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Combined Teaching of Foreign Languages – Shared Experience

Learn how the combined teaching of foreign languages can improve the learning process. Discover shared experience and innovative approaches.

Combined (cross) teaching of foreign languages - Kabinata.com

Introduction: Combined (Cross) Teaching of Foreign Languages

 

What does the combined (cross) teaching of foreign languages mean? This article examines some practical aspects and interesting case studies in the learning or refinement of foreign languages through other (foreign, non-native) languages – wholly or partially. The latter, from the perspective of a teacher who conducts lessons in Bulgarian, covers two main scenarios – when instruction in a foreign language is conducted entirely in another foreign (for the teacher or the learner) language, or when it is conducted primarily in Bulgarian but numerous examples from a second foreign language are provided in order to better facilitate the acquisition and use of the main language being studied, i.e. partially. Naturally, applying such practices is only possible when the colleague-teacher has solid, primarily theoretical, knowledge of several languages and is able to find and employ an analogy from another language (or languages) that supports the learner – who, for their part, it is preferable but not always necessary to have knowledge of the auxiliary language from which examples are drawn. Sometimes it is simply enough to give an elementary and easily understandable example from that language (especially when no suitable equivalent exists in Bulgarian) in order to clarify something in the main language being taught. This article provides both appropriate examples and individual elements of contrastive linguistics, and the case studies cited draw primarily from English, French, German and Spanish. When learning rare, exotic, or non-European languages, instruction conducted through or in popular languages (most notably English) may be considered standard practice for various reasons, but this falls outside the scope of the present article.

Shared Experience and Practical Focus

This article likewise makes no claim to academic depth; it is primarily experience-sharing, practically oriented, and intended to assist all fellow foreign-language teachers working at beginner and intermediate levels of instruction. Even if some conclusions and examples prove debatable, I hope it can contribute to the professional debate and to practice regarding the use of third languages (beyond the native and the target language) in foreign-language teaching.

Practices and Trends in Foreign Language Learning

It is clear that when someone begins to learn a foreign language, they do so (or prefer to do so) on the basis of their native language, whether Bulgarian or another. Increasingly, however, with the advance of globalisation and the growing number of people living for shorter or longer periods outside their home country, combined with the widespread learning of foreign languages, it turns out to be necessary to provide examples or to explain grammatical rules directly through other (non-native) languages, in order to support the acquisition of the main target language. Specific cases from practice are described below.

We can loosely call these languages 'auxiliary', and many strong arguments can be found in support of using them to aid the mastery of the primary language. First and foremost among these is practice itself – as will be discussed below, when we have a learner (most often a young person in the 12–15–18 age range) who perceives both Bulgarian and English (an increasingly common situation) as native languages, there is no way to avoid drawing on the latter. Furthermore, this allows both the learner and, no less importantly, the teacher to continually raise their qualifications and maintain what we might call 'perfect linguistic fitness', by constantly making appropriate references to other languages. In addition to this, all documents from the main European institutions concerned with foreign-language teaching – the EU and the Council of Europe – actively encourage multilingualism and plurilingualism and, more specifically, 'encouraging learners to use more than one foreign language', as well as 'using knowledge of different languages to understand a language considered unknown'. Of course, none of this should override the primary goal for which language instruction is conducted, namely the mastery of the target language.

Cross (or Combined) Teaching

In the scholarly literature of various language schools, or at least within the research conducted for this modest publication, it is difficult to find any precisely established term or expression to denote the learning of one language through another – regardless of whether instruction is conducted entirely in a language that is non-native to the teacher or the learner, or whether it is conducted in their native language while examples are drawn from another language that both parties know sufficiently well. Various publications use terms such as cross-language learning or comparative learning, but these tend to address the problems of bilingual learners rather than what is meant here, namely the active use of auxiliary languages. Regardless, we can provisionally call this practice cross or combined teaching.

The Bulgarian Model

From a practical standpoint, the cases in which it becomes necessary or advisable to incorporate other languages can be loosely divided into several categories. The first involves children or young people from Bulgarian families living abroad, who have good conversational Bulgarian and can carry on an extended and relatively complex conversation without difficulty, but are practically unable to read or write in Bulgarian. Attendance at Sunday Bulgarian schools is not possible everywhere, and parents either lack the time or (more often) the competence to teach their children to read and write in Bulgarian. In such cases, a word or expression must be explained in Bulgarian, but if something needs to be written or read outside the target language, recourse is most commonly made to another language that the child studies at school and commands in all its forms. Moreover, these children's command of Bulgarian is in any case limited at the lexical level, particularly for older or more complex words, and in those situations it also becomes necessary to turn to a third language – that is, the translation is not written in Bulgarian but in one of the auxiliary languages. Furthermore, for the reasons already cited, these children lack an in-depth knowledge of Bulgarian grammatical structure, and certain rules of the target language cannot be explained to them through Bulgarian, particularly when those rules do not exist in it at all. Examples include the explanation of the impersonal pronoun 'on' in French through the similar 'man' in German (or vice versa), despite the considerable differences between them (see further below).

More Examples…

Another example is the explanation of the pronominal adverbs 'damit' or 'darauf' (or their derivatives) in German through the similar 'therewith' or 'thereof' in English. Perhaps the most curious moment in my experience as a teacher was a student from Germany, from a Bulgarian family, with whom we were conducting French lessons but 'passed through' English, German or Bulgarian for individual elements of the language, depending on what exactly was unclear to him and in which of those three auxiliary languages the explanation was most accessible. In general, we conducted the instruction for explaining and translating the main vocabulary in Bulgarian, but examples of similar grammatical rules or translations of individual words were given in those three languages. It should also be noted that a clear trend has emerged in recent years: it is by no means necessary for children from Bulgarian families to reside permanently abroad in order to have difficulties with the Bulgarian language. Schooling in international schools in Bulgaria, where instruction is conducted primarily in English, and the overall widespread use of English as the new lingua franca, means that children prefer to have certain words or rules of the target language (French, German, Spanish or another) taught to them through English as well as in Bulgarian. The differences between these cases and those where children of Bulgarians grow up abroad lie, beyond the form of instruction (in-person or online), in the fact that children in Bulgaria prefer primarily English as the auxiliary language, while those living abroad prefer the language of the country they live in, but also English, if there is a difference between the two.

When and Why Is the Use of an Auxiliary Language Required?

The next scenario in which the use of an auxiliary language or languages is indispensable involves foreigners, most often adults, who are learning a language that is foreign to them. Here too we can identify several interesting combinations – instruction may be conducted in the learner's native language, which is however foreign to the teacher. An example: a German national learning French through German, while German is obviously foreign to the teacher, who is Bulgarian. I have had similar cases of teaching French to Germans or German to French speakers. In such situations, it is also possible to reach a point where explaining or translating a word or providing synonyms presents difficulties for the teacher (mainly at higher language levels), at which point it is entirely natural to seek other options, the most common of which is to fall back on English, since in this context Bulgarian obviously cannot be used. There are also cases, however, where a common language is sought – one shared by the teacher and the learner – on the basis of which instruction can be conducted, and this is almost never the native language of either party. Although rare, such cases do occur, particularly when both parties know some other shared language (most often English) well enough to conduct instruction in it. An interesting episode from my own practice involved a mini-group of two people whose native languages were Italian and Russian, with whom I had to conduct German lessons as part of preparation for a B1-level examination. Once it became clear that instruction could not be conducted in Russian, since it was not the native language of either participant, we quite naturally fell back on English and managed to complete the preparation successfully. Another element worth highlighting here: when the learner is a foreigner who does not know Bulgarian but commands the target language at a sufficiently high level for instruction to be conducted entirely in it, there is almost no need to resort to a third (auxiliary) language. This typically occurs when the learner has already attained and demonstrated a B2 or C1 level on the CEFR.

Mandatory and Non-Mandatory Conditions

The use of auxiliary languages in the teaching of a primary foreign language is, however, by no means necessarily linked to living abroad, whether we are talking about children or adults, Bulgarians or foreigners. This practice can be widely applied with all those who are learning any of the most widely spoken European languages. A mandatory part of the preliminary information I require from my students before we begin instruction in a given language is whether they command or have previously studied any foreign language, regardless of what their native language is. It is certainly the case that prior study of another language facilitates the acquisition and successful learning of the one currently being studied. This is self-evident and requires no proof: when a person has already studied a foreign language, learning the next one is considerably easier, even without drawing specific examples from the previously learned one. This has to do with the very philosophy, structure and fundamental principles of linguistics that the learner has already mastered, or at least been introduced to. In a large proportion of cases that previously studied (or mastered) language is English, and it is most commonly used as a reference (auxiliary) language in instruction. Despite its relative simplicity (with all the caveats that word implies) compared to languages such as French, Spanish and especially German, English has long and successfully served as a 'pilot' language in the teaching of another language, by providing many specific and appropriate examples that the learner can directly apply in their own study. Outside the context of this article, English has long and frequently served as a pilot language in translations involving difficult language combinations in international institutions such as the EU, the Council of Europe and others. It is indeed hard to imagine that qualified interpreters could easily be found for combinations such as Estonian/Portuguese or Hungarian/Latvian – and here we have not even included minority languages within the EU such as Maltese, Irish or Luxembourgish, which are nonetheless official in certain formats of those organisations. In other words, in those cases the process goes through English, albeit certainly at the cost of translation quality.

English as an Auxiliary Language

Many other objective circumstances also contribute to the widespread use of English as an auxiliary language. Many digital platforms or mobile applications for language learning have no Bulgarian-language versions, and Bulgarians learning a language through them are compelled to do so in or through English – meaning that if and when they at some point seek the help of a teacher, they have in practice been learning the relevant language only in that way. When beginning to work with them, a teacher cannot help but take this into account. In a similar vein, some teaching materials are also organised through English – for example, in the textbook 'Zdraveyte' for learning Bulgarian, new words are given in English, and likewise in the German-language edition of 'Menschen', many new words are provided first in German, then in English, and then in the native language of the person using the textbook.

There are numerous examples in which English can be actively used as an auxiliary language in the learning of another language – in this case French or German, but not only these. For a number of historical, social or purely linguistic reasons, a considerable portion of the active vocabulary shared by English on the one hand and French and German on the other is very similar, with all the existing (and obvious) differences in phonetics or semantics notwithstanding. When we add the vocabulary derived directly from Latin, Ancient Greek or of general international currency, we effectively have several hundred or even several thousand words that can be learned relatively quickly and put into active use. It is hardly necessary to give specific examples, as they are sufficiently well known, but from the perspective of my own practice I would highlight a few that have helped learners to absorb and retain lexical material effectively.

Examples

The examples are numerous, but we will mention only a few – verbs such as 'to arrive' – arriver (fr) – arrive (eng), 'to mention' – mentionner (fr) – mention (eng), 'to pronounce' – prononcer (fr) – pronounce (eng); nouns such as 'danger' – danger (fr) – danger (eng), 'flower' – fleur (fr) – flower (eng); adverbs such as 'evidently' – évidemment (fr) – evident (eng) or 'apparently' – apparemment (fr) – apparently (eng). When comparing German and English, particularly valuable use can be made of the similarities between verbs such as 'to help' – helfen (de) – help (eng), as well as the nouns derived from them: die Hilfe – help, or verbs with different but phonetically related forms and meanings such as 'to forget' – vergessen – forget. The examples could go on virtually indefinitely; what matters is selecting the right correspondences and similarities, especially for the most important and frequently used words. Naturally, Bulgarian has exact translations for all the examples given above, but adding examples from yet another language – in this case the widely used English – greatly facilitates memorisation and, above all, active use. When a further example from another foreign language is added, and especially when there is an obvious resemblance between those two words, this is enormously helpful in acquiring the primary language.

German

With regard to teaching German specifically, providing examples from English can be very valuable for certain grammatical and syntactic features. One of the major difficulties for learners of German is the so-called 'final position' (Endposition, Endstellung) of the verb, which is used extensively in complex sentences. One of its uses is, for example, in the formation of subordinate clauses with reported questions, the so-called 'Nebensätze – Fragesätze', in which the conjugated verbs are placed at the end and separable-prefix verbs are not split. For example – 'Wann steht Peter morgens auf?' (When does Peter get up?) – a direct question, while the reported version should be – 'Ich weiß nicht, wann Peter morgens aufsteht?' (I don't know when Peter gets up). Let us compare this with English in the case of reported speech with question words – direct question: 'How old is your mother?', reported question: 'He asked how old her mother was' – that is, the verb also moves to the end of the clause. When such a direct analogy is drawn with English, where, as can be seen, the word order in these cases is similar, the German material is much better understood and put into use. The analogy between the two languages is certainly not complete, especially since the use of Endstellung in German is far more extensive; moreover, as already noted, we make no claim to academic depth. Nevertheless, appropriate examples from English can certainly be drawn, since it is sufficiently well mastered by the younger generation, to support the learning of this difficult syntactic structure in German.

Modal Verbs

Another interesting case study with an appropriate parallel between German and English arises in the learning of modal verbs, which represent one of the other difficulties in studying German – specifically the pair of verbs 'können – dürfen'. The nuances in meaning between 'darf ich' and 'kann ich', particularly in interrogative sentences, can be successfully explained using the English pair 'may I' and 'can I', where the former is used in the sense of a 'request, permission', which allows young learners in particular – those who accept English as a second native language – to grasp the meaning clearly.

From My Own Practice

Since the languages I teach most often are French and German, I will allow myself to give a few examples of working analogies between the two that can be used bidirectionally – that is, using French to explain German or vice versa. Naturally, such analogies can be drawn for instructional purposes only with people who already command (or have as their native language) one of the languages and are learning the other. First of all, this involves the use of the auxiliary verbs 'sein' in German and 'être' in French for the formation of compound tenses. One analogy is that in both languages these auxiliary verbs are used to conjugate intransitive verbs, or the so-called 'verbs of directed movement' or 'movement with a specific direction', but the range of verbs conjugated with 'sein' in German is incomparably larger. With regard to the verbs of movement themselves, in French only around 15 verbs (or slightly more if their derivatives are included) are conjugated with 'être', but outside the scope of this auxiliary verb are many other verbs of 'general movement' such as marcher (to walk), voler (to fly), courir (to run), sauter/bondir (to jump), voyager (to travel), nager (to swim) and many others, which are conjugated with the other main auxiliary verb 'avoir'. In German, by contrast, the verb 'sein' covers virtually all verbs of movement, directed or otherwise, including such verbs as springen (to jump), fliegen (to fly), aufstehen (to get up/rise), brechen (to break), reiten (to ride), ziehen (to pull) and, as a rule, their derivatives.[13] As mentioned, for people who already command one of the two languages it is much easier to explain this regarding the other, while naturally accounting for these differences. Of course, in both languages there are verbs that are conjugated with both auxiliary verbs depending on context and meaning, but these qualifications go far beyond the scope of this article.

Differences

The differences in the analogy between the two auxiliary verbs ('sein' and 'être') in German and French are by no means limited to verbs of movement. In German, the verb 'sein' is used to conjugate, beyond the verbs of movement, many verbs expressing a general change of state – many of them forming antonymical pairs such as einschlafen/aufwachen (to fall asleep/to wake up), erkranken/genesen (to fall ill/to recover), werden (to become/to turn into), erscheinen/verschwunden (to appear/to disappear) and many others. Additionally, in German the verb 'sein' is conjugated with itself as its own auxiliary, while in French the two main auxiliary verbs 'avoir' and 'être' are both conjugated using 'avoir'. Regarding auxiliary verbs, another significant difference between the two languages is that reflexive verbs in German are conjugated in compound tenses with 'haben', while in French they are conjugated with 'être', which is also something very easily explained to people who know one language and are learning the other.

Parallels

The interesting and noteworthy parallels between French and German do not end there; what matters most is which of them can be successfully used in teaching practice to aid the mastery of specific grammatical forms in one or the other language. Another interesting case from my practice involved a Bulgarian female student in Austria who had a good command of German but was learning French. While clarifying the conjugation of verbs in compound tenses – in this case the passé composé – she found it difficult to understand (or rather to remember) why the verb 'rester' (to stay) is conjugated with the auxiliary verb 'être', which is otherwise used with the so-called 'verbs of movement', whereas 'rester' means anything but movement. However, when her attention was drawn to the fact that the analogous verb in German – 'bleiben' – is also conjugated with 'sein' (the equivalent of French 'être'), with which German also conjugates verbs of movement[14], she very quickly understood and internalised this apparent paradox in both languages. In connection with the above, practical grammars of French very often list the verbs conjugated with 'être' in antonymical pairs, which is indeed justified for the purpose of easier memorisation – aller–venir; partir–arriver and so on – while in some of them the aforementioned verb 'rester' is listed as a pair with 'tomber' (to fall).[15] The topic of auxiliary verb use in the two languages is vast and cannot be exhausted here, but we will permit ourselves one further similarity regarding individual important and frequently used verbs such as 'to be born/to die' (gebären/sterben in German – naître/mourir in French) and 'to become' in the sense of 'to turn into' (werden in German – devenir in French), which in both languages are conjugated with the equivalent of 'to be' – namely 'sein' in German and 'être' in French.

An Interesting Analogy

Another interesting analogy between these languages that can be successfully used in teaching practice is the already-mentioned closeness – but also distinction – between the impersonal pronouns 'man' in German and 'on' in French. There is nothing surprising in this analogy, since both derive from the words for 'person' or 'human' in their respective languages – 'on' from 'homme' and 'man' from 'der Mensch' – and ultimately the roots of these words and pronouns lie in the Latin 'homo'. The benefit for anyone who knows one of the languages and is learning the other is that in both languages these pronouns are conjugated in the third person singular, as is the case with all impersonal verbs. In both languages these pronouns can also only function as the subject of a sentence (Nominativ in German). Their usage in terms of meaning and substituting function differs, however, with the French 'on' having a broader and more universal application. In German, 'man' is most often translated as 'an indefinite group of people (i.e., people in general), and less often as an indefinite individual', meaning 'one' or 'someone'[18] – 'Hier kann man gut essen.' ('One can eat well here' or 'A person can eat well here') or, using the increasingly common Bulgarian equivalent of a second-person singular as an impersonal pronoun – 'You can eat well here'. By contrast, the French 'on', in addition to meaning 'people' or 'someone', most commonly substitutes for the first-person plural pronoun 'nous', but in practice, particularly in colloquial speech, it can be used whenever no specific personal pronoun is employed – 'Vous verra-t-on demain?' – 'Will I see you tomorrow?', 'Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait?' – 'What happened (What have you done)?'

Phonetic Analogy Between the Two Languages

In phonetic terms, the most frequent and useful analogy or comparison between the two languages that arises, is worth making, and that I can share, is the one between the French diphthong 'eu' and the O-Umlaut (or Ö) in German. This sound does not exist in Bulgarian and can be rendered as something midway between the Bulgarian vowels 'o' and 'e'. For those who know German, the French 'eu' is easy to explain through the German Ö (or vice versa), bearing in mind that in French this sound is by no means limited to the diphthong 'eu' – it is also the way the vowel 'e' is pronounced, for instance, when it carries no stress and a word has to be spelled out letter by letter. The analogy can be deepened further by pointing to the cases in which a slight lengthening of this sound is required in both languages, albeit for different reasons. In German, Ö is lengthened (as are all other vowels) typically when it precedes 'h' within a word, as for example in 'die Möhre' (carrot) or 'der Föhn' (hair dryer). In French, this diphthong is slightly lengthened most often at the end of words such as chaleur, grandeur, hauteur and many others, mainly due to the particularities of sound production – that is, the need for a more emphatic pronunciation of the final 'r'. Incidentally, this lengthening of the final vowel in French occurs not only with the diphthong 'eu' but almost whenever that (or any other) vowel precedes a final voiced consonant, since in French voiced consonants are not devoiced (unlike in German, Spanish or Bulgarian). This is observed in words such as 'rose', 'base', 'garage' and many others with a final voiced consonant. This is particularly well illustrated by comparing these words with phonetically similar ones that have a voiceless equivalent – 'base – basse' or 'rose – rosse'. In other words, although French does not have a distinction between short and long vowels (unlike German), the final vowels in many words are in practice lengthened before a final voiced consonant due to the aforementioned particularities of sound production.

More Interesting Examples from My Practice

Another interesting example from my practice involves a female student – a German national living in Bulgaria and learning Bulgarian – who at the same time had a solid knowledge of Spanish. Mentioning the Spanish word for 'table' (la mesa) helped her to firmly and durably acquire the Bulgarian equivalent, the resemblance between the two languages being obvious here; the word has very old roots and entered both Bulgarian and Spanish through different historical circumstances. When learning the Bulgarian word for the other basic piece of furniture – 'stol' (chair) – no such reference was needed, because there the resemblance favoured her native German – der Stuhl 😊 In a similar fashion, the same student also acquired the negation of Bulgarian verbs well and quickly, since it closely resembles that of Spanish – namely the placement of 'no' (in Spanish) or 'ne' (in Bulgarian) before the verb – for example 'hablo – no hablo', 'govoryam – ne govoryam'. Here, naturally, account must be taken of special cases such as the negation of the future tense in Bulgarian, which is formed with 'nyama da', since it sometimes happens that learners of Bulgarian automatically use the archaic poetic form 'ne shte'.

Frequently Used Verbs, Expressions, Adjectives…

As other interesting individual examples in the learning of frequently used verbs, expressions or adjectives – particularly in cases where they differ from their Bulgarian equivalents – one can also point to the verb 'to call (someone on the phone)', which is typically studied at the beginner levels of a language and which in all the main foreign languages differs from its Bulgarian counterpart in that (1) it is not reflexive and (2) it is transitive, i.e. it takes a direct object (with the Akkusativ in German) – to call (eng) / anrufen (de) / appeler (fr) / llamar (esp). In other words, when this verb is being studied in any of these languages, pointing to this analogy with the other three – most often English – facilitates its acquisition in whichever one is being learned. Another example could be the frequently used adjective 'proud', which in Bulgarian is typically used with the preposition 's' (with) and less often with 'ot' (of). By analogy with Bulgarian, learners tend to automatically and incorrectly use the preposition in the target language that corresponds most closely to the Bulgarian 's' – namely with (eng) / mit (de) / avec (fr) / con (esp) – that is, natural nativisation occurs. In all of these languages, however, the adjective 'proud' is normally used with a different preposition: proud of (eng), stolz auf (de), fier de (fr), orgulloso de (esp). When learning this adjective in any of these languages, examples from the others can be cited in a similar way (regardless of whether the learner knows them or not) – emphasising that in none of those languages does the adjective 'proud' take the equivalent of the Bulgarian 's' – in order to better understand and internalise this usage. This analogy also helps with the use of certain pronominal adverbs – I am proud thereof (eng), ich bin stolz darauf (de), j'en suis fier (fr). Here we naturally do not address the cases in which the adjective 'proud' is used in other structures with verbs or conjunctions such as 'proud to be…' or 'proud that…', etc., which are studied at higher levels. Another common structure shared across these languages that is appropriate, easily memorable and important at beginner levels of instruction is the combination of the verb 'to have + infinitive' as a synonym for 'must', expressing necessity: 'I have to' (eng), 'ich habe zu' (de), 'j'ai à' (fr), 'hay que' (esp) – with the note that the last of these is in impersonal form. The parallel between these languages is very helpful in learning this structure in any one of them.

The Significance of Auxiliary Verbs

Although rarely, it does happen with learners of more limited linguistic background that they fail to grasp the meaning of auxiliary verbs beyond that function – that is, beyond their use in compound tenses or as independent verbs meaning 'to have' and 'to be' (as well as the additional auxiliaries 'aller' and 'venir' in French). In such cases, these learners find it difficult to use these verbs 'with themselves' (simultaneously as independent and auxiliary verbs) in expressions such as 'ich bin gewesen' (I was/I have been), 'ich habe gehabt' (I had/I have had) in German, or 'j'ai eu' (I had), as well as 'je vais aller' (I am about to go) or 'je viens de venir' (I have just come) in French. In this case, an appropriate reference can be made to Spanish, pointing out that in Spanish there is a dedicated auxiliary verb 'haber', used only in that capacity or in the impersonal form 'hay' (there is/are) or 'hay que' (one must/it is necessary), while the verb that conveys the idea of possession – i.e. 'to have' – is 'tener'; but in the other languages this is not the case. Such an explanation is usually received very well and helps to overcome the confusion. An appropriate reference to Spanish can also be made when learning the conjugation of the polite form – though only for German, since in French the polite form coincides with that of Bulgarian, i.e. the second person plural. The polite form in German, as is well known, is conjugated in the third person plural, which coincides with Spanish when addressing more than one person politely – Ustedes. The other polite form in Spanish – Usted – used when speaking politely to a single person, is conjugated in the third person singular, but the point here is to show that there are languages in which the polite form is not conjugated in the same way as in Bulgarian.

Conclusion: Combined Teaching of Foreign Languages

The analogies between individual Indo-European languages could be continued virtually indefinitely. A large number of them share many structural, grammatical, phonetic or syntactic similarities that can always be drawn upon in the teaching of any one of them. The increasingly frequent need to resort to one or more additional foreign languages in the teaching of a target language can, however, be defined not so much as a linguistic phenomenon as a social one – for example, in the case of children growing up in a bilingual (or even trilingual) environment, and also, in the conditions of globalisation and virtually unlimited opportunities for communication, in the form of considerably freer linguistic contact between teachers and learners. Over recent years and decades, English has indisputably established itself as a kind of pilot language in the learning of some of the other most widely spoken languages, but all other language combinations are equally possible for the purpose of better and more durable acquisition of the primary target language. We can say with confidence that such practice has an unlimited future ahead of it.

Article by Dimitar Pehlivanov

Dimitar Pehlivanov (53) is a linguist and foreign-language teacher. He teaches French, German, Spanish and Bulgarian for foreigners, and has a solid knowledge of English, Russian, Czech and Greek. Teacher at Kabinata.com (Book a lesson with Dimitar). Member of the Association of Teachers of/in French and of the Society of German-Language Teachers.

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