and families; second, clues to foster “interlingual education” through the inclusion of all the languages present in the class; and third, oral mediation strategies to overcome the communication conflicts that sometimes take place in a multicultural classroom due to the presence of two or more mother tongues and home cultures.