Receptive communication skills to support inclusive learning in the multilingual classroom: a workshop for university teaching staff

1 Description of context

Luxembourg is a multilingual country with three administrative languages: Luxembourgish, French and German. Notably, the primary language of over 33 % of the population is not one of these three official languages, with Portuguese (15.4 %), Italian (3.6 %), English (3.6 %) and South Slavic languages (2 %) being the largest groups. On average, residents of Luxembourg speak four languages, reflecting the country’s rich linguistic diversity and cultural complexity (see Fehlen et al. 2021).

Much like the country itself, the University of Luxembourg is multilingual by law, with English, French and German as official teaching languages. In 2020, the university adopted a policy on multilingualism, which outlines the roles that languages play in teaching and learning, research and administration.^[1] The University of Luxembourg Language Centre (ULLC) is responsible for implementing and monitoring the multilingualism policy, with a particular focus on language training for academic literacies in the university’s teaching languages. Through its research focus on multilingual pedagogy in higher education, the ULLC fosters quality language education while promoting linguistic diversity and intercultural exchange. It supports university members within this multilingual educational landscape and encourages inclusive learning in alignment with the institution’s values.

The trial workshop and activities presented in this paper were designed for the University of Luxembourg’s inaugural initiative “ACT – Advancing Competence in Teaching for student success” in February 2024. The aim of ACT is to support the university teaching community and encourage sharing and collaboration. A total of nine workshops were offered (partly in parallel) over one day, with 94 participants attending the event. Each workshop was limited to 1 hour. Our workshop, entitled “Teaching and Learning in the Multilingual Classroom”, was part of the ULLC’s efforts to support teaching staff in addressing the complexities of multilingual classrooms and promoting inclusive learning. Twenty-five experienced teaching staff members and early-career academics from all three university faculties registered for the workshop. The workshop involved two short activities to train receptive language skills, applying the intercomprehension and lingua receptiva (LaRa) approaches combined with plain language strategies. By integrating plain language strategies into the receptive multilingualism approach, the goal was to enhance comprehension, ensuring that participants with limited language skills or lower proficiency levels could engage effectively in classroom interaction. Inspiration for the workshop came from the qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with 13 teaching staff members and the open-ended questions of an online questionnaire completed by 68 Bachelor students, with balanced representation across the three university faculties, collected through the “Representations of Linguistic Diversity in Multilingual Universities (RELIDIMU)” project. Overall, 12 of the 13 teaching staff members interviewed and 66 % of the undergraduate students who completed the questionnaire indicated that they speak and/or understand the three university languages: English, French and German. More than half of the teaching staff interviewed, and nearly half of the participating students also speak or understand Luxembourgish as well as other languages, such as Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch or Arabic, with varying levels of proficiency.

However, participants reported that they are mainly exposed to French and English in the university context, while German and Luxembourgish play a minor role, and other languages hardly ever appear. Specifically, students estimated that the average exposure to languages other than the university’s official ones is less than 3 %.

The linguistically rich environment at the University of Luxembourg and the reported dominance of English and French over German, Luxembourgish and other languages in most university teaching settings motivated us to design a workshop encouraging multilingualism and promoting the use and learning of underrepresented languages in this context.

2 Receptive multilingualism approaches to teaching and learning

Based on the data briefly presented in Section 1, we opted for receptive multilingualism approaches when designing activities for the workshop. As teaching staff and students are often highly proficient in a Romance or Germanic language and speak one or two additional languages at varying levels of proficiency, there is significant potential for mutual understanding, particularly among European languages.

In practice, we designed one reading comprehension activity based on the concept of intercomprehension and one oral activity based on the concept of lingua receptiva. Intercomprehension is defined as comprehension of a (foreign) language or linguistic variety without having acquired it by formal learning or in its cultural environment.^[2] This approach is considered most effective among languages that are typologically closely related, such as European languages (see Carrasco Perea et al. 2008; Hufeisen and Marx 2007; Klein and Reissner 2006; McCann et al. 1999; Meißner 2016). Furthermore, especially in academic discourse, a significant number of terms derive from Greek and Latin origins (so-called internationalisms), contributing to a shared linguistic foundation among various languages. In academic discourse this commonality extends to similar structural elements, such as formal language use and text organisation (see Deroey et al. 2019).

Lingua receptiva (LaRa) also falls under the concept of receptive multilingualism. Here, mutual understanding occurs not because of linguistic similarities but because speakers have acquired the language, either being raised with it or having learned it later in life. As a result, they can use their receptive skills to understand their communication partner, even if they are not proficient enough to actively produce the language themselves (Rehbein et al. 2010). At the University of Luxembourg, where teaching staff and undergraduate students are often motivated to learn languages and acquire at least basic linguistic skills in the third university teaching language or speak an additional language, LaRa can be effectively employed for classroom interaction in a more structured way.

For our activities, we decided to combine receptive multilingualism with plain language strategies for three key reasons. First, in academic contexts, plain language strategies can be applied to academic genres such as abstracts or summaries (Stoll et al. 2022) to help novice students or second language learners familiarise themselves with a topic before engaging in deeper exploration. Second, written or oral communication in plain language helps participants with lower language skills overcome barriers and engage more effectively in classroom communication. Third, unlike receptive multilingualism, plain language is a concept already somewhat familiar to university teaching staff, allowing us to build upon their existing knowledge in our workshop activities. As well as using visual graphics to minimise reliance on text, one teaching staff member, for example, shared in an interview that she uses “a simpler language with the technical words in it”, describing it as a language “in the common range […] that people will understand”.

3 Intercomprehension activity

4 Lingua receptiva activity

4.2 Description of activity and material used

The activity was divided into two parts. In the first part we demonstrated the concept of LaRa using authentic data from interviews with teaching staff that were conducted as part of the RELIDIMU project (Figure 1). The excerpts were carefully selected to be short, in plain language, and relevant to the topic discussed at the workshop. The aim of the demonstration was to contribute to a better understanding of the process and set expectations for the second part of the activity.

Figure 1:

Oral conversation in French and German.

In the second part, participants selected a sticker representing their preferred language at the University of Luxembourg (yellow for Luxembourgish, green for German, purple for English or blue for French). They then paired up with someone who had a differently-coloured sticker. In these pairs, participants engaged in a conversation about multilingual teaching practices, following two rules: they had to use their preferred language throughout and both partners were required to use plain language to accommodate varying proficiency levels. After this partner activity, participants reflected on their experiences in an open discussion.

5 Summary of experiences and future prospects

The aim of our workshop was to familiarise participants with basic concepts and practices of receptive multilingualism applicable to the multilingual academic classroom. Participants’ feedback confirmed that both intercomprehension and LaRa are suitable for our multilingual academic context. The activities and the discussions showed that participants made use of their diverse linguistic and cultural repertoire. In addition, participants suggested that applying the presented multilingual practices in the classroom could provide motivation to learn languages that are less visible or less frequently used in the university context and created a more inclusive environment.

At the same time, the workshop revealed the need for further and more systematic training in multilingual practices. To address this, we have decided to expand the length of the workshop to a half-day format, include more activities, incorporate work with authentic materials from teaching staff, and facilitate activities in smaller groups. In practical terms, we will ask teaching staff in advance to upload texts from their disciplines that they would like to work on during the workshop so that we can provide a step-by-step demonstration of how plain language strategies can be applied to academic texts. Furthermore, we will ask participants to suggest short academic texts in different languages to practise intercomprehension in mixed-language groups. Lastly, we will incorporate more playful and interactive LaRa activities aimed at developing receptive skills. An example of such an activity resembles the board game “Taboo” in which participants pair up and use different languages to help their partner guess the word on their card (Majdańska-Wachowicz et al. 2021).

We consider this type of workshop particularly relevant and beneficial for the multilingual context at the University of Luxembourg. It could also serve as a model for other multilingual university contexts to support both teaching staff and students, fostering intercultural understanding and encouraging language learning.