Plurilingual classes: challenges and effects of practices to foster plurilingualism at school

Cultural and linguistic diversity are nowadays a prominent characteristic of schools in most European countries. However, monolingualism is mostly the norm, and even in multilingual countries schools follow a monolingual policy. Thanks to strong empirical evidence bilingualism should no longer be considered a problem or an obstacle to (majority) language learning and academic success. In addition, teachers who are able to implement intercultural and plurilingual pedagogical approaches, doing so with- out negative bias towards ethnic minority students, offer students the best possibilities of academic success, and social and identity integration. In the present article we review the literature about bilingual develop- ment, the sociocultural aspects of ethnically diverse classrooms and discuss the possibility of implementing plurilingual practices at school and the benefits students might derive from these