Multilingualism

This essay considers and highlights the importance of knowing more than one foreign
language and culture in a multilingual Europe, due to a process of migration and
minorisation. So, a discussion concerning the organization of a multilingual school
program needs to examine four main areas:
1) the role of migration as a social phenomenon, and consequently the social and
educational configuration of European countries;
2) the shift from bilingualism to multilingualism;
3) the importance of cultural inputs during language learning: - a foreign language is
not only a system based on words and structures different from other systems, but it
emerges from another reality which is a combination of anthropological and
geographical values -, and
4) finally, the rise of English as a world language.