A Cross-Country Comparison: Plurilingual Teaching Across Educational Curricula in Finland, Germany, and Norway

Abstract

Due to globalization and migration, societies are increasingly more linguistically and culturally diverse. This change necessitates a growing awareness and understanding of linguistic and cultural diversity. Beyond awareness, ever-increasing multilingual and multicultural societies bear important implications for educational institutions, teacher training, and policy making. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate whether plurilingual teaching is considered in the curricula and educational guidelines for primary and secondary schools across Finland, Germany, and Norway, and to find out the extent to which the approaches to plurilingual teaching diverge. A comparison of these three countries is particularly insightful, as they differ in population size, migration history, and number of heritage speakers. As part of the analysis, the following three themes relevant to plurilingual teaching were identified: cultural diversity, multilingualism as a resource, and valuing heritage languages. We provide a critical assessment of the curricula and educational guidelines in addition to suggesting avenues for future research.