Faculty’ Beliefs About Multilingualism and a Multilingual Pedagogical Approach

Abstract

Language skills are the ultimate 21 st century social skill, linked to creativity, problem solving, and the ability to effectively communicate. Knowledge of teachers' beliefs is central to understanding teachers' decision-making in the classroom. In an interconnected and globalized world, foreign language is a global competency, and multilingualism is an essential social skill. Multilingualism plays a significant role in developing the intercultural skills necessary for global talent in a globalized workplace, for an effective and engaged cosmopolitan global citizen, and it is an essential tool in addressing complex global issues. In this study a sample of 151 faculty members participated in the study. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect primary data. The secondary data were collected from the documents in the ministry of Education. Study revealed that faculty beliefs affect multilingualism. The value of R 2 of .45 indicates that 45% of the variations in multilingualism in learning is explained by faculty beliefs in general. This means that the universities need to take into consideration the multilingualism while teaching in institutions of higher learning.

Trends in Multilingual Higher Education in the Pre-Pandemic Decade

“…For example, in Kazakhstan, professionally-oriented foreign language teaching in higher education as well as multilingual education became a new reality. They made significant efforts to organize and provide special training for the teachers, prepare learning materials, and apply new methods to develop their communication and professional skills in English (Meiramova, et al, 2015).…”

“…Besides that, encouraging inductive learning and learner autonomy, using authentic materials, task completion, process syllabi, and teamwork are typical teaching methods applied to teach English for specific purposes (Schmidt-Unterberger, 2018). Task-based learning and teaching technologies are considered an effective approach to developing language and cross-cultural communicative competencies among students in the context of multilingualism (Meiramova et al, 2015). Finally, Kunioshi et al (2016) believe, that teachers' and students" awareness of specific vocabulary (English keywords and expressions that teachers use frequently for pedagogical purposes) may support listening comprehension of students in science and engineering.…”