ABSTRACT
It is very easy to say that anyone teaching language (first, second, foreign, …) should have experienced what it is like to study a language in addition to one’s mother tongue. This advice probably comes across as humorous to a European audience, which routinely not only studies but uses more than one language. In the United States, people understand much less readily the normality of the rest of the world’s multilingualism. In the United States, we have to argue repeatedly and persuasively why it is in our interest to know more than one language. This argument becomes increasingly difficult when we limit the discussion to academic contexts, where the language of most journals, international conferences, and electronic communication is English (Swales, 1997).
