ABSTRACT
The central concern of this chapter is the relationship between migrants’ language practices and the benefits to wider receiving societies of drawing on, rather than resisting, difference and diversity. By seeing multilingualism, in the specific context of the European Union, as an asset, the chapter seeks to understand migration at the continental level by exploring language policy and language use within and across Europe. The linguistic landscape of London is explored before looking at the experiences of a migrant from Poland who made London his home. Seeing language learning through the eyes of a recently arrived migrant foregrounds the discussion which follows concerning what it means to learn a new language. This section draws on Second Language Acquisition (SLA) literature so that readers are able to see what is involved in learning a second language. Sociolinguistic approaches to language learning are drawn on in a critique of how SLA still dominates the communicative language learning paradigm. We explore an emerging theory of translanguaging which looks beyond these traditions towards a future for language learning for mobile societies. The chapter ends with an analysis of the relationship between a translanguaging view of language use and an intercultural approach to learning. Intercultural learning is seen to overcome the binary of migrant versus non-migrant in the public sphere. We discuss how language fits into an intercultural approach to learning which is grounded in ethno-relativism – being able to see that other cultures have their own values and behaviours which are different to one’s own but no better or worse.
